A few weekends ago my fiance and I found this thrift store a couple blocks away from his apartment. The whole operation is run out of this one woman's eight car garage and proceeds benefit a local program offering free neutering of pets and captured stray cats and dogs. Yes you read right, it's an eight car garage. It was her ex husbands idea to build it and it was her idea to use it as a charity shop after they separated.
The great thing about thrift stores in suburban areas is that they are influenced by what I like to call The Bored House Wife Effect. It's not caused by housewives specifically, it's just that the suburbs have a high proportion of women, employed out side the home or not, with free time. In their free time many of these women like to make their home more cozy, which leads them take up needle work, crochet, knitting, sewing, scrap booking and any variety of activities that involve gluing fake flowers onto other objects. Bored women in the suburbs have a tendency to over estimate their supply of craftiness and spare time. This means that a great deal of craft supplies are passed along to second hand retail. As a result the humane society thrift shop, humbly marked by a simple sidewalk sign reading "garage sale", offers a great deal of yarn, ribbon, baskets, fake flowers and plastic beads for sale at absurdly low prices. So even though it looks fancy, I got this parasol for about $2 worth of materials (including an old umbrella ribbon flowers and thread) and a couple hours of sewing.
