Junk and Treasure for Sale

I have never been a person who loves thrift stores.  I don't mind an occasional quick trip, but I'm not a person who can go to store after store; I'm not interested in spending hours in a show.  In part, it's because there's not much there in my larger size, so I'm less inclined to go on a hunt for clothes.  In part, it's because I don't have much patience for searching through other people's junk on the off chance I'll find a treasure.  I already have too much stuff in my house.

Yesterday we went on a quest for a soup pot.  When I first thought about seminary housing, I thought I would buy a new set of pots and pans and leave the older stuff at home.  As I was packing, I thought it was absurd to buy a new set when we had almost 2 complete sets.

I don't have a large pot with a non-stick surface, so that's what I was looking for yesterday.  We headed down to the nearby town of Fletcher, which has some wonderful thrift-type stores.  But when I looked at the prices at the first store, I realized we were in the world of consignment shops, not thrift stores.  The prices seemed similar to what I would pay for the product new.  And they didn't have a soup pot.

They did, however, have a refrigerator.  It wasn't the one we'd had our eyes on, the model we bought for our kitchen remodel of 2003. It was a basic model, freezer on top, stainless steel outside.  It wasn't significantly cheaper than the model we could get at Lowe's--IF we could actually get that fridge.  We didn't buy it right away, but we did circle back later in the day to get it and to pay for delivery.

We went to a more traditional thrift store, the kind that supports a pet rescue, where we bought a microwave.  It's an older model, high power and rather huge as microwaves go.  We don't really have a good surface for it in our present kitchen.  Our countertops are too small for the microwave, which tells you how big it is or how small countertops were back in the 70's when our kitchen was installed.

So, at the end of the day, we bought a fridge and a microwave:  a kitchen remodel!

We also went to a more traditional thrift store, the local Good Will store, where we didn't find much, but the stuff was much cheaper.  We also went to my favorite kind of thrift store, where there were various venders, and many of them offered all sorts of trinkets from the past, like old bottles and kitchen equipment and such.  It reminded me of the big warehouses where we used to go in grad school, warehouses full of junk and treasure for sale, warehouses that would later be transformed/bulldozed into apartments and restaurants for a trendy section of town  (now the Vista, back then just Huger Street in Columbia, SC).

It's interesting to go thrifting, or any kind of shopping, after having spent a season paring down our possessions in advance of our move.  Part of me thought about all the stuff we jettisoned--could we have made money?  Of course, we'd have had to haul it up here to make money.  And it's hard to know if any of it would have actually sold.  I don't think we got rid of anything that was actually vintage instead of just old.

I understand the appeal of thrifting, the thrill of the hunt, the challenge of making something new out of other people's castaways.   But I'm also wary of the potential consumerism of it all, the amount of time it could take, not to mention the money and the storage space that might be required.  And let me back away from my judging tone here--I'm wary for me, not for the whole world.  For the whole world to be saved, we might need more thrifting, less of the other kinds of shopping.