Therapy for Overspenders

AROUND 2003, I was visiting San Francisco and stopped at a friend’s lovely-looking boutique of house and gardening wares. Business was booming. In the window, next to some seed packets and an old wooden bathtub, I found a stack of sleek blue plastic watering cans. “I get them from Ikea for $2 and sell them for $40,” my friend said with an absurd guffaw, “and people are buying them like crazy!”

It has become painfully obvious that, in the last few years, the worth of most everything — plastic containers, investment portfolios, condos, cupcakes — has been wickedly inflated. A trip to Peachfrog, a new emporium of liquidated and overstocked merchandise, was a much-needed, cleansing corrective to all that jazz. The store carries men’s and women’s clothing, accessories and home furnishings guaranteed to be 70 to 90 percent off the original price.

The store starts at the bottom. Immediately upon entering, you are in “the Pit,” where everything has been marked down to $5. There are a handful of subdued garments here, but the gaudiest ones caught my eye: stretch turtlenecks in a sea-green python print hung near a shelf displaying a blue metallic photo album decorated with rhinestones. A top in mottled sky blue had a shredded outer layer, as if Donatella Versace had worn it when attacked by her cats. A striped orange blouse with ruffles looked like a uniform from a peach cobbler kiosk at Knott’s Berry Farm.

It’s therapeutic to visit Peachfrog now because the store is filled with items that defined the recent past — that weird “Let’s Go Shopping!” era when Britney Spears was the most searched name on the Internet and everyone thought it was cool to wear underwear with sex-me-up phrases on the crotch like “Boy crazy!’ and “Goddess.” (Upstairs from the Pit, these undergarments are $2.50.) Signs appear at every rack and bin displaying the full retail price, along with Peachfrog’s marked-down offer. A gold lamé Tammi Lyn tulip bag, for example, was originally $473 and is sold here for $20. Someone actually paid full price for a bag like this. It’s easy to picture this person clacking around South Beach, lazily buying a $22 bottle of Principessa Bagno bubble bath, available here at the slightly jumbled makeup counter for $6.

Much of the main space is dedicated to women’s clothing. Colorful sundresses ($35, originally $140) hung on a circular rack like “elimiDATE” contestant-ghosts. Slacks appropriate for a temp job you have to pretend to care about lined the wall, many for $40. Jeans and cords from labels like Radcliffe, Replay and Killah were $10.

William Norton, who has worked as a steel sculptor and the director of installations at PS1, opened Peachfrog in November with Howard Blumberg, a professional liquidator. With more than 20 years in the business, Mr. Blumberg knows how to find sweet deals that bigger stores overlook.

“We’re different than Marshalls or Syms or even Century 21,” he told me later by phone. Peachfrog, he explained, zeros in on “voided inventories,” liquidation lingo for all the merchandise that falls through the cracks, which he defines as “store stocks, samples, odds and ends, returns, irregulars and mixed lots.”

The store was full of funky New York City girls who understand that the queasily garish clothing of our embarrassing past can be reinterpreted and made retro-cool with the right earrings, confidence and sense of irony. I had one of these girls with me — my friend Cary — who ran through the store, scooping up halter tops, a pair of pre-faded Daisy Dukes and a miniskirt the color of orange sherbet, costing a total of $30.

In a dressing room at the back of the store, Cary slipped on a sundress, but the zipper broke. She also tried a pair of Miss Sixty cords, rust-colored and extremely low-slung, but she resembled Christina Aguilera on the cover of “Stripped,” and it’s too early to bring back that trend.

The Peachfrog space used to be an egg roll factory, and men’s selections are found in what was once a huge freezer. There, two young men were trying on baggy Sean John pullovers, for $7.50. A tall wood wardrobe was stacked with soft white thermals and undershirts for $2. Most sizes were XXL, and I sensed this place was a gold mine for guys who can pull off hip-hop fashion’s difficult draping.

Unlike the women’s things, the more garish styles in the men’s section weren’t inspiring. Most of it looked as if it had come from the closets of reality-show stars like Criss Angel, the male cast of “Sunset Tan” or that creepy TV personality Mystery, “the world’s greatest pick-up artist.” A rack of Aqua-VI hoodies, brocaded with metallic curlicues, originally sold for $98 but were $15 here. White jeans from Energie, also $15, were dusted with silver glitter as if Tinker Bell had slept on them.

Still, I was tempted to buy something. If it looks dumb, who cares; you paid only 10 bucks for it.

Before I made a terrible mistake, I walked over to the home selections. I loved the Burlwood items: bowls and baskets, $10 to $20, carved out of knotty “reclaimed fir tree root balls,” according to the Peachfrog signage. Next to them was a clipboard and a pen. “What’s in your Burlwood?” it said at the top of the page. Customers had written answers, including “Popcorn,” “Mag-o-zines,” “Lifesaving antidepressants” and a hastily written love note: “Hi cute girl with black hat that works here.”

On a table nearby were woven basket-objects the shape of bed pillows for $10 to $15. Originally priced at $80, they are the kind of thing you would find in an aspirational home décor magazine. Way back in 2003, when useless items seemed so important, you may have even purchased them (along with a $40 plastic watering can). But here, they were affordable and stripped of any exaggerated status or worth.

I left Peachfrog calmer, my demoralized value system wrenched out of the nosebleed naughties and back to hard, honest earth.

PEACHFROG

136 North 10th Street (between Berry and Bedford Streets), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 387-3224

CRAZY BARGAINS! A roomy store of liquidated and often hilarious merchandise to guide us out of yesterday’s delirious dreamland into today’s rock-bottom reality.

PREPOSTEROUS PRICES! Every rack and bin is accompanied with a sign displaying the original damage, and Howard Blumberg, the friendly co-owner, is often on hand to tell you the story behind the sale.

MORE AMAZING DEALS! There are cheap finds at Artists and Fleas (129 North Sixth Street), and sidewalk vendors on Bedford display rumpled clothes and occasional discoveries.