Thrifty Insights

What’s for sale in a thrift shop will tell you as much or more about a place as any map or guidebook, writes Yona Zeldis McDonough in the New York Times (12/5/08). To be clear, Yona says she’s not talking about “antique stores,” which she says “already have been edited down, gussied up and thoroughly merchandised.” She says that thrift stores “offer a much more direct — and … more authentic — pipeline into the particular place where they are lodged.”

She continues: “That’s because each thrift store is different. The shops are the ultimate anti-chain: idiosyncratic, unpredictable and filled with diamonds in the rough for those who know how to mine.” At the thrift shops in East Hampton, N.Y., for instance, she’ll find “the leavings of people with appetites for high culture and good clothes, and the money to indulge both.” At the Pink Door, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida,” meanwhile, “there is less wood and more polyester.”

Then there’s the Bargain Box in Winter Park, Florida, where Yona found a set of hangers with multicolored “hand-crocheted wool covers,” suggesting “the patient labor of someone with more time than money, but with an inborn sense of elegance.” Yona also takes note of the staff — “who offer their own special windows into the local culture “– from blue-haired to blond streaks to the “perfectly shellacked bouffant and false lashes.” Says Yona: “What I’ve found, as I’ve hunted, is more than mere stuff: I’ve tapped into the soul of the cities and the towns I’ve visited.” ~ Tim Manners, editor