I’ve been living in Ecuador for the last 2.5 years, and my wife and I noticed something almost immediately. There are no second-hand stores here.
I mean, none.
There are open markets where you can occasionally find merchants selling used clothes. But even then, its mostly donations from abroad or just cheap knock-offs. (I once bought a jacket from a gentleman selling the same jacket in a variety of colors and brandnames. I needed it for hiking, so I got the North Face one in blue.)
At some point, I figured out what was going on. People can’t afford new clothes here. So, they wear the ones they have until they fall apart. And, since there isn’t a constant turn over of new clothes on the shelves prices are higher to boot.
Meanwhile, in the US, we just buy new clothes because we feel like it. Plus, you can’t attend an event without getting a free t-shirt. And if it isn’t free, $20 proves we were there, so why not? Later, if there’s something in our closet we don’t like, we just get rid of it. Because of this trend, donation centers like Goodwill and The Salvation Army stores have grown to a huge business. And, since we have rather wealthy people in this country, there’s even really quality brands available on the cheap.
The massive amounts of wealth that socialists keep complaining about redistributes itself in a free market. So, next time you see a greedy fat-cat capitalist, tell him “Thank you. These $5 vintage Levy’s are fantastic.”
One reply on “Excess Wealth – Why you should thank the 1%”
I spent a bit of time there at the turn of the century when they had dollarized and things were sort of looking up. That upswing didn’t seem to last long. A funny thing is the way that here and there, amid the general squalor, there will be a beautifully built wooden chalet, perhaps sited on the shore of a lake, looking all the world like something transposed from Switzerland. That would be Germans. Descendants of immigrants who have retained their language and culture. Prominent in the universities.