My wife and I recently came out this way for a friend's birthday at some local winery. Beautiful place - outdoor picnic tables, rock walls, string lights and tangles of grapevines spreading down a gently rolling hill.
Anyway, as soon as we got there I let my wife out of the car and told her I was going to go buy some crap at the nearest Goodwill. She was a little disappointed, but by now she's used to that.
So I ended up at this Goodwill in Shelton and I have to say, I was a bit disappointed as well. While most of these little factory towns in the Naugatuck Valley had a decidedly rundown rustbelt vibe to them, this Goodwill was located in a big splashy new shopping center with those corny fake facades and the interior was brightly lit, nice-smelling and overall pretty clean. Right off the bat, none of this does anything for me.
But I press on. As far as the goods are concerned, this place is on par with any of the other countless Goodwill's around Connecticut, which means mostly newer, boring clothing - fleeces, khakis and checkered shirts for the men and Walmart tops and endless aisles of bland "coatigan"-type thingies for the women.
You will also find a few racks of housewares items which consist of mostly damaged dishware, Boyd's Bears figurines and generic wall art.
The media selection will contain tons of not very good books and CDs and a smaller amount of really not very good records.
However, today I got lucky and I scored two old plaid blazers, a couple pairs of sunglasses and a giant 6XL 3D-printed shirt with a rooster holding a machine gun.
Turns out the blazers had been feasted upon by moths or weevils or some other blazer-eating insects and the sunglasses were prescription, but the 6XL rooster shirt? That is simply pure perfection!
Now, my wife puts up with a lot, but ditching her friends at a winery so I could pay ten bucks for a very large man's rooster shirt, might be a bridge too far so I smuggled that one home to make an appearance at some future date to be determined. read more