Junk shop

“ I suppose it's natural that, coming back to England, I should begin to unpack a lot of old memories, empty out the box-room, and come across some useless and discarded things. I'll settle down presently; but it's a thoroughly useless business turning over old stock. The wise man pitches it all into the junk-shop, and cuts his losses. ”

“ It is displacing brick for building and wood for ships. And yet how much goes to waste! Stoves, pots, kettles, rails, machinery, wagon springs, car wheels, pillars, girders, and a multitude of other forms of this valuable metal go to waste. The junk shop is a mine. Manufacturers will pay you fifty cents per 100 pounds. The fact is not generally known, but many junk dealers have become rich.
920. Old Newspapers.—Newspapers should not be sold to the ragman until they have been scissored, and{291} perhaps not then. In New York there is a man who makes a business of preserving newspapers. ”

“ For material, they use odds and ends of old rigging called “junk,” the yarns of which are picked to pieces, and then twisted into new combinations, something as most books are manufactured. This “junk” is bought at the junk shops along the wharves; outlandish looking dens, generally subterranean, full of old iron, old shrouds, spars, rusty blocks, and superannuated tackles; and kept by villainous looking old men, in tarred trowsers, and with yellow beards like oakum. ”

“ But people who are “picking up things,” attending action sales here and there, visiting junk shops and{23} second-hand shops all over the city, constantly expecting to find something and never tired or disappointed. ”

“ Clothing stores, or more exactly, cloth-shops, are perhaps most numerous, countless useless duplications of the selfsame stock, with hundreds of bolts of as many different weaves piled high in the open doorways. Every merchant, however meager his supplies, announces himself an “importer and exporter,” and after morning mass manto-wrapped women wander for hours from shop to shop, haggling for a fancied difference of a half cent in some purchase which, in the end, is more apt than not to be abandoned. ”

“ I found the street-sellers characterize the “swags” as hard and grinding men, taking every advantage “in the way of trade.” There is, too, I was told by a man lately employed in a swag-shop a constant collision of clamour and bargaining, not to say of wits, between the smarter street-sellers—the pattering class especially—and the swag-men with whom they are familiar.
The points in which the “swag-shops” resemble the “slaughter-houses,” are in the traffic in work-boxes, desks, and dressing-cases. ”

“ The first she sells to a man who comes to the door and buys them; the others she sells at a store where rags are bought for making paper. She has no system in buying and selling—buying at the lowest prices she can, and selling at the highest. Another woman told me she buys white rags at three and a half cents per pound, and sells at four. She pays so much a pound for old metals, and sells at an advance. Other articles, as bottles, glass, bones, cold victuals, and grease, are disposed of by junkwomen. The damaged cotton picked up by old women is sold to junk dealers. ”

“ We sell only by the dozen and to dealers uptown.”
“Over there is the tailor shop. We clean the clothes which come in, sew on the buttons, press them and make them look as good as possible. We are wholesalers only. We sell old things by the dozen just as factory owners sell new things in large quantities only. But there are many shops on Baxter Street which cater to private customers. This part of the city is frequented by “down-and-outers,” men who come from no one knows where. They stay a while; they sleep wherever they are undisturbed, they hang out in our saloons and then they disappear. ”

“ There are shops for the sale of second-hand clothes on either side of all the narrow thoroughfares, but the bulk of the business is done by those dealers who bear their goods about with them, slung over their shoulders or hugged in their arms, and who push and drive through the mob with the rest, screeching out with all the strength of their lungs what it is they have got to dispose of, and what the price of it is. ”

“ It is not, however, always the shopman whose ways are most open to criticism. For, not only in the poorer districts, customers exist whose ideas of integrity are not of the finest. In Somers, Camden, or Kentish Towns, where the trader must, of necessity and from custom, spread out his goods in the street, to catch the eye, on projecting booths, that articles should occasionally be missed is, perhaps, hardly wonderful; and yet, curiously enough, it is rather in the big West End emporiums that shop-lifting is most common. Sales especially are most dangerous in this respect. ”

“ Thus the church throws her dead weight into the scale of commerce, and the law gives up the cause of contention: but there is nothing more disgraceful, except thieving, in other places. “I am told,” says an elderly gentleman, as he amused himself in a pitiful bookseller’s shop in a wretched market town, “that you are a stocking-maker by trade!” The humble bookseller, half confused, and wholly ashamed, could not deny the charge. “Ah,” cried the senior, whose features were modelled between the sneer and the smile, “there is neither honour nor profit in changing the trade you were bred to. ”

“ Some dock-labourers lunch on too much beer and too little bread; for they are held in thraldom by certain unrighteous publicans, who still pursue, with great contentment and delectation to themselves, but to the defrauding, ruin, and misery of their customers, the atrocious trade, now well nigh rooted from the manufacturing and mining districts, known as the “tommy-shop” system. ”

“ What a strange type of all the luxury, dissipation, extravagance, profligacy, misery, ruin, and want, which characterise the various classes of society, is a pawnbroker's shop! It is the emporium whither go the jewels of the aristocrat, the clothes of the mechanic, the ornaments of the actress, and the necessaries of the poor. Genteel profligacy and pining industry seek, at the same place—the one the means for fresh extravagance, the other the wherewith to purchase food to sustain life. ”

“ Wild luxury reigns in the streets, excellent shops, packed with goods but where no working man can afford to buy anything. Free trade and profiteering also flourishes in the working men’s districts, but there are no respectable shops there, and a whole street possesses only one wretched miserable shop. This is easily explained—in workers' districts there is no one who can afford to buy things. ”

“ Buy nothing in Chatham street, and keep out of it after dark.
FORCED SALES. When business is dull in this locality, the "merchants" resort to many artifices to fill their coffers. One of their manoeuvres is called a "forced sale." A man walking along the street, will be seized and dragged into a clothing shop. He may protest that he does not wish to buy anything, but the "merchant" and his clerks will insist that he does, and before he can well help himself, they will haul off his coat, clap one of the store coats on his back, and declare it a "perfect fit." ”

“ We have all heard of institutions called "stores"; but still it is a pity to carp at a pretty picture drawn by a literary artist. I know that rebellious tradesmen in many of the shires use violent language as they describe the huge packing-cases which are deposited at various mansions by the railway vans. I know also that the regulation saddler who airs his apron at the door of his shop on market-days will inform the stranger that the gentry get saddles, harness, and everything else nowadays from the abominable "stores" ”

“ The forlorn aspect of the ruined shop told the gloomy facts with unmistakable clearness. So few assistants, so pitiably few customers, such a beggarly array of goods! Those shelves have all been dressed with dummies; those rolls of rich silk are composed of a wooden block, some paper, and half a yard of soiled material; within those huge presses you will find only darkness. Emptiness, desolation, death! ”

“ He took her to the other end of the store, and then going back to the pile which she had just rejected, snatched up several pieces, and sold her [Pg 396] one of them almost immediately. Customers, the old merchant says, were often bullied into buying things they did not want.
"Many a half-frightened girl," he remarks, "have I seen go out of the shop, the tears welling up into her eyes, and saying, 'I am sure I shall never like it:' some shawl or dress having been forced upon her contrary to her taste or judgment." ”

“ Tickets gradually appeared in the windows; then rolls of flannel, with labels on them, were stuck outside the door; then a bill was pasted on the street-door, intimating that the first floor was to let unfurnished; then one of the young men disappeared altogether, and the other took to a black neckerchief, and the proprietor took to drinking. The shop became dirty, broken panes of glass remained unmended, and the stock disappeared piecemeal. At last the company’s man came to cut off the water, and then the linen-draper cut off himself, leaving the landlord his compliments and the key. ”

“ The plate glass windows of every store lay in thousands of pieces below their sashes, and the entire stock of merchandise whether furniture or drapery, groceries or dairy products, had been hurled through them into the middle of the thoroughfare. Above these were piled pell-mell bedding and chairs, wardrobes and wash basins, all splintered and broken—the whole making the most pitiable conglomeration I ever hope to witness. ”

“ Hucksters and pedlars’ carts make two rows of booths in the street itself, and along the houses is still another—a perpetual market doing a very lively trade in its own queer staples, found nowhere on American ground save in “the Bend.” Two old hags, camping on the pavement, are dispensing stale bread, baked not in loaves, but in the shape of big wreaths like exaggerated crullers, out of bags of dirty bed-tick. There is no use disguising the fact: they look like and they probably are old mattresses mustered into service under the pressure of a rush of trade. ”

“ I was overstocked with a load of perishable commodities, and found myself deprived of the best part of my home customers, by the ill-nature and revenge of the justice, who employed all his influence among the common people, making use of threats and promises, to make them desert my shop, and give their custom to another person, whom he settled in the same business under my nose. ”

“ They are keepers of shops of all varieties, busy scavengers of second-hand articles; busier than we know, with thread and needle in clothing and sweat shops. They are dealers in junk, the refuse and wreckage of our industrial establishments; creators of new avenues of trade and of some new industries. ”

“ Some of the alleys were tough and contained cheap lodging-houses wherein dwelt many a hard case and criminal.
[Pg 66]
We walked down Third Street as far as the railroad depot and saw lots of things to interest us. All the goods displayed in the store windows seemed dirt cheap. How they did tempt us, but as we were not overburdened with wealth just then we didn't feel like buying. Silk pocket handkerchiefs, dandy hats, elegant trousers, mouth harmonicas, pistols, knives, razors, accordions were there in great variety. Why were we born poor? ”

“ Everywhere we look we see discarded junk like televisions, washing machines, and automobiles (strangely enough, these were supposed to be the very symbols of prosperity) — does it not make one feel the desolation foretelling the end of an age? When a tiger dies it leaves its hide, but when city merchandise dies, it leaves more evil. [10]
Will human beings in the end be crushed under the load of their merchandise and trash? ”

“ A few months' want of work, with their little stock of shop stuff oozing away—partly on credit to their poor neighbours, and partly to live upon themselves —and they become destitute of all, except a few beggarly remnants of empty shop furniture. ”

“ It’s an auction place. Surely, it cannot be that such wonderful things are sold in a junk room,” exclaimed Mrs. Stewart.
That made the other three look also, and Eleanor added: “It doesn’t follow that just because this is an auction house, that it must be a junk room.”
“Well, I never saw anything but awful junk in the second-hand place in Oak Creek,” explained Polly.
“Even the Denver dealers sell only junk, Nolla. But it may be different in New York. Everything seems to be different,” said Anne. ”

“ Where ashes are burned they are 133collected with the rubbish and garbage in those districts nearest to the incinerating plant in order to reduce the length of haul.
Revenue from By-Products Many cities as yet make no effort to secure and dispose of the by-products, which consist of metal, rags, paper, tin cans, bottles, and ashes; in others the problem is being studied seriously. In comparatively few considerable revenue is derived. Generally junk dealers are allowed to overrun the dump and select what they want. ”

“ Why not put a sign out that would tell everyone that the books and magazines sold have been received as gifts for the poor and sick by the Salvation Army?
The so-called industrial homes sustain furniture factories where skilled labor is employed to rejuvenate furniture collected by the wagons. Antique furniture dealers have the pick of the really valuable things and hundreds of dollars are often paid for something which has been carted away as junk by the Salvation Army’s ragman. ”

“ Preserved from theft and fire in Canton's godowns and pawnshops are stored enough fabrics of silk, art-embroideries, and carvings in ivory and teakwood, to cause a person of average taste to lose his mind, could they be paraded for his benefit; and a collector would find it difficult to preserve solvency, were the treasures of the shabby-looking warehouses proffered for sale. Unusually repugnant are the stalls where food is vended, for their wares are prepared in a manner making it easy for the visitor to forget that he ever possessed an appetite. ”