I’ve bought many of my clothes at thrift stores. It’s a treasure hunt. Each item is one of a kind. Most of the stuff is unappealing or the wrong size. But sometimes I find something that’s well-made and fits. It feels like a minor accomplishment.
In November, 2019, an emaciated, white-haired guy in a Red, White & Blue Thrift Store just south of Pittsburgh smiled at me, pulled a black leather jacket from his full shopping cart, put it on and asked what I thought of it. I told him it looked good on him.
He told me that he used to be a heroin addict. He explained that he now shops at thrift stores “because addicts always need to be out,gettingsomething.”
It was a self-aware observation and a seemingly constructive adaptation. Though given the fullness of his cart, I wondered if he’d end up on that TV show about hoarders. We often trade one problem for another.
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Salvation Army Thrift Stores are characteristically austere. Many have bare concrete floors, white cinderblock walls, a dank scent and long, straight, tightly packed racks of clothes and shelves of mostly outdated junk. The store workers are typically more casually dressed and less restrained than are Macy’s staff. I’ve heard some thrift store employees sing while they stock or clear stuff from the racks. Some have better voices than others. But with music, it’s feeling that counts most.
Perhaps to confer extra humility on shoppers or to surveil shoplifters, thrift store checkout counters are typically raised about two feet above the main floor. One afternoon, when I entered a Salvation Army store near Trenton, New Jersey, the woman cashier on the platform called out, in an Eastern European accent, “Hey, Movie Star!”
During my years as an attorney, I won some public interest lawsuits. Sometimes, I was interviewed on TV news segments. As I walked toward her, she said, “I saw you on TV and I said, ‘Iknowthatguy!’”
I laughed and replied, “Did you see the shirt I was wearing? I bought it at thisstore.”
When I returned on a subsequent trip, she announced to the other shoppers, “The Movie Star is in the house!”
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Before the Scamdemic began, I revisited that same store, found a few items and brought them to the checkout counter. Atop the platform, there was a man in his early thirties rocking stylish, black-framed glasses and a tasteful, colored, buttoned shirt under a snappy sweater vest. When he finished ringing my items, he passed my plain white plastic bag to me and said, earnestly and ethereally, “Have a blessed day.”
I returned to the store a month later. While I was examining the t-shirt rack, the same, well-dressed guy who rang me out on my prior visit passed by, recognized me, tapped me warmly on the left shoulder and asked, “What’s up, brother?” as he continued, stride unbroken, toward the back of the store. I turned my head to track him, smiled and replied, “I’m OK, thanks for asking.”
After I had scanned the men’s section for about twenty minutes, I found a few more shirts for people I knew, walked to the checkout counter and pressed the old-fashioned bell to summon someone from the back room to ring out my stuff. My bespectacled buddy came forward and ascended the checker’s loft.
I asked, “How have you been?”
He frowned and said, “Well, Iwasdoing prettygooduntil about five minutesago.”
Concerned, I asked, “What happened?”
Leaning over, he started to whisper so no one but me could hear him above the Star 99 Pop-Christian radio playing in the background. “I give some people that shop here discounts and they give me tips. Somebody in line saw me doing it so they told my boss and my boss told me that I wasn’t allowed to take tips. They have a camera on me and saw me do it.”
He shook his head and continued, “Can youbelievethatsh*t? Imean, what thef**k?!”It’s not like they be paying me a lot of money.”
He continued, “They told me if I get any tips, they have to go into this, right here.”
He pointed to a red kettle on the counter; a mini-replica of the kind that they put on the sidewalks alongside the Christmastime sidewalk bellringers.
He shook his head again.
Who knew that even Salvation Army Stores had kickback schemes?
I thought about mentioning to the checker that, well, itisa store that raises funds to house, feed and rehabilitate drug addicts and alcoholics. But I figured his boss might have told him that already. Besides, he had welcomed me so warmly.
So I just took my bag with its t-shirts, smiled sympathetically and said:
“Have a blessed day.”
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In the past decade, I’ve shopped in thrift stores less often than I used to. The merchandise isn’t as good as it used to be. New clothes have become cheesier; “fast fashion” rules this age of apparel. Further, instead of being donated, higher-grade potential thrift store inventory is now sold on ebay or PoshMark, and/or is skimmed off by savvy thrift store sorting-room employees; they’ve told me they do this. Thus, what reaches the sales floor these days are many 5K race t-shirts, Britney Spears CDs, unmatched dishes, tacky knick-knacks or other obsolete ephemera, much of it electronic.
Thrift store visits are latter day archaeological digs. They reveal much about our culture and its recent history. Fundamentally, these stores show that people buy many things that they thought they had to have—or gave, as gifts, to people they knew—but really weren’t needed. And/or these items didn’t fit, didn’t work or, although once seen as cool, are now considered trite or ugly and thus, disposable.
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During Coronamania, American governments spent trillions on theatrical stuff they cynically, insincerely decided that people had to have. This stuff resembled thrift store merchandise: junk that gullible people followed the crowd and impulsively bought.
Many people have belatedly figured out that the NPIs: lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests and the shots were useless. Now, they want to purge reminders of the past four years and to eliminate vestiges of their conformism and poor judgment.
Except that the Covid interventions cost much more and were much more harmful than does/is thrift store fodder.
For example, people were told, and generally agreed that:
We had to laud, obey and pay the high salaries and pensions of Public Health bureaucrats, DARPA/DOD officials and politicians whose NPI and shot edicts not only failed but wrecked hundreds of millions of lives.
We had to lavishly fund ad campaigns to terrorize healthy people and convince them to wash their hands and stay home.
We had to have billions of units of sophisticated-sounding “PPE,” i.e., ineffective, virtue-signaling pieces of paper that people put over various parts of their lower faces.
We had to pay police to enforce curfews and bust people for going to parks or beaches or refusing to mask.
We had to fund and require asymptomatic people to take billions of wildly inaccurate tests.
We had to mobilize hospital ships and manufacture tens of thousands of ventilators. (Like the garments that thrift stores can’t sell, these ventilators were soon “internationally dumped” or sold as scrap).
We had to pay hospitals $13,000 for every Covid patient admitted and $39,000 for every patient they placed on a ventilator. We also had to pay next-of-kin who went along with dubious Covid death coding an extra $9,000 for funeral expenses/hush money.
We had to glorify “essential” hospital workers even though, when not hanging out or choreographing dance videos, they were simply doing the jobs they were paid to do and/or sometimes overmedicating and ventilating patients to death.
We had to pay tens of millions of “non-essential” workers more than they were normally paid—”enhanced unemployment”—to do nothing.
We had to keep public school kids at home for 18 months and pay school personnel to either do nothing or to conduct on-line classes for kids that either never logged on or, if they did, that didn’t engage them or allow social development.
We had to pay businesses to stop earning money and give them billions in PPP “loans,” very few of which were repaid.
We had to pay for electric power and diesel fuel and pay people to drive nearly empty trains or buses.
We had to inject badly overrated, injurious experimental substances and pay Pharma companies over $100 billion for these.
We had to have and do all of this. And more.
Except that we didn’t have to—and certainly shouldn’t have done—any of it. These were not even close calls.
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Like the primary, impulse buyers of foreseeably worthless items that end up in thrift stores, governments wasted trillions of dollars on the NPIs and jabs. The decreed contrivance of these enormous sums has caused record, persistent, impoverishing, inflation. Select, already wealthy corporations and individuals profited from these trendy measures, which were, like today’s “fast fashion” thrift store items, trash to begin with.
More importantly, those who ordered these measures wasted trillions of hours of peoples’ lives. And badly damaged peoples’ physical and mental health.
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In the same way that addicts initially find it cool and empowering to inject heroin, Covid Era bureaucrats, politicians and Pharma got an intense high from controlling others. Though “Covid mitigation” mandates and policies caused pain without gain, pushing people around gave authoritarians a perverse sense of purpose and an unfounded belief in their own intellectual superiority. They claimed to know “The Science!”
Except that they didn’t.
And now, just as heroin use soon degenerates into desperation, steals junkies’ souls and causes them to pathetically chase the next high, power and money-hungry public health bureaucrats and politicians are compulsively hyping and chasing “the next pandemic.” In both settings, the dreadful, deceitful, played-out but ongoing pursuit of ill-derived dopamine causes deep, lasting pain to those who are sucked into these delusional addicts’ orbits.
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