Free shop
I am walking along the street, and find a sign over a clothes rack: „For free, please help yourself“.
Curiously, I enter the shop that belongs to this stand. A room, a couch, a table, a bunch of likeable people sitting there, eating. In the back room, a shop. But not a normal shop, no: all for free. Downstairs clothes, and books, well sorted. Selfmade stairs lead up to a wooden self-built second floor: up there dishes and a lot of other stuff.
From business suits to childrens toys, hippie skirts to a firebowl, scarf and watering can and mp3 player, and some CDs, everything. This is „Schenkladen Systemfehler“ („gift shop system error“) in Berlin. A project financed by fundraising in the beginning, now by regular sponsorships. I also pay 1,50 Euro a month for the rent of this space, which already gave me back so much more.
But the aim of the project is more than this shop: to build a free economy network around Berlin, in which people will supply each other with goods and services – for free. One project related to it is, for example, the „Obestbaumnutzungsgemeinschaft
Before I leave people bring some food they recycled from organic shops and bakeries in the surrounding. Gratefully I take a nut wedge and an apple and leave.
Totally different: the freeshop in Beneficio, South of Spain, probably the most used free shop of Europe. This freeshop is nothing more than an unsorted and mostly unwashed pile of clothes on a table in front of the „Big Lodge“, the big community tipi.
Rummaging around in it half of the stuff falls onto the ground…
Me, used to other freeshop standards, I am sceptical at first. Bu after a few days I learn that this freeshop has points I appreciate. The large assortment is changing almost everyday, and to have a look every few days really pays off, even though you got to wash the things first. I found some of my now most favourite clothes there.
When people from our group find a huge amount of almost new clothes, also lots of childrens clothes, in a dumpster near Nerja, we bring everything to this table and are happy to watch how the pile of things disappears quickly and how people are happily promenading Beneficio in the newest freeshop collection.
These are only two examples of two very different freeshops. And as different freeshops in Europe and the World might look like: they exist almost everywhere! Keep your eyes open, it is always worth a search for them!
