Ode to the Scary Black Lady

There are a few special days in the course of a year when everything is half priced at the thrift store named Savers. I buy almost all my clothes second-hand, in large part because fair trade (non child or slave labor produced) clothing is so hard to come by. Half off everything sales at Savers are where most of my wardrobe comes from. The sale days are busy and crowded, but I can elbow in with the best of them to get a good deal on a dress or shirt or pair of shoes that are super cute, inexpensive, and don’t benefit any slave traders. Memorial day is one of those magic days, but this time instead of going to my local Savers, off Lake Street in the heart of Minneapolis, I visited a suburban location in Maplewood.

The major hang up at Savers is the dressing rooms. Since thrift shopping is mostly a numbers game, I’m not the only shopper who arrives at the dressing rooms with a shopping cart heaped over with potential fashion gems. To prevent impossibly long waits, and I assume a lot of shoplifting, Savers has a three-item limit on the dressing rooms. If one obeys the rules, one waits in line many, many times. It’s fairly common practice to take four or even five items into the dressing rooms, but the spirit of the rule is obeyed for the convenience of others. No one wants to stand around for an hour while four people try on eighty different outfits, even if you only have to stand in line once. The rule creates a flow, a movement of people going in and out, and helps out those rare shoppers just looking for one red, button-up blouse. It creates a kind of community, because you stand in line with the same people over and over, and get to see them in some goofy outfits as they model them for their friends. As in any community system, there are free-riders. People who pull their heaping cart up to the dressing room door and just grab four more items without bothering to wait in line again. People who think they can short-circuit the system by having a spouse or friend hand them all their clothes, three items at a time.

At the Lake Street store, there is a loud black woman who prevents this kind of behavior. She scares the crap out of me, but I respect and appreciate her. There’s a little adrenaline rush in sneaking five items into a dressing room under her careful eye, and no one gets away with any of those free-riding shenanigans on her watch. At the Maplewood Savers, there is no scary black lady. People are really kind, and will even tell you it’s your turn instead of sneaking into the empty dressing room that just opened up, which is nice. But in Maplewood, a total blind eye is turned to the free-riders. So despite the presence of a teenage girl blatantly taking up a dressing room for over an hour, nothing was said. Her parents asked her periodically if she was done, and she would shrug and say “not really. I’ve still got lots of stuff.”

I imagine that scary black lady transported to the Maplewood Savers, and I can see that she would be interpreted by the shoppers there as hostile, a bad employee because she’s not treating the customers with respect. But I missed her. I missed the order she brings to the operation, the clear-cut justice she enforces, the sense of fairness that was missing from the more peaceful scene in the suburbs.