 |
||||
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Betraying her own roots Margaret Thatcher devoted much of her long premiership to demolishing Napoleon's proposition that the English are a nation  of shopkeepers. Her belief that God is on the side of the battalions of big business saw supermarkets, nay, hypermarkets, mushrooming up on the edge of every sizeable town in the U.K. As everyone rushed to one-stop shopping in the mall, the heart was torn out of city center upon center. Almost overnight the small specialist and family shops were boarded up. The high streets had been savagely pruned of people coming and going, stopping and talking. But it's an ill wind. The peppercorn rents that all of these former premises of butchers and bakers and candlestick makers were now only able to command allowed a new species of retailer to move in - the charity or thrift shop.
Following the long established example of Oxfam (an organisation founded in Oxford to help combat third world famine) a slew of nationally chained and one-off thrift shops moved into the vacant outlets. Big time. In Eltham, for example, Bob Hope's birthplace on the edge of London, you will find at least half-a-dozen in three short blocks. Their profits go to swell the coffers of such as, among many, the (British) Red Cross, Cancer Research, Cerebral Palsy support or, typically, the neighbourhood hospice. And profits there are. Staffed by volunteers, stocked by donation, enjoying massive tax breaks, the English thrift shop turns many a pretty penny. Not a few of them mine. There is a type, of course, for whom the concept of 'second hand' is anathema. ("My dear, I'd rather be dead!") My belief, however, is that such Simon Purists are missing out on all the fun and excitement of a hundred and one Aladdin's caves and all the thrill of the treasure hunt that lies within them. Books are the great lure for me. Amid all the trash you can pick up for around a buck - Archer, Grisham, Amis fils (somebody should compile a 'Discarded' league table to balance the Best-seller lists - you'll find, occasionally but regularly, a gem you've been on the look-out for years. In the last week I've picked up a Vonnegut, a Nietzsche (which I probably won't get around to but at the price it was absurd not to have it at hand) a better 'Crime and Punishment' than the one I had, an American David Goodis anthology. For the past ten years and more I've scarcely used my local and free city library. My reading patterns are, in fact, driven by a sort of benign thrift-shop roulette. Something catches my eye and that's it for the next week. Haphazard, yes, and ill disciplined - but you'd want me on your trivial Pursuits team. I know my place. At home the books pile up. But every few months I institute a cull. I pass a few on and, true confession time, I sell quite a few more. The small profit I make does give me a qualm. But it will all go on further purchases and, gee guys, I gave you those shirts that unaccountably shrank and my exercise bicycle and my second best bed: you've got to believe you're ahead…. I've come across some books I've personally written, dog-eared by now and going for 50 cents, but I've never found a Gutenberg Bible. Once in a while I do find a thoroughly desirable first edition. Then guilt always accompanies the glee I'm experiencing as I pay a twentieth of the market value. But not a lot. And how many times has a red mist descended inducing me to buy a book I can't be quite positive I've already got so that eventually returning home I discover - damn! (But if you leave it for a day while you check then, natch, you haven't got it and when you return it's gone.) It's not just books, though. I have a pair of Brooks Brothers trousers as pristine the day I paid for them a thirtieth of their original sale price as the day they came off the presses. Ditto a pair of dress pants labelled Harrods. I have six or so Timberland shirts, nicely run in, bought for about five bucks each and countless others of similar quality and bargain worth. I have a Raglan sleeved, single-breasted, tweed top My fellow shopper-explorers are a mixed and flaky bunch. There will be the chic, thirty-something housewife looker searching for that little designer label number in which she'll host her next inordinately lavish dinner party. There will be the shabbily unkempt, middle-aged dropout looking to keep warm on the streets for minimal expense.He may have competition from the student already up to his ears in fee-bill debt and the first generation immigrant buying up basic clothing to send back to her kid brothers and sisters. Over there is a young mother holding T-shirt up against the three year-old who in six months will need something two sizes larger. All sorts, in fact. But all of us have one thing in common. As we pay the nominal asking price a sly, not-quite-grin covers our would-be deadpan faces. We know, don't we, we're getting a steal. And without being rip-off artists. A good cause is being subsidised. Products are being re-cycled. A minute counter has been mounted against the accelerating diminishment of the world's post-Kyoto finite resources. A fraction less energy has been expended on premature waste disposal and, maybe, brand new manufacture. And the shopping mall has lost another sale of a probably inferior item. Thrift shops are, in fact, random time capsules. Because of their 'products' because of their style of operation there is, I suppose, a hefty nostalgia factor attached to shopping in them. Let me conclude, then, by saluting them with a line from an English poet wanting to set down the pleasure he obtained from shopping in Oxford in pre-Thatcher times. In an age of differing currency John Masefield expressed his gratitude to those old-style retailers by recording that: 'they gave me silver what my copper bought'. So, if you seek until you find, can still be the case today. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
