All These Thrifted Things

Three

The thing about working in a thrift store? People wanted you to treat your business like a yard sale.

That included hours of operation.

Somewhere along the way, someone who (apparently) hated sleeping in decided that yard sales needed to start before the sun came up. Most of the time, the best finds had already been discovered by nine in the morning by the true bargain-shopping pros.

Which was why Aggie always had a handful of customers waiting outside the store at eight a.m. on a Saturday.

"Don't you people have families to feed? Or cats?" She often wanted to ask. She kept it to herself, however.

She'd once tried opening the store a little closer to ten or eleven (you know, normal people hours for the weekend), but received several Facebook complaints and an op-ed in the local newspaper. Not a fan of the attention, Aggie decided it was best to give the people what they wanted.

That just meant that she closed at two p.m. on the weekends now.

Power was a balancing act, you see.

One thing she'd learned from watching her mother run the store the past few years? Customers took every liberty they got. If you gave a customer an inch - say, by offering a discount for seniors - they asked why the discount was fifteen percent, and not twenty.

Aggie didn't mean the senior citizens any disrespect. She just had bills to pay.

Another example was the dressing room. Allow customers to have five articles of clothing with them at any given time, and they'd just try to sneak seven in with the argument that it was "just" two more items.

They always "just" wanted a little extra.

Right now, one soccer mom was doing her best to lay claim to a free lamp. It was nine-thirty in the morning.

"I don't understand. What's the big deal? I bought a set of two floor lamps. I think it's only fair to help me out." The lady rapped her pretty, gel-tipped fingers on the checkout counter.

"Shouldn't you be at your kid's soccer game?" Aggie wanted to ask. She resisted.

"I can knock a couple of dollars off the two table lamps, but I don't like giving away individual items when they're part of a set," she said instead.

The woman ran a hand through her perfectly coiffed hair. "I see."

Aggie nodded. Thank goodness. Sometimes these things could get ugl-

"I could just as easily go to Neiman Marcus and find something better than this old junk, anyhow." The woman turned to grab her purchase.

Aggie was familiar with the general makeup of that sentence, as well as what the words truly meant: "Whatever. I'm too good for this place anyway."

"You do that," Aggie quipped, slipping around the counter to open the front door for the woman. "Have a nice day." She held the door wide for the woman as she left.

Something across the street caught her eye; the flash of a gray suit and its wearer lifting a paper coffee cup to his lips. It was strange because, well, one didn't often see a suit in this downtown strip on a Saturday morning. One certainly didn't see shoulders like those stretching against material like that.

Her eyes met piercing brown ones and she instantly looked away, shutting the door and closing herself back inside the safety of her store.

He had seen her, sure, but he probably hadn't noticed her noticing his massive shoulders. Probably.

She moved along, setting her sights on the discarded table lamps sitting atop her checkout counter. "We'll just put these away and not look back outside the front window. He can't prove that you were ogling if you are actively not looking at him." She nodded. "Yes. That's how that works."