Big Thrift Whoas
Fast fashion puts a wrench in thrift value.
Our days of thrift store finds are numbered. If the barriers to people selling their stuff on their own weren’t obliterated by apps with stellar interfaces, then the cheap stuff that looks good online—easy to buy, easy to toss—rapidly consuming thrift store rack real estate is killing big thrift value. I used to scan, looking for good materials and interesting patterns to snap up. Now I scan, looking for original tags to cue me to keep moving. What’s more, thrift store prices have skyrocketed.
The use case I see for big thrift stores today is: 1) being the first stop before the dump because if you can get the thrift store to take it, you can avoid dump fees, and 2) people who don’t want to sell things themselves and are satisfied to just give away. The latter category is very small, I imagine, because we’re supposed to be obsessed with stuff and making money so we can buy more stuff, are we not? The people who give away stuff and forego making money off it see the original payment for a thing as a sunk cost—a use fee—and so they have a bit more ease (or a lot more ease) in giving things away than most of us do. Now, the problems that an over-focus on consuming stuff may create is not something we intentionally buy, but if we aren’t careful, it’s what we get.
Alternatives to shopping big thrift stores are shopping small ones, carefully curated by a person or group of people that care. Consignment can be really good too—which is to say, fair prices and an interesting selection of treasures, from clothing to fishing rods, clean and well-organized.
Next, when will we merge genders in department stores? The more expensive the clothes, the harder it is to find what I’m looking for in a department store, thrift or otherwise. I remember when I first walked into Nordstrom and saw the departments within a department had been separated by brand, well, it made me want to riot. I still don’t understand what the world is coming to when a series of ideas like that was approved and planted into existence. Sometimes someone’s dumb creation gives me hope, “I mean, if that can be made, surely my [fill in the blank] could have a go.” I want to see all possible pants on one rack or in one area at least. Then all possible dresses. All possible sweaters. You catch my drift.
Yesterday, I was in a dressing room of a big thrift store I have regularly patronized and chanced upon a scuffle in the room next door. The accent and slang of the two people slinging were so thick that I had to listen more carefully, past the din of the desperate music, shuffling hangers, and other shoppers, to locate the words in space. “You’re cut off!” the voice hissed. “You’re a fiend! This is goodbye.” As I pulled a shirt over my head, I wondered if they had a gun, and if they had one and used it, if the bullet would come through the dressing room wall and hit me. What would be the odds of that? Surely possible but the odds not so good, I consoled myself. I listened for the pace of things outside the dressing room walls to change, the kind to cue us all into a different mood, the mood of running for our lives. It didn’t. Then came a sharp pop. It could have been the dressing room door, slammed in its frame, not a gun. I smelled gunpowder, faint, but did I really? An attendant came to the door there and knocked a piercing knock that only a key between knuckles can make. No answer it seemed. I didn’t find a thing and had zero interest in looking some more so I hurried out and let the story be left to its own devices.
My exit into the parking lot was not without it’s own rewards. There I saw a deshelved man leaning on a shopping cart full to the brim with puppies, hurrying toward a pet supply store. It was then I had the strange sensation that maybe there had been a tear in the field of reality as we know it and I had gone and inadvertently slipped through. I don’t mind slipping through, I worry about being able to slip back. See, I don’t think getting back involves any kind of slipping and that’s what worries me. I mean, if I had to pick a worry, getting back to reality after I had lost it would be it.
Speaking of another reality, why don’t we shop online exclusively? This essay could be used to support shopping exclusively online if not for this paragraph. Online shopping isn’t shopping. Just like our friends on social media actually aren’t our friends. Shopping in real life involves all the physical senses, and if we’re lucky, some human connection too. This level of engagement is important for our wellness as humans and is rather easy to get in shopping in-person or attending a market or a party, and this kind of thing exactly is just not possible online. Online shopping is mechanical. It’s checking boxes. It’s getting things done. Shopping in real life is an art, and shopping online is its ugly stepchild. Because we don’t need more stuff, really, what we need are more stories and experiences of how we’re connected in real life so what we consume and create next is informed and valuable.
