I've been a thrift hound for as long as I can remember. Who doesn’t love finding a good deal while pawing through second-hand stuff at a thrift store? Or even just finding something curious to put on a shelf in the living room?

Going back some thirty years to the days when I lived in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, I was a regular at the Goodwill store on Geary and Larkin just around the corner from my apartment. Sometimes I’d stop by the little outdoor flea market that was held on weekends in an old parking lot just under the freeway on the southern end of Van Ness Avenue. I doubt it’s still there. When I felt adventurous, I’d catch the Muni train and go wandering around the Mission District.

I have a vague memory of being mindful not to wear anything red. Red was supposedly a rival gang’s color in an ongoing gang war between certain Hispanic factions — the Hondurans and Guatemalans, or the Mexicans and El Salvadorans. I forget. Anyway, it was some supposed turf war taking place within that little area in the Mission District around 16th Street. Petty and provincial, like most gang wars.

I was stopped by one of those punks one day. I couldn’t say for sure if he was a gang member, or if I was wearing red or blue or purple. I was a pack-a-day smoker back then, and the kid got right up in my face and asked if I had a cigarette. I glanced around  and noticed four of his friends had surrounded me from behind. I’m five-foot eight, and still I stood head and shoulders taller than the lot of them. I reached into my pocket and handed him a Marlboro. He took it, then asked me if I had a light. I held my lighter up and lit his cigarette. He watched me closely, then probably guessing that I posed no threat and had nothing worth stealing, he stepped aside and let me pass. Wasn’t sure if I was in any actual danger of getting the shit kicked out of me or if I was just being paranoid. I knew one thing: those kids would never get to see the world beyond that tiny piss-stained sidewalk. Imagine having to worry day in and day out about who’s stepping foot in “your” part of the neighborhood?

Back then, the narcotics of choice were crack and heroin. Now it’s fentanyl. The area around Civic Center and Sixth Street looks like Ground Zero for the zombie apocalypse. A sad waste of city space. Ditch the tech bros and bring back Dirty Harry. Clean it all up.

If you had any brains and had the foresight to tune in to the bigger picture, you’d keep your head down, get a job, pay the rent, and get the fuck out as soon as possible.

Fast forward a few decades. I’ve since relocated the family to the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. Most weekends now, I’ll visit the Thrift Giants, Thrift Cities, or Thrift Towns. I suspect they are all owned by the same thrift store conglomerate. Every once in a while, I’ll stop by the Salvation Army or the local Goodwill, but the quality of the stuff in these latter places have degraded to the point where the stock is slightly less worthless than the plastic junk you find at the Dollar Store. Maybe their employees are in the backroom squirreling away all the good stuff for themselves. I couldn’t blame them. I’d probably do the same if I had to spend all day sifting through other people’s garbage.

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I have a hit-list of items I always keep an eye out for: used books, manual typewriters, military surplus, and high-end backpacks, briefcases, or luggage — Tumi, Briggs & Riley, Filson, Domke, North Face, GoRuck.

I don’t come across typewriters as much as I once did, say fifteen or twenty years ago, and the book sections of many thrift shops have slowly shrunk over the years, dwindling from multiple aisles to a single row to just a small section on a single shelf. Some stores have gotten rid of their book sections entirely. A sad thing to witness, but not surprising considering one study claimed that over fifty-four-percent of the American population is unable to read at a sixth grade level and is functionally illiterate.

This ought to alarm every library card-wielding American and send Christian conservative hypocrites into their usual hysterics. “This is what drugs, gangs, and immigrants will do to a nation. These people need GOD in their lives!”

Instead, there is silence. A quiet acceptance of one of the many failings we have as a nation. Or maybe it’s the unspoken understanding that this is where the elites will obtain their slave labor for generations to come. Keep ‘em dumb, poor, and uneducated and they will have nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to except Sunday football on the big dumb TV and work at the factory or warehouse on Monday morning.

I have one theory, which is in no way born out by any sociological or scientific study: reading and writing is not as important as it was a century ago. Or even thirty years ago. This is the Youtube generation. Everything is learned by watching videos now. Is this not the logical conclusion to the “show don’t tell” mantra they teach in writing classes? Why read a book when you can watch a video? Imagery is much more powerful than the written word. Unless you’re a narratophile, which is someone who is sexually aroused by the written word. But with literacy rates falling, I suspect the number of perverts jerking off to long narrative passages in a paperback book would be relatively low.

Show don’t tell. Watch, don't read.

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I've stocked our house with pots and pans (cast iron, preferably, and never nonstick) purchased exclusively from thrift stores. I've bought canvas paintings to paint over with my own acrylic creations. I bought a drum set once, but donated it to another shop not long after because the wife didn't like the noises I was making.

Out here in the safe neighborhoods of middle-class suburbia, I've noticed a change in the kind of shopper frequenting these secondhand shops in recent years. Maybe it's the "economy," the usual scapegoat, however amorphous and vague, that people like to blame when they don’t have enough money in their bank accounts. Maybe we’re a civilization in decline, one of overworked and underpaid citizenry, over its head in mortgage and car payments, struggling to pay the rent and healthcare premiums, having to pay for gas to get to jobs that no longer pay enough. More than likely it is a symptom of late-stage capitalism, when company profits have been milked dry and there’s nothing left to steal or exploit — like a parasite that ultimately destroys its host, corporations will begin to feed on the people themselves. Whatever the reason, it seems to have had an effect on the downstream second-hand retail market.

This seeming desperation doesn’t seem to carry over into lower-middle-class, blue-collar neighborhoods — the “poorer” neighborhoods where the houses are nestled up against  factories and warehouses, where you’ll see transmission repair shops next to taco shops next to Catholic churches, where the homeless seem a little more at home here.

On the other side of the railroad tracks across town, where they’ve got the newer subdivisions with the two-thousand square foot homes and manicured lawns (as dictated by their respective HOAs), it’s a different vibe. You might notice a frenetic look in the eyes of some of the housewives and stay-at-home dads who have nothing better to do at 11am on a Tuesday morning. They feign indifference or boredom, but just beneath the surface you sense a nervous energy about them. You notice it in the way they carry themselves as they wander down each aisle. Eyes twitching from side to side, scanning every shelf for something valuable. They want to be the first to find the best picks, and they won’t think twice about politely shoving grandma out of the way to get at it. They’re moving a little too quickly, almost hurried. Desperate to maintain the last pitiful vestiges of a middle-class status, they hope to resell the discarded, secondhand detritus of their peers and turn some of that crap into cash on websites like eBay and Craigslist, supplementing their incomes, making a little extra money, one ragged pair of blue jeans or designer purse at a time. They have mortgages to pay, kids to put through school. You know….because of “the Economy.”

I was at a box store a few weeks back — a literal box store where they sell cardboard boxes for shipping stuff. I needed to buy one to ship a motorcycle helmet I bought from one of the Thrift Giant stores in Dallas. Sold it for $100 on eBay. There was another guy there also looking for a box to ship some sneakers. An older guy, probably around my age, twitchy and giddy with excitement. He couldn’t stop talking to the teenage sales clerk as he pawed at various cardboard boxes. He was one of those guys who’ll tell you all about his personal business and life history, unnecessarily and without any prompting. In his hands he held the pair of sneakers he needed to ship.

“I find these at the thrift store and sell ‘em for a hundred, two hundred bucks a pop,” he told the clerk, who replied with a bored “Wow.”

That’s a pretty good mark-up, I thought to myself. I paid thirty bucks for that motorcycle helmet.

There was one thrift store I used to visit on my lunch break back in the days when I had an office job and could get away with three-hour lunch breaks. When the place first opened, they used to stock a lot of good high quality bags. Over the course of a year or so, I noticed more and more soccer mom types coming in and tossing into their cart any and every bag that appeared to contain any resale value at all. It was like watching one of those game shows where contestants sprint through a fake grocery store with a shopping cart and find as many items as they can before the timer runs out. It was ridiculous.

The thing about reselling is that it isn’t scalable and it isn’t consistent. You spend too much time scrounging around and driving all over town looking through dusty bins for good deals. You’re not going to get rich reselling ninety-nine percent of the crap you find in those places. And then you get guys like this sneaker dad, who’s trying to make millions, two dollars at a time.

Or like the guy in California who posted a Youtube video of how he made a killing reselling patio heaters during a particularly long cold snap along the West Coast with power outages and homeless people freezing to death. Although this was actual retail arbitrage and not so much secondhand reselling, the basic concept and frenetic desperation were the same. He drove to every Home Depot within a two or three hundred mile radius of his house and bought out every patio heater that Home Depot had to sell. Then he turned around and sold them at a markup online. He claims to have made something like a ten or twenty thousand dollar profit.

For me, it’s not about making a profit. In fact, I rarely go searching for things with reselling in mind. Most times, I’m just wandering around because I have nowhere to go and nothing better to do. If I find something interesting, I’ll buy it. If it looks like it might make me some money on eBay, I’ll sell it. But that isn’t my main focus.

I’ve bought so many used books over the years that I once rented a booth at a flea market to sell them. I didn’t make a dime from that experience, but I wrote a book about it, “Flea Market Weirdos and Other Stories.”

Later, I opened an Amazon seller account and listed my books for sale on their website. It did okay for a few years. Relatively speaking. I sold an average of two or three books a month, which was still better than the two years I spent holed up in that gloomy flea market booth, where I averaged zero sales for months at a time.

What ya gonna do? Nobody reads anymore.

But don’t tell that to the folks I sometimes see at the thrift store using a bar code scanner on their phones to scan every book on the shelf to check its value. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were an actual employee of the store as you watch them squatting down on all fours frantically trying to get at the books along the bottom shelves.

I laugh to myself. Amateurs.

I’m no expert by any means, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know that not only is it possible to judge a book by its cover, it’s possible to judge its worth just by glancing at its spine as your eyes scan across the shelf.

Many publishers maintain a consistent design across their titles — DAW, TOR, Penguin Classics, Harlequin,  Reader’s Digest Condensed. Likewise, many subjects tend to have a similar look — travel guides, college text books, career guides, cookbooks.

I don’t need a bar code scanner to tell me which ones aren’t worth the time trying to resell — romances, travel guides, Reader’s Digest condensed horseshit, and about 99.9% of most mass-market fiction titles. Not to say that the actual content of these kinds of books aren’t worth reading or will fail to provide any enlightenment or entertainment, but they won’t make you any money, either. And that’s why you’re doing this, right — to make money? Because you know….“the Economy.”

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