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In the great river of used clothing that courses through America, our family plays the part of sieve. Oh, I’m not going to moan and complain. I really am grateful. People could be throwing these clothes away, or selling them — but instead, they wash and fold them and save them for us.
I generally take anything that anyone offers, and — let me repeat — I really am really, really grateful. I have no idea how much it costs to outfit eight children, because I almost never have to buy them anything. It’s actually been a long time since anyone has dumped a boatload of junk on us without asking first, and most people are extremely tactful, almost apologetic, when offering me things. To any donor to the Fisher family who’s reading this: I’m not talking about you! If I said “thank you,” I meant it!
But everyone’s generosity does leave me with a few problems (problems which, I hasten to add, I am happy and grateful to have). There are several categories of clothing in the bags we receive:
(1) Great stuff that we’re thrilled to wear. This is actually mostly what we get. And again: I AM GRATEFUL.
(2) Decent stuff that we already have plenty of, like navy blue shorts or pink sweatshirts. I’m also grateful for these, just not in capital letters.
(3) Stuff that is objectively nice, but puzzling as a gift to our family. My husband, for instance, is 6’4″, and my sons are ages 6 and 8. So why the half-a-dozen pairs of obese midget grampa slacks?
(4) Crummy stuff. I assume that these items are in the “donate” bag rather than the trash because some sentimental mother couldn’t bear the idea of throwing away the last vestiges of her dear children’s tender years at home. And so, blinded by affection and nostalgia, she didn’t realize that she’s giving us a large collection of stained, pilled, ripped, stretched-out, unwearable rags.
(5) Expensive clothing in excellent condition, suitable for lavishly outfitting one’s daughter for a lucrative career as a hooker.
So:
The great stuff, we keep, of course.
The crummy stuff and the hooker stuff, we throw away (or occasionally designate as costumes).
But what about everything else? The stuff that’s perfectly good, but not needed? It’s not so easy to dispose of it. I can’t throw it away, when I know there are kids out on the street with nothing warm or decent to wear (no, not my kids. My kids have plenty of clothes, remember? They just dress like homeless people to make me look bad). I used to store it indefinitely, but that’s just as wasteful as throwing it away.
You’d think I could donate it, but it turns out the local charity thrift stores are already up to their eyeballs in decent clothing, and have put out notices threatening police action against midnight dumpers.
I could consign it, but having watched my mother wash, iron, fold, transport, champion, and ultimately earn $1.32 for the vast quantities of used clothing she used to sell, I’m not even going to try. It’s the same story on eBay — I was making fractions of a cent per hour of labor.
Then I noticed those yellow Planet Aid donation bins everywhere. The perfect solution! No questions asked, no hassle, just slow down the car, chuck it in the general direction of the bin, and drive away.
But the fine print on the bins reveals a partial list of their services. Call me paranoid, but any organization that promotes “education,” “health,” and “HIV prevention” services to third world countries while “protecting the environment” is not going to get so much as a shrunken tee ball T-shirt from me.
Also, Planet Aid has recently been accused of being a profitable scam, an exploiter of the third world, even a cult. So those handy bins are out.
There must be a patron saint for people drowning in used clothing. I tell you, I’ve suffered so much over this issue, I’m practically a candidate myself. Someone clearly interceded for me in my suffering, for lo, there appeared on the side of the road a bin. It was nestled into the weeds next to the utility shed of a volunteer fire department in a tiny town we pass through on our way over the mountain to the dentist.
And it wasn’t Planet Aid or Mengele’s Happy Social Engineering Club or any other shady organization. This bin belonged to the good old Salvation Army. Our local Salvation Army sells clothes cheap, it gives them away if you apply for a voucher, it hires poor people, and it even has a free bread table. It also works with ex-convicts, campaigns against pornography, and fights human trafficking. No, they’re not Catholic, and no, I’m sure they’re not perfect. But they are pretty good. I wish they had the money to put out enough bins to compete with Planet Aid.
So now I have a policy: I accept everything, absolutely everything. I sort it as soon as I get it, and anything that I don’t want goes straight into the back of my van. And then all I have to do is wait for the next dentist appointment (which is never more than a week or two away), and my problem is solved. That’s a whole ministry in itself, even though it doesn’t show up on the Salvation Army’s website: giving me an easy and morally sound way of unloading it all.
And for that — did I mention? — I am grateful.
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(Cross-posted at The Anchoress)
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The Salvation Army is also my salvation when it comes to clothes, shoes, and household items not fit for the trash but no longer needed. There’s also a small, but growing number of people looking to cut down spending and do their part for recycling by purchasing second hand stuff at both consignment shops and second hand/thrift stores. Here in our neighborhood there is a family list serve where families swap kids’s clothes, baby items, furniture, and more. So, who knew your family was being so trendy?
Good to know. I haven’t bought clothes in years except for the splurge on matching navy blue sweater vests this past Easter.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t Goodwill and such places shred and/or sell the clothing by weight if they can’t use it. I’m afraid I’m guilty of giving stained things to Goodwill thinking that they at least “recycled” it somehow and it was better than just throwing it away. One can really only use so many bags of “rags.”
It is really hard sometimes to part with perfectly nice clothing. I can’t believe that we are blessed enough with hand me downs to have the freedom to pass along a good chunk of the nice things people give to us that just doesn’t suit our tastes. I have three boys so far, so no hooker wear, but we go through the bags stealthily so that the boys never see the Power Ranger shirts and shiny sports jerseys or those weird patchwork shorts and pink gingham oxfords.
One question though, how do you actually REMEMBER to drop off that bag at the SA? I have gone months with clothes and such in the back of my van without ever once remembering to drop it off.
Boo! They just put one of these in not a block from my house, and I couldn’t wait to start using it (since the 1/2 mile drive to the Goodwill is just. too. much.). I have a (tiny, compared to yours, I’m sure) pile of clothes that I keep meaning to donate somewhere, but I just can’t seem to get rid of it. If Mengele’s Happy Social Engineering Club collected door to door, I’d be sorely tempted.
I am going to forward this to my wife. She’ll know why. Something to do with the six trash bags in my home office. And the big plastic bins in the living room. And the too small house we live in.
But we are really, really, really grateful. (Did I mention “really”?) to those who give us the hand-me-downs so I don’t have to spend good money on clothes to drape on my kids that they will stain within seconds of wearing it. After spending the money on clothes for me to do that to myself, there’s hardly any left for them anyway.
Since my income is often irregular, I must confess that I am a happy customer of those Thrift Shops – It is amazing how many very nice nearly new clothes, even in my size 20, can be found for very reasonable prices, something for me to be very grateful about. And all the profits go back to the Salvation Army.
I meant All the profits go back to the good works of the Salvation Army.
…while i was perched inside the lip of the yellow dumpster, dislodging the shoe someone had left that was keeping the door from opening. and i was so proud to have washed, saved, and sorted those clothes…
I call it the “Traveling Rummage Sale,” and we are the last stop. The best thing I ever got was a pile of bags that contained a bunch of Red Sox jerseys, the expensive licensed kind, in some magic white fabric that doesn’t stain. I have three little avid Red Sox fans. The worst thing I ever got was twenty, count ‘em, leaf-’n'-lawn bags of clothes that a high school janitor rescued from gym lockers at the end of school, and they all smelled like gym lockers. It was mostly girls’ sweat pants with suggestive things written on the butt.
Among the treasures in my “save for someday” stash is a man’s size XL sweater with a picture of a man playing golf knitted into it, that for some reason my 8-year-old thought was wonderful and made me promise to save until he grew into it.
Among the worst well-meant pile was the offerings of a little old lady who noticed she was just the same size as my petite 15-year-old daughter, and gave her all her white polyester double-knit pants suits and lacy blouses with shoulder pads.
But I appreciate all of it! I do! Especially since we have a St. Vincent de Paul bin not far from here.
I can see my husband beat me to the punch. My sister-in-law just passed on six huge trash bags with boys clothing size 0-5 (we have one 14 month old boy). I am dreading sorting through the heap. Still, I am grateful. Almost all of it is top quality stuff. No rags. I just haven’t yet found the clothing in my son’s actual current size. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.
BUT I am especially grateful that our parish has a St Vincent de Paul Society and that they have a big white bin in the parking lot of the church. Though of course on Sunday I forgot to drop the bag of clothing to donate that is still in the back of my car. And I can’t wait till Sunday. I have to drop it off before I can go grocery shopping.
Our nearest Salvation Army is about 70 miles away, but there is a loal thrift shop that takes donations. All it’s proceeds go to help local dialysis patients travel the several hours to their dialysis appointments in another part of the state. They also take books, toys, electronics and smaller pieces of furniture. When I was pregnanet with my first baby, everyone I worked with who had been saving their kids’ old toys brought them all to me. I think I might have finally weeded them out (four years later).
We have an outfit called the Red, White and Blue thrift shops around here (our nearest is a couple of miles away) and all proceeds go to support care for Vietnam Veterans. You can go online and schedule a pick up of as little as 2 bags of clothing and one of their vans will come and snatch them off your porch. So whenever I have one of those “I’m throwing away everything you own you messy kids!” moments I go online and schedule a pick-up and then go through the house finding that much stuff to give away.
Around here we buy shoes, socks, underwear and the occasional special occasion dress new (although usually from Marshalls or otherwise waaay marked down). Playclothes come from the same thrift shop I donate to above and the tab is usually $50-60 a year per kid. One time when we were visiting I asked the manager a question about the inner workings and he took me behind the scenes where there were at least 15 10 foot tall compressed pallets of clothing and told be that they process that many a day, selling the good stuff at the store and selling the stained/bad in bulk for recycling/reuse. As such the turnover at our store is great, anything that has been there for more than a week is at least 50% off.