"Cool," I said, but I'm sure my face said, "Eeeewwwww."
It only got worse.
"I'll take you there sometime. It's a lot of fun."
"Ummmm, OK, sure." I said, but what I really meant was, well, "EEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW."
I don't know why, but I found the thought of shopping in a thrift store grim. Why would I want to paw through someone's cast offs? And odd. Why did my mother-in-law shop there, anyway? It certainly wasn't because she needed to. So I went with her one day, and quickly discovered the reason - people get rid of some fabulous clothes. I still found it a little bit unsettling, but my doubts were erased when I found the perfect Eddie Bauer parka. I proudly showed my mother-in-law my find, and she showed off hers - an Ann Klein suit with the tags still on. If I needed any further persuasion, it came when I read that Winona Ryder donated ex-boyfriend Matt Damon's belongings to charity after their breakup. Not grim at all.
Now I have to admit thrift store shopping is sort of my dirty little secret - I guess this article is my self-outing. I don't really admit to it much, but then again I'm not sure what the stigma is all about. The fact of the matter is that Americans wallow in material abundance, and we don't even know it. The consequence of our ignorance is mind-numbing waste. We discard fine clothes; we throw out good food; we gorge landfills with our recyclables.
To put it bluntly, it is not hip to be frugal anymore.
But it should be. My grandmother, the queen of frugal, reigns over a telling 'junk' drawer - filled to the brim with carefully straightened twist-ties, rubber bands saved form her newspapers, meticulously cleaned and folded bread bags awaiting a second life. She remembers the Depression, and the motto "Waste not, want not" is no cliché to her. If we tease her about her thriftiness, she grouses, "I'm not cheap; I'm careful with my money."
What a shame more of us aren't these days. According to the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, over 3/4 of American households had at least one credit card in 1999 and - here's the scary part - the average balance on that card was $7,564. That represents an increase of about two and a half times the average credit card debt in 1990. Remember 1990? We thought we were hedonists then. Of course, all that buying power doesn't come cheap. The average interest rate on that money was over 17%. To put it all in perspective, if the 'average' credit card owner with the 'average' debt in 1999 paid $500 a month while not charging anything new they would be debt free in the middle of next year. During that time, they would have paid over $1,000 in interest. Keep that in mind while you're doing your holiday shopping, because the average consumer expects to spend about $1700 on the holidays this year. And that's a 9% increase over what they spent in 1999. .
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