Thoughts on Thrifting

TNG is taking a much needed break from Dec 19-Jan 4. TNG will return with new content on Jan 5. Until then, please enjoy this post from the past year. Original publish date: 7/16/2008.

Me playing with a pair of Electronic Hulk Hands found at a suburban thrift store. Sadly, their price tag was missing so they weren't for sale.

I love thrift stores. In the age of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," American consumers are throwing away lots of great junk by the truck-load. Luckily, many of these no-longer-needed yet perfectly good items end up on the shelves and hangers of your local thrift stores.

While thrifting for a Miss Adams Morgan Pageant costume at a thrift store in Silver Spring last year, I stumbled upon a massive selection of housewares and home appliances. I wasn't quick enough to land the crock pot, but I ended up with a bunch of great kitchen things, including a rice cooker, a huge stainless silver bowl, a set of 4 red cereal bowls and some great framed art. Who cares if it wasn't all wrapped up in a pretty plastic package? Who cares if the price, written on the bottom of the items in black wax pencil, took four scrubbings to get off. I landed some perfectly functional products for dirt cheap prices and walked out smiling.

Now, I've been a fan of thrift stores for years and somehow I forgot that there are other people in this world who think thrifting is an activity that only the untouchables participate in. I was, however, harshly reminded of this fact recently, on 17th St between P and Q.

My boyfriend and I were out on the town on a recent Saturday afternoon putting up flyers for the TNG "I Heart DC" party. We had been making our usual rounds, hitting coffee shops, book stores and other venues with community bulletin boards often located by the bathrooms of locally owned venues. We were walking past Jack's on 17th Street, trying to decide whether we should ask them to put up a flyer for us. We were just about to walk in when we were confronted by a very drunk middle-aged Jack's patron who was outside smoking a cigarette. He stated with the BF, asking him what his t-shirt meant. Wanting to dodge the question and let the guy know he was not on the market, he said, "I don't know, my boyfriend bought it for me."

Undeterred, he turned to me.

"What does this shirt mean? I want to understand it."

I replied that I didn't know what it meant either, as I had purchased it at a thrift store.

"You buy clothessss for your boyfriend at a thrift store?" he asked, shocked that anyone would buy anything at a thrift store, let alone a gift for his boyfriend.

I replied that I buy lots of clothing at thrift stores, and so does my boyfriend, and that we often find things the other would like and buy them for each other.

He then replied to us with something that nearly blew my top off: "You shop at thrift stores and call yourselves gay men?!?"

This prompted me to say something uncharacteristically mean to him. "That's why our clothing is more interesting than yours." I think he got the point, or had finished his cigarette, and left us alone.

Thrift stores aren't only a place to find ironic t-shirts and polyester slacks that you'll cut into shorts. You can furnish an entire house at many of the thrift stores that lurk just beyond the beltway here in the DC region. The only problem is that there aren't more of them, closer-in and accessible by metro.

Perhaps this is a generation gap? Or perhaps the type of person who chooses to spend sunny, temperate, summer Saturday afternoons inside a bar drinking aren't the type of person who could appreciate saving a lot of money on slightly loved pre-owned clothing.

What do you think? And where do you feel are the best thrift stores? Anyone up for a field trip to Laurel? Or Baltimore?