**Warning: Cynicism ahead, read at your own peril**
Since we are now thigh deep in the giving season, I feel it is pertinent to share my complete and total disgust with the fact that shoppers trampled a man to death on Black Friday. If you're not familiar with the story, and don't mind having your faith in humanity tested, read
more here. A few onlookers even stopped shopping long enough to make jokes about how overweight the person was that they had just killed in their haste to save five bucks on a panini maker.
The crowd counted down: "Five, four, three, two, one!"
A worker inside slowly opened the door. Everyone pushed from all directions.
They knocked the door off its hinges. A worker tried to use it as a shield, but the glass shattered...Augustine kept going, down packed aisles, moving with the crowd, still heading to the deals. She raced for the toy section and snatched up a bike, a dollhouse and 10 Hannah Montana dolls for $5 a piece.
Two hours later, she checked out, just as the store announced it was closing. She got in line and spent $495 on 36 items. She had no idea what became of the man who had fallen.
In order to maintain my giving spirit in the face of such a dreadful story, I've decided to give you five good reasons to do your shopping at your local Deseret Industries, Salvation Army or other community thrift store:
1. Your money will not be going to support sweatshops. Even if you do end up purchasing that awesome Gap-emblazoned sweater that you've always wanted, you can rest assured that that your money is not directly supporting the company responsible for forcing the
10-year-old who made it to work 16 hour days.
Can you guess where I bought my sweater?2. Thrift stores often employ people who are otherwise "unemployable," and run their stores on a model that is dedicated to keeping the store open and the employees paid, rather than maximizing profits. By patronizing thrift stores, you are directly helping these people to earn a living, without simply giving them a handout (a practice which has lost its luster these days, to the point where "giving someone a handout" is as popular as giving someone the bubonic plague.)
Hey there, I've got something for you...3. It's cheap. And there's no need to wake up at four in the morning and line up outside the thrift store, because it's cheap every day. Buying clothes, books, movies and other items at the thrift store is often ten times less than you would spend on comparable (or even the very same) item at a mall or department store. I buy many of my books at thrift stores, and I can often find them for a dollar or less, and many of my compliment-receiving work ensembles cost less than my lunch on a given day.
This is actually Megan's closet, not a thrift store
4. It's green. Everyone seems to have jumped on the green bandwagon lately, and shopping at a thrift store is a great way to be environmentally concious by reusing perfectly good items instead of consigning them to a landfill and then wasting resources by producing the same good again. Beyond that, almost nothing in a thrift store has the excessive, and
sometimes dangerous, packaging that seems to accompany everything for sale these days.
6,000 American go to the emergency room each year with injuries
caused by trying to pry, stab and cut open their purchases, according to the
Consumer Products Safety Commision [I did not make this up]
oh, the irony
5. Thrift stores are nowhere near as crowded as the other stores you will visit this season. Unless this post is wildly succesful, you will have zero chance of being trampled by -- or trampling -- any other humans in your quest for a Christmas present. If you shop at the thrift store you will also be able to avoid obnoxiously loud teeny bopper music, scantily clad people in clothing advertisements ("Hey look, they're nearly nude, maybe I should buy a shirt there!"), and the temptation of that stand at the mall that sells those incredible smelling peanuts for only $18 a bag.
Man, these things are good
So choose to go visit your local thrift store today, because, at least for now, you
can still call it a choice.
(after I took this picture, she climbed up the tree and put the star on top. Sadly, this was before we had a digital camera, and I had run out of film.)
