These days, everyone is spending a lot of time in thrift shops, looking for clothes and shoes, a bad book for a quarter, pots and pans for the kitchen. I bought a kitschy wood statue of a mountain man as a present for a friend on the Lower East Side last week. Of course, the economic slide means that people are holding onto stuff they otherwise would have donated to the Salvation Army in years past, so that, between, the rising demand of the knickknack seekers and the new found thriftiness of potential donors, the pickings are slimmer.
