To the editor:
Up until about a year and a half ago, one fun thing to do in Caribou and Presque Isle was to go to the local thrift stores and see what new gems they had. I often went, particularly because I enjoyed seeing the unique and odd and precious things that people had donated rather than thrown away, and I appreciated that lovely. slightly used things were being offered at really low prices to everyone from someone who no longer needed them.
If I wasn’t sure I wanted something I could come back days later and it would still be there. No longer. Now, as a friend recently said to me, “There isn’t anything good at them anymore.” I noticed that, too. Nice things disappear very quickly and in general the interesting and pretty things are no longer on the shelves. Well, this makes no sense since everything is constantly being bought and other things donated and this is a small community.
So I asked an employee at one of the thrift stores, who said recently there are people who come in very often, some of them twice a day, and they know when the trucks bring new things in and are there on the spot when the trucks arrive. They take carts and fill them with anything seemingly valuable and then they go home and sell them on eBay.
I no longer donate and I wander through the shops sadly, rarely finding anything nice. What I have to say is I did not donate my things so that some selfish person could make a personal profit on it. I bought it to share with the community and I expected that it would stay in the community.
Furthermore, this means that the poorer people in the community can no longer have nice things they can afford. Nothing could be more selfish. It is really crummy to steal from the poor and to send our lovely things far away forever.
Kathleen Angevin
Caribou
