Hardly pausing for an answer, he chucks the mass of tops and jeans onto another basket, which somehow stays upright.

Next in line, please.

At Plato's Closet, a used clothing store at the Crossroads shopping center in Cary, Thomas does this dance all day. On this day, the store ended up with 48 baskets. Some Saturdays, it's more like 100 -- up from about 20 per day three years ago.

"More people are selling," said Greg May, a Plato's partner. "We've just expanded our inventory."

From Cary to California, purveyors of used stuff are enjoying a mix of favorable conditions. Consumers need more cash, and therefore are willing to sell things they don't need or use anymore. Meanwhile, stores that specialize in sales of used things -- sporting goods, musical instruments, clothes, you name it -- are enjoying a flood of inventory and new customers.

About 18 percent of consumers planned to do some back-to-school shopping at resale and thrift stores, according to a back-to-school survey conducted for the National Retail Federation. It's the first year those kinds of stores have been included in the survey, indicating an arrival of sorts for the industry.

And while back-to-school customers swarmed Plato's Closet, further evidence of a used-stuff boom lingered elsewhere at Crossroads.

John Agusta, owner of Music Go Round, which buys and sells used musical instruments and equipment, said he has more used inventory than a year ago. Shiny electric guitars and woody acoustics lined two walls.

Just the other day, he said, a customer sold four of them for quick cash, including an acoustic guitar once worth about $1,000 used.

"He's hurting right now; a lot of us are," Agusta said. "You could tell there was some regret."

He said that although most people can get a better price if they put something on consignment, more have been taking a lesser amount from Agusta up-front. Up the sidewalk, Mathew Sawyer, manager at Play It Again Sports, sat at the register tagging items. The store dwarfed him, packed with bikes, helmets, and heaps of equipment hung or shelved on anything that stood still.

"We have more people coming in than before," he said. "People stop buying big-screen TVs when they're broke, not sports equipment."

So many people are selling that Sawyer has put a halt to treadmills and most golf equipment.

"More people call us to sell treadmills than we can take," he said. And as far as golf items, "we only take it in if we get a really good deal on it."

May, who owns Plato's Closet with Mary Housel, also is a co-owner of Once Upon a Child, a resale shop for infants and kids in another Cary center. "In the last year we've definitely seen an increase in new customers," Housel said. Infant clothes are always in big supply.

"First time parents will go overboard and get a lot of that stuff," she said, with people digging deeper in their closets and attics to find stuff they can sell. "There are times we have to turn things away."

Plato's Closet has always turned things away: anything that's not relatively new or brand-name. It's how they keep their customers happy --buying great stuff for next to nothing. It's one reason why used stuff will always be popular, especially in this sluggish economy.

"We used to have customers come in, see it's used, then leave," May said. "That's not happening anymore."