One place that does better in a downturn, I'll bet, is Goodwill.  And that's as it should be.  Their big thing is to provide job-training, and they fund it by recycling the used and surplus goods of our consumer culture, mostly at garage-sale prices. But you'll always find that odd Goodwill in an up-and-coming neighborhood that starts jacking up the prices until you'd think you were in a nightmare-version of Saks.

The Elm Street Goodwill in Somerville is definitely approaching the cross-over point.  I took a long break from thrift-shopping over the winter, but I've been dropping in once or twice a week for the past few weeks in search of terra cotta pots and ceramic cachepots (it's a gay thing), and picture frames.  I'll pick up a book or two if something catches my eye. 

You can still get a decent deal on stuff the people who work there don't seem to know what it is or don't have any interest in.  The prices on books haven't gone up in the over two years I've been dropping in (a buck-ninety-nine is still a little steep for hardcovers, but ninety-nine cents for paperbacks feels about right), and you can usually find a good read (I picked up Benjamin Cavell's Rumble, Young Man, Rumble, and Spinoza's Ethics yesterday). 

I used to peruse the tee-shirts occasionally for something different, but when I went back to the tee-shirt rack the other day, I was shocked to see they're charging $4.99 for tees now!  Youch!  Just spend a few bucks more and get a cool original design by Dave Ortega.  They're on sale! Sure, they don't have that Goodwill smell or built-in sweat-stains, but they're from the future, which makes up for it.

If you're not a denizen of thrift-stores none of this will make sense to you, of course.  You'll be thinking: so what?  $4.99 is still dirt cheap.  Get over it.  But if you've been doing this a while, like me, you'll know what I'm talking about.  I mean, this is free shit all they have to do is throw on the shelves or hang on the rack, and ka-ching! 

Thrift shops are win-win, ideally.  They get it for free from folks who get to write it off, and they pass it on to you for next to nothing and still make a huge profit to fund social services.  For the thrifty shopper it's always an adventure, and if you ask him, he'll surely have some treasure he found buried in the bargain bin in the back he'll tell you about.  Maybe it's a coat or a cashepot, a rare book or print, a coffee table or an odd little tchotchke.  If he paid two bucks for it, it means more than if he paid two-hundred.  In fact, the value is in inverse proportion to the price.

When you jack up the prices that fragile win-win ecology goes all koyaanisqatsi.  There's a point at which instead of feeling goodwill all around, you start thinking, "man, these guys are getting a little greedy."  The fun starts to go out of your finds.  The treasures start feeling more like what they are: other people's trash.   

There's a Salvation Army between Central and MIT on Mass. Ave., I pass on my way to work sometimes.  And just for academic purposes, I dropped in in the afternoon yesterday to check on their tee prices.  Ninety-nine cents.  While I was there I scored a like-new 28.5"X20.5" frame from Ikea for five bucks, perfect for an old poster I'd been wanting to put up.  At my Goodwill, that frame would've cost five times that.  It would've been cheaper to buy it new at Ikea.

Whatever.  At least I'm not dependent on Goodwill for my income.  There was a time, as some of you will recall, when I was between jobs, and paid my rent by reselling books on Amazon I'd picked up thrift-shopping.  And there are lots of people who turn a quick profit on e-bay from their thrift-shop finds. In fact, this might be influencing thrift-shop prices, too, although I don't see why it should.

When I was doing it, it was always hit or miss, but eventually I developed a sixth sense as to what would sell, and some of the fun was in seeing if I was right about a book.  That's about the time I started seeing new-school scavengers with iphones sifting through stacks of books, punching in the ISBN codes on the back to see where the titles ranked on amazon, and whether they could expect to sell them at a profit, and if so how much of one.

I felt like an old-school pick-pocket confronted with high-tech identity theft.  Or like a mom-n-pop when a big-box moves into town.  Yeah, sure, it was easier and more efficient, but it also seemed artless and unfun.  Of course, this may just be sour grapes on my part, or an attitude borne of too many years making a virtue of necessity.  And the truth is, while I reserved a special scorn for those armed with newfangled gadgets, I didn't like any of my competition at the book bins back in the day, and my arch-nemesis, as you may remember, was a homeless guy.

But the other day I couldn't believe what I saw:  a fellow, all business, with a hand-held barcode scanner attached to his iphone.  Come on: it's too much.  That's taking an unfair advantage to new extremes.  But then again, if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the bargain basement.  It's brutal down there.  It's a young man's game.