Salvation Army offers daytime respite from extreme heat in Chandler
Salvation Army Lieutenant Loren Philpot and a homeless patient describe the cooling center offered to those in need in Chandler.
At the best thrift store in the world, Kolby Miller decided not to buy a pogo stick on Monday.
He’s usually interested in polo, not pogo. The Salvation Army’s massive thrift store in Ann Arbor is a reliable place to find name-brand golf shirts that work for his job in tech sales.
“Salvation Armani,” as the University of Michigan students call it, is a leafy island of shelves where a thick black North Face jacket was $24.99 this week and an Under Armour version was $8 less. Among the Salvation Army’s 29 stores in southeast Michigan, manager Catherine Wale agreed, hers is the most likely to receive a toaster in a box of donated goods, along with a Coach bag.
That doesn’t officially make it the best thrift store in the world. That title was awarded Monday by a guy named Rob from Ypsilanti who was looking at books, most of which are available two for 99 cents.
Luxury goods, however, are an attraction, even on the first day of move-in week for the fall semester, when a larger crowd than usual was perhaps more interested in furniture than fashion. When young people came to UM looking for lighting, and their desks needed the same, a 3,150-square-foot store stocked with dozens of cheap used lamps and countless other household items was a logical stop.
Probably no one was looking for a spring-loaded cane with footrests. But Miller, 25, sometimes finds a golf club valuable enough to sell on eBay, and the pogo stick lying nearby immediately caught his eye.
He visits every month with Megan McBee, 23, who had her hands full with three pairs of pants and an antique white ceramic box with roses on the lid, valued at $5.99, that she wanted to take home to store her jewelry.
Saving on: 6 second-hand shops that are worth a visit
This meant that she couldn’t catch him when he fell, or pick him up again, but he still made a few unbalanced jumps on the gray concrete floor. Although the price of only $9.99 was attractive, he decided the damage potential wasn’t high enough.
“I’m going to put this back,” he said, “so I don’t break my leg.”
In addition to wearables, Salvation Armani offers everything from flat-screen TVs starting at $34.99 to a George Foreman grill for $7.99 to a plastic night light shaped like a chubby Indiana University football player for $1.99. Salvation Armani doesn’t sell splints or crutches, however, which made Miller’s decision all the wiser.
Lands’ End and new beginnings
The store is close enough to Michigan Stadium that it does a nice side business parking cars on football Saturdays. In the parking lot at the corner of State Street and Stimson on Monday, a white Tesla was parked a few spaces away from a white Honda Civic with its front bumper taped down.
Inside, cashier Dakota Shull sang Christian pop hits between customers while a mother and daughter from Manchester filled a shopping cart with collectibles and back-to-school clothes and two graduate students grabbed $1.99 T-shirts to print with an inside joke about the decomposition of organic matter.
Typical Ann Arbor, then, where students with diverse interests and a tight budget share a town with enough financially well-off residents to donate Lululemon and Michael Kors to a thrift store. Found in order on a rack of women’s white blouses: Coldwater Creek, J. Crew, Lands’ End, Brooks Brothers, Croft & Barrow. And, just for the sake of modesty, Merona, the former Target store brand.
The daily selection “depends on our wonderful donors,” Wale said, meaning there is no guarantee that shoppers will find items that began their lives at Nieman Marcus.
However, the proceeds are guaranteed to benefit the Salvation Army’s rehabilitation center in Detroit, where an occupational therapy program places clients in the sorting rooms of stores and some of them have been so successful that they have made it to managers.
Heather Stommen, a mother from Manchester, said she was very conscious that she was shopping in a “high socioeconomic area” and also that her money was actually reaching people who need help.
She and her daughter Sarah loved it, as well as the black-and-white striped sweater they found for Sarah for $7, the dresses Sarah will wear to graduation photos, and the set of ceramic containers Heather will sell at her antiques stand near her parents’ house in Traverse City.
Stommen, a recently retired elementary school teacher, ended up with a full shopping cart of $250 worth of goods, “about what I would have spent on two or three items at the mall.”
Her overall verdict: “Very, very cool.”
Curiosities in the inventory
Of course, Salvation Armani also has curiosities that make up the magic of a second-hand shop – even if the shop is housed in a former warehouse so huge that it probably housed hippos or cement trucks.
Hand-held hair dryers, for example, are on a shelf next to leaf blowers, a further development of the same concept. On the sparsely stocked shelf of personal hygiene products, there is a presumably unopened 99-cent tube of Veet hair removal cream.
While most books and other media are priced at 49.5 cents each, some hardcover editions are priced at $2.99, including “The Courage to Be Rich” by Suze Orman. If you want to donate Hermes scarves to Salvation Armani, you’ll apparently need to make a major investment up front.
In keeping with their future salaries, a Public Defender Training Institute T-shirt in the UM department costs $1.99. For the School of Music, Theater and Dance: $3.99. For a yellow T-shirt with a blue block M and a cheese grater: $6.99.
For real cheese graters in the home goods department: $1.99.
Ally Sung-Jereczek, 29, who recently completed her master’s degree at the School of Environmental Sustainability, and her friend Julia Blike raided the shelves for various $1.99 T-shirts that still had room for another print.
“We take a bunch and then cut them down,” Sung-Jereczek said. The ones we keep are eventually distributed to friends with the message: “I found love in the composting toilet.”
Love in the toilet, Lululemon in a thrift store… you don’t count on it, but it can happen.
Some of Neal Rubin’s most disgusting Hawaiian shirts come from thrift stores. You can reach him at [email protected].
