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White buys her clothes from "walk-ins," estate sales, and strangers responding to her ad seeking leather biker jackets and men’s vintage clothes in a local rock magazine. Most of the walk-ins are one-time visitors who’re moving across the country, hawking their dead relative’s threads, or mutating from self-employed creative types to cubicle drones. White estimates that about 60 percent of her phone inquiries come from people with goods that are ultimately not salable, so she tries to screen her calls; people trying to sell old clothing don’t always know that the term "vintage" doesn’t mean ugly or not wearable. "A woman in Brockton called me and told me she had a thousand pairs of pants," recalls White. "She has a hundred pair of chiffon bellbottoms that look like the Supremes would have worn — and no one in their right mind would wear. She said, ‘Well, they are bellbottoms.’ I said, ‘Oh, God.’ To her, it was eminently sellable. To me, it was a big waste of time."

White gives an example of how a transaction might work. "If you said, for instance, ‘I want to sell you this coat,’" she says, eyeing my knee-length red jacket like a hungry predator, "I look at the coat and I say, ‘That looks like a Gap coat; I could sell it for $25’" — it was actually purchased for $65 at H&M two months ago — "‘[or] I can give you 10 for it, if you wanted cash right away.’

"If it didn’t sell within a week, I would mark it down to $20," White continues. "If it didn’t sell in two weeks, it would be $15. Eventually, I donate it if it doesn’t sell. I try to donate it to Goodwill or the Old Faith Baptist Church over there. I also give some clothing to homeless people."

Sometimes, White has to deal with stolen goods. "One couple came in here and told me I was fostering the drug problem in America. And I said, ‘What?’ They said their neighbor in Wellesley had [broken into] their house and everything he stole from their house, he told them he sold me." Turned out the thief had sold her only one shirt.

Patrons also try to scam her. "People come in here and sell me a leather jacket and in the afternoon, another one of their roommates will come in and say, ‘She stole it!’" But White not only requires identification from vendors, she demands to know why a person’s selling something. "I’ll always say, ‘Is it yours?’ Have you changed your MO?’ I want to know, I want to know why I’m buying it."

A brief, perhaps unsurprising list of used-CD titles which suck so much that local CD buyers typically reject them on sight: R.E.M.’s Monster; Joan Osborne’s Relish; Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View; Spin Doctors’ Pocket Full of Kryptonite; the Wallflowers’ Bringing down the Horse; Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill ("I get three of them a day," says CD Spins buyer Alex Daniels); and Blues Traveler’s Four. "In our warehouse," Daniels says, "we have literally, like, a shelf that’s nothing but Blues Traveler Four."

"It’s a little different than a one-hit wonder," explains Duncan Brown, chief operating officer at Newbury Comics. "It’s a real popular record that a year later, people think, ‘I haven’t listened to it that much because the rest of the record ...’" he pauses, "‘ ... sucked. My favorite for that is Sugar Ray or whoever that band was that did ‘Walkin’ on the Sun.’"

The band is Smash Mouth, the record is Fush Yu Mang, and Newbury Comics puts used copies on the shelves for $2.99. The store offers only around 50 cents to those selling it — basically a token gesture. "When it’s down that low," says Brown, "it’s usually a message, we don’t even really want it."

So what’s still selling in used-CD circles? There’s last year’s Shins album Chutes Too Narrow, which Newbury Comics buys for $5 and resells for $11.99, and "cool" bands like Sigur Rós, Wilco, the White Stripes, Radiohead, Modest Mouse, Cat Power, and Lambchop. "It has something to do with the educated customer," says Planet Records owner John Damroth. "People who’re musically conscious and are reading about it and always checking new stuff out."

Damroth has owned his Harvard Square store for 22 years. When he started the business, he wanted it to be inclusive, and packed the place with everything from esoteric Japanese imports to Rod Stewart. "There’re really no kinds of music that you don’t carry," he says, "although we try not to get a lot of Britney Spears in here." Damroth is a music fan, too, so he doesn’t want Planet to be too cheesy. "I’ve always used the standard [that if] a relative or a good friend comes in, I want them to be impressed with what we have and how much it is."

Damroth, like everyone else in the resale business, has to deal with "hot" merchandise — perhaps even more prevalent in music retail, since the small size of CDs makes them so easy to pilfer. But unlike clothes or books, the CD-resale business is a whole other monster — record stores have to deal with other kinds of filching. Technology has made it possible not only to burn CDs, but to convert them into MP3s. Now some music fans are converting their entire collections to MP3s, then selling back all their CDs.

Like Jason, a 29-year-old Somerville resident who recently tried to sell back that same wretched Wallflowers CD to Newbury Comics. An iPod owner, Jason has converted his 2000-plus CD collection into MP3 files and bought most of his new music through Apple’s online iTunes store. The new-release stuff that isn’t available from iTunes, he’ll buy on sale, then sell back to a secondhand store for $5. Over the last few months, Jason estimates, he’s sold back 400 CDs, earning more than $700 — which he used to buy new hard drives (to store his 115-gigabyte digital-music collection), two plane tickets, and a couple of nice meals. He’s got about 1500 CDs left.

"It’s a lot tougher to make money," says Damroth, who lowered his prices last year after business dropped off, a move that helped it recoup. But there’s still an industry-wide squeeze, as evidenced by the likes of falling dominoes Smash City, Phase Four, and Mystery Train. "The bottom line is, my bottom line has gone down."

Damroth thinks — or at least he hopes — that there’s still something irreplaceable about digging through record-store bins and chasing down priceless finds. "There’s only a certain amount of entertainment time available to people," he says. "How would you rather spend it? Would you rather click around on a computer? Or would you rather go into a store on a rainy day and browse? The art of browsing is the key element here."

But are there enough people devoted to the art of browsing to sustain the independent resale industry? "Ultimately," says Damroth, "that really is the big question."

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com