We ate dinner at Rick’s parents’ house last night, where his niece Allison excitedly explained a class project to us – she had brought home two little rocks, which she was supposed to rub together over a bowl to see how sand is formed. She sat at the kitchen table, smushing the rocks together, watching the sand fall, and talking non-stop about whatever happened to be inside her head (she is what can only be described as a “chatterbox”). At one point, she noticed that one of her rocks had a crystal inside it, and she showed it to us and then said, “we should sell it on the Internet! We’d get really rich!” We didn’t have the heart to tell her that rocks with crystals really aren’t worth anything…
What’s funny is, I’ll bet if that rock was on eBay, someone actually WOULD pay money for it. Especially if we could make up a great story about it first. I mean, when people actually pay money to buy a piece of toast because someone says their toaster burned an image of Jesus onto it, you gotta figure people will buy just about anything. “Uh, yeah, this was a rock that Jesus took out of his sandal. Yeah, that’s right… he was walking over by the Sea of Galilee one day, and was like, “yeowch! Something’s stuck in my shoe!” and he took it off and there it was: the miraculous rock of the sandal. Yeah. So pay me some money for it.”
I used to volunteer at a thrift store with my friend Cindy – she mostly stocked things in the store, and I mostly checked people out at the cash register. And I was always so surprised by the things people would actually BUY at that store. The store was a great concept, of course: people donated items, other people bought them, and all the profits went to charity. I remember so many times that Cindy would come up to me at the cash register to show me some kind of weird item that she was about to stock in the store. It was like, “look what someone donated – it’s a t-shirt from a Burger King uniform!” And we’d laugh and wonder why anyone would think someone would want to pay money for part of a Burger King uniform. An hour later, I’d be ringing up someone’s purchase at the cash register, and suddenly there it was – the Burger King shirt. I could never figure that out… why would anyone buy a Burger King shirt when there were a hundred plain t-shirts hanging out next to it, in every color of the rainbow, any of which would be a much more reasonable addition to a wardrobe?? Are there people who actually WANT to look like they’ve just gotten off a shift at a fast-food restaurant? Is it part of an attempt to sneak into Burger King and pretend to be an employee so you can score some free fries? I never understood that…
Of course, I could never bring myself to buy ANY clothes at the thrift store. I don’t know why exactly… it’s kind of like if I’m going to be wearing someone else’s clothing, I need to have a back story to go with it. I can’t just wear any old piece of clothing, because who knows what the person who wore it previously was like. I have no problem buying used books, or something like a flower vase or a refrigerator magnet. But clothing is too personal… if I want something cheap, I’ll just travel over to my neighborhood Mervyn’s store and search through the clearance racks (I once got a brand new skirt at Mervyn’s for 5 bucks… it had already been marked down about ten times. That was their last-ditch effort to get rid of the thing, I guess…) Actually, I can’t really do that anymore – it seems that Mervyn’s just recently shut down every location it had in Austin… I’m gonna miss that store. Everything was always on sale, even if it wasn’t marked “on sale.” The price on the tag was always more than whatever it rang up as at the cash register. That was a fun store. I wonder why they closed down? Maybe they weren’t making a profit because of all those sale items…
Well, if I have to buy everything retail, I may need a little extra money. Hey, does anyone want to buy a really cool rock?
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