(RE)Cycle
By Olivia Torcedo
There was a Goodwill outlet near my house where I thrifted during the summer when there was nothing else to do. Groups of “the regulars” showed up every day, no matter the time of day or the weather outside, waiting for it to open in the morning. When the doors opened at 9 a.m., people flooded in. Fluorescent lights shone down on the sparse warehouse room, lined with rows of huge bins across the middle and along the walls. There was always an indistinguishable musty smell inside the warehouse that contributed to the atmosphere, maybe from the clothes, or the building, or the people, but always present. The red lines in front of the bins separated the animals from their prize, a line you were instructed not to cross until it was time. Everyone stood barely on the borders of the lines, scanning the things inside each bin. These things, mostly trash, varied by the different rows. Shirts with mysterious stains, a singular tennis shoe, and an array of random toys fill every bin to the brim.
“Stay behind the red lines!” a worker with a vest weighed down by varying rainbow-colored keychains would scream at us. They made sure everyone’s toes were behind the faded lines, which barred the hunters from the possibility of a good find until they were allowed to move.
“Three, two, one,” they started counting down, and everyone held their breath, “Shop!” Chaos ensued as everyone jolted into action, savagely digging, digging, digging. People swore at each other, fighting for a cart before they began digging again into the piles. The “regulars” hoarded whole bins to themselves to pick through later for the best things.
At the time, I had a calling to find, repair, and resell sneakers, so I dug haphazardly through piles of dirty, disinfectant-scented boots, ending up with a singular Jordan that was a children’s size two and some Nike Blazers. Everyone else was still tearing through the shoes, throwing and discarding unwanted ones every which way. These shoes, which I had picked up for whatever elusive reason, were what I thought to be the best picks out of all the bins I had dug through. Although I couldn’t fit into the children's size, and I probably will never find a buyer for such a shoe, I still felt obliged to grab those shoes in the frenzy. These shoes were almost unwearable because they were dirty, and, as I would later discover, filled with dried-up sand underneath the insole, which made them hell to clean.
I went back to the same Goodwill outlet bins the next week that summer, and for the next consecutive weeks, I rummaged through and collected a plethora of shoes I’d obtained alongside the “regulars”. Bumping elbows, we fought for the unforeseen treasures that could be lying in the bins. A designer boot or a vintage pair of Jordans were always my aspirations, but I never found any. What I did find were these shoes I would never wear, filled with holes, scored with scratches in the leather which I had to sand away, and that were always a size too large or too small for my feet. I bought them anyway.
Sometimes I looked over my shoulder and watched the “regulars” digging and digging and noticed how methodically they searched. Any complete pair of shoes they would throw into a large canvas cart that the workers awarded the usual customers for their patronage. They threw whatever their hands touched first into the cart in cycles that rotated from bin to bin.
Their efficiency of searching was nearly an artform. Most of the time, they threw all the stuff back into the pile, watching as a worker rolled it away to the room in the back that was filled to the ceiling with mountains of objects. The vacancy the last pile left was never there for long since it was quickly replaced by a new bin with fresh, old things.
I could wonder what they were doing with all of the shoes and all of the things. The things that were discarded once, bought again, and will, inevitably, be discarded again. I could wonder why they all stood at the red lines every morning, but that would not hinder the fact that I bought the Blazers.
