Compact Action: In with the Old (part.2)

Cynthia let's me share with you our family's effort's to live without buying anything new as part of a group called "The Compact." In the face of ongoing revelations about the abject criminality of the current administration, it sometimes seems like wasted effort. What we get out of it is community, a divorce from advertising, and a heightened awareness of consumerism’s grasp. Along the way, we save a little carbon and a lot of sanity by making due instead of chasing new.

As a compacter, you spend a lot of time looking for things used. It doesn't add up to as much time as we shopped before, but the quest for used items requires effort. Bay Area flea markets provided most of the household goods we needed. As people discarded last year's model, we were right there to scoop it up. It has been hard replacing that resource.

It was a quirk I hadn't counted on. A flea market here in Missouri isn't the same as a flea market in California, or even my childhood home of Tennessee. Around here, the outdoor gathering of sellers I think of as a flea market is called a swap meet. The flea markets are antique malls where you can rent space by the booth. They are useful for a compacter, we got some shelves for our daughter's room at one, but not quite what I'm looking for.

It is a local linguistic quirk that changes right at the border apparently. In Collinsville, Il, just across from St. Louis, flea markets revert to what I'm used to. We haven't found a good one yet so we lean heavily on thrifts and garage sales.

One Missouri perk has been the trend of city-wide yard sales. From Neosho to Bolivar, you can find one every weekend in spring. This amounts to dozens of easy to find smaller sales and has been a great resource for kids clothes, tools, and household items.

Thrift stores have been a disappointment. In the high-living bay area, space and fashion meant the thrift stores were full of new and barely used items. Here, good old hillbilly thrift sees to it that items get used until they are threadbare.

Overall, this means we've had to adjust some of our buying. We remain largely on the path, blithely throwing out the circulars from Wal-Mart and Target unread. As I told a friend here, I don’t care how cheap the prices are, the cost is too high. Next week, we'll look at a major Missouri development toward sustainability that will soon be heard about nationwide.