And yes, I plan to make a T-shirt of that.
I used to live in a hippie populated neighbourhood called Fernwood, it was the best place ever, pretty much. There was a main square filled with brick buildings from the turn of the century, coffee shops filled with trustafarians, community gardens, it was fucking rad. A big thing that people in the hood do, is put out boxes with FREE written on them in permanent marker. Then they just set whatever they don’t want into these boxes and put them out in front of their houses. You can be guaranteed that whatever you put out, will be gone within two days. And its amazing what one can find in a free box, I found a pair of pants that I wore for two years, a CD of a band I’d never heard of before that turned out to be pretty good, binders. It was really awesome, because this isn’t stuff people are too lazy to throw out, its stuff that people would usually give to a thrift store, but instead are just giving it away.
And I can understand that, I mean, some of the biggest non-religious thrift stores are for-profit, they get free stuff and sell it at whatever markup they choose. Sure, a cut of it goes to charity, but unlike the Salvation Army, the majority of their profits go towards making more profits. You probably know one of these companies, Value Village. About a year ago, Value Village was bought by Wal-Mart, and since then, the company markup has increased, and new products have started showing up in what used to be a thrift store. Dumb shit.
That’s why free boxes aren’t just junk, the people just don’t want to, or can’t, go to the thrift store to ‘donate’, so they give it away. And when you have one or two households doing this, it’s pretty rare and isn’t that big a deal, but when you scale it up to an entire neighbourhood, it’s pretty incredible. Why don’t more people do this, I mean, it’s a community act of charity. The two problems, in my opinion, are:
- People hoard a lot of stuff, so they don’t need to get rid of a lot.
- Not enough people know about free boxing and what joy it can bring to a casual passerby.
The world needs more free boxes. So I’ve decided to never give anything to the thrift shops again. Instead, whenever I have clothes or things I don’t want, I’ll put it in a free box and leave it outside. I encourage you to do the same. Imagine all the free stuff that you could get just by walking down the street.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And the world could use a bit more treasure.
More posts coming.
-A
Letters From The Great White North 