Around 10 years ago to the day, I wrote my first column as the Critical Shopper. In that time, I’ve written about more than 150 stores, spanning luxury outposts and discount retailers, malls and pocket-size shops, decades-old spots and places that quickly vanished. But I’ve never written about the one I’m most familiar with.
That would be me: I am a store. Come shop with me.
We all are, really, in this time of post-Kondo closet-thinning, mainstreamed ethics of sustainability and easy access to online marketplaces. And selling your things online is part of the modern condition of being vulnerable on the internet. It requires you to be present, decent and transparent. You have wares to offer, and you hope someone else might find them worthy. Please accept my goods and, by extension, me.
And so every day I am a writer, and I am also a seller. I find retailing alternately anxiety-inducing and soothing, a plaintive plea followed by a sturdy hug. As a person who believes in the idea that an object always has an intended home, finding the right buyer for something I can’t use has an almost narcotic effect.
I pack things with care. I hope people are excited to receive them and will put them to good use. A couple of years ago, I sold a particularly rare and, shall we say, experimental pair of Yamamoto sneakers that never looked right on me. When someone finally bought them, after three or so years of no bites, I got so excited that I started a conversation with him about where he’d learned about the sneakers and where he was planning to wear them in his small town. It was honestly more gratifying than owning the shoes.
But selling things is unmistakably work. Every day, sometimes for a few minutes and sometimes for embarrassingly more than that, I scan my inventory — clothes from my closet on Grailed, records from my collection on Discogs, and various ephemera accumulated over the years on eBay.
Sometimes I rifle through my stuff for things I’m finally ready to let go of. Sometimes I’m taking pictures of new things to post, figuring out how to avoid shadows from my godforsaken track lighting. Sometimes I adjust the prices of items that have been sitting a little too long, nudging anyone who might be paying attention.
I maintain a supply of cardboard boxes of varying sizes and buy packing tape in bulk. I try to be timely with replies, even when I’m traveling.
I keep a set of tabs open in my browser for any package that’s still in transit. I am both proud and a little ashamed to say I have maintained a perfect customer service rating on each platform (though not without triumphing in the occasional tug of war with a fussy buyer or scammer). Once, when I was on urgent deadline, I fended off one question after another, around a dozen in all, from a teenager in the Midwest — he better have been a teenager — about an item I knew had a limited audience and was therefore eager to unload. My customer service? A+, five stars, 10/10 would shop again.
I have limits, though. Twice in recent weeks, I have been asked by a potential buyer to measure a specific part of my body, in order to — I hope — better gauge the fit of a garment. I declined.
What hole deep inside me all of this fills isn’t totally clear. What I do know is that when several layers of life seem unpredictable, or unwieldy, it can be gratifying and motivating to sell something, pack it up tight, take it to the post office and know that in short order its going to be put to better use. The benefits are ethical and environmental, and also financial, but mostly psychological.
There is some ancillary professional benefit as well: At least part of how I see stores when I’m shopping is rooted in the steps I know are required to successfully get an item into the hands of someone who wants it. As a shopper, I don’t want to be fawned over, and I don’t want to be outright ignored. I simply want to know that if I have a question, someone will be there to answer it.
That’s true when buying things from a random person on the internet, too, so I try to give all the information upfront I think someone might need — and definitively enough that if they have a question, they’ll know I’ve got the answer and will ask for it.
It is, in short, a tiny exercise in trust, each and every time. And for someone who shops as part of his job, and who’s rarely happier than at the moment of purchase, the slow and steady drip of outgoing items helps to remind that it can be just as powerful to let go.
