American Thrift Store: A Photo Essay

The places that sell old stuff can be as beautiful as the stuff they sell.

Glendale, Arizona thirft store. Photo by author

Here in the US, it’s often said that the best way to experience the so-called “real” America is to visit small towns. Right along Main Street, sipping low-grade Arabica bean coffee at the counter of a mom and pop café, the essential national character will rise, like the scent of cooking bacon, up through the manner and conversations of the working class locals around you. I don’t mean character as a matter of dress or genetic disposition — Wrangler versus Levi’s jeans; boxy versus rounded jaws; nor do I mean it as a measure of quaintness or simplicity, those visual elements of the nostalgic yesteryears preserved in the pickling jars of American period pieces such as Happy Days and The Brady Bunch. I mean character as the definitive, underlying qualities of a thing, its inner reality or, in Aristotle’s philosophical conception, its hypostasis. In this sense, any real America that might exist would manifest in the same way as any other country’s essence: as a measure of how we as a nation think; what we value; what we fear; what pursuits we find worthy of our time and energy; how we interact with others; and how we view ourselves and the world. For instance, are we greedy or generous? Communal or unconnected? Empathetic or thoughtless? Intellectual or hedonistic? Tolerant or small-minded? And how so?