Thrift Store Thoughts

Good morning and Happy Weekend!

We had a talent show the other night which was full of spectacles, wonder, and tomfoolery. There was music (drum solos), dance (DDR demonstrations), unicycles (with training wheels), and pretty much everything else you could consider 'talent.' Apparently, some videos were taken. Links to follow shortly....

So, my topic for the day is Savers, the thrift store. Now, I'm the first to admit that I'm picky about stuff I wear - not that I have to have nice clothes, but I'm particular about colors and fit and tidiness. My mother told me that as a child, I hated holes in socks (still do - no tolerance), hated stains on my pants, and hated shoes without Velcro. When I was a toddler, I was even finicky about brands and preferred Osh-Kosh-B'gosh pants. I guess I wasn't aware that in the early 80's anyone else was making pants for 3 year-olds.

Anyway, ever since I lived in Fort Collins and was a poor high school student, I'd occasionally go into Savers, to see if there were any funny shirts, or things that fit well, because their stuff was inexpensive - aka used. This is also an ideal place to go to get costume materials or things for theme dress-ups and what not. Once in a while, you find something nice or rad for 3 bucks and you brag about it to everyone. My entire 2007 Halloween costume from Savers cost $12 and brought me a few awards for humor. It's funny how I'll always remember the exact price I pay for something used, but that doesn't hold true for the new things I purchase (Converse shoes, dig it).


Savers puts a random-colored price tag on each item. Blue, red, yellow, orange, I don't know, there's at least 6. Sometimes when you go in there, the tell you that all yellow-tagged items are 50% off for the day. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason how stuff gets labeled or how they choose the color for that day, but you feel like you're getting a steal somehow. This is known as smart business people tricking you into thinking you're paying them less (they get everything donated to them!).
Back to high school. During this time in my life, I'd look for things to wear to swing dances (when I was into that), and humor. Then in college, I'd go there out of sheer necessity, so I could get to my classes with clothes on and sometimes eat. There is something 'special' about Savers in the Mormondom of Orem, Utah. Now because everything is nearby in Mesa, I live near Savers in Arizona, and still, I am a poor student. Maybe I should get a job.

Once I went there with my roommate, Eric, and we found a nice tripod and a NFL-grade knee brace for $10 total. We took those home, cleaned them up, and listed them on eBay and made $150. Bam! This started delusions of money making schemes in our heads as we decided to regularly check Savers and The Salvation Army and Goodwill to scour the store for things that were worth money that people didn't know about. This only requires you to be an expert in everything ever produced and counting on employees and thousands of customers not knowing anything. Needless to say, that magical day of fat profit was the only one.

Back to the present. Grandma got out of the hospital yesterday, and I went to pick her up to get her back home. She handled the procedure well, and I wanted to bring her some flowers to help her get better faster, because somehow that works. I found some good ones at Costco (surprised?), and Mom suggested I go get a vase at Savers because they always have a bunch for $2. How does she know this stuff? I went there and indeed found a nice vase for $1.50, and had a few minutes, so I decided to skim the racks to see if there were any funny shirts.


After a couple of minutes, a very weird thing happened to me. I saw a shirt on the rack for $6, which at one time was mine. Last month, I took a bag of things that we couldn't sell at our garage sale to Savers to get them outta the house. This particular one was a shirt that I'd decided I didn't wear anymore because it was old and had a hole and too tight. But it used to be mine, and I guess there was at least some sort of bizarre attachment still there. It was pretty weird to see a company trying to sell my old stuff. I was used to seeing it in my closet and wearing it once in a while, and now they'd make me pay $6 to have it again? Yes, I realize that these are not rational thoughts, I'm just explaining how this was weird.

Then I saw another one of my shirts that no one wanted at the garage sale on the sale rack. This one, I got from another Savers in Utah a few years ago for $3. Now this Savers put $6 on that one too! That's a 100% increase in value over 4 years! Savers should pay me a cut of that shirt profit, because not only did they get my money for it once, but they also saw how well I took care of it and actually increased its value! I'm awesome. Let me check to see if my savings account doubled in value during the past 4 years.......ahh, nope.

I decided then and there that when you can make a few bucks off a shirt you don't have to buy, you probably have a decent business plan. I guess, I'm feeling like when I donate clothes, I'm going to start taking them to Goodwill or The Salvation Army for a couple reasons. One, I get the feeling that those places get things back to those in need more effectively than Savers, and two, then I won't ever see price tags on my old shirts again (because those places are far away and I never go there). And, since we go to the homeless shelter to work on people's teeth once in a while, I think the coat I took to Savers would have been better off being given to someone out there. I'll know better next time.

Oh, and yes, I did find a couple shirts for $4 bucks each that fit well and/or said something funny; the cycle has been perpetuated.