Our Warehouse Is a Four-Bedroom House
Interstate 19 runs for sixty-three miles between the southern end of Tucson and Nogales, Arizona, stopping three hundred feet from the crossing into Nogales, Mexico. For most of its passage, I-19 is a desolate desert highway that passes a handful of small towns. On the northbound side, U.S. border control officers run semi-permanent checkpoints seeking contraband and—presumably—illegal immigrants. But get a local talking about the highway and eventually they’ll bring up the southbound side. At every hour of the day, pickup trucks—and pickup trucks with trailers—haul loads of secondhand goods from Tucson and Phoenix to Mexico.
I’ve seen trailers behind new GMC trucks packed with cushioning mattresses and the world of “hard goods” stuffed between them: bicycles, tables, dorm refrigerators, and boxes that I assume contain dishes, flatware, kitchen utensils, and toys. And I’ve seen much more reckless haulers: older Ford pickups dangerously overloaded with bed frames, bicycles, and commercial refrigerators, all held together—and off the road—by bungee cords.
It’s the Southwestern version of Japan’s trade with Southeast Asia. But here on the border, there’s no Hamaya shipping massive volumes of stuff to traders; there’s no Bookoff outlet opening in Mexico City. Instead, it’s a trade conducted by small-business people who, pickup by pickup, evacuate the unwanted stuff generated across the Southwestern United States to Mexico’s up-and-coming consumers.
The traders are relentless, journeying back and forth over the border, sometimes daily, in search of goods. When a barrier is erected, they go around it and keep trading.
And the barriers are significant. Mexico’s business community long ago pressured its government into outlawing the import of secondhand goods. To do it these days, a trader needs a license—and those are nearly impossible to obtain, especially for someone who works in pickup-truck volumes. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is increasingly determined to keep Mexicans in Mexico, even if their only purpose in coming to the United States is to buy and export the stuff Americans don’t want.
Small traders find a way.
Throughout Mexico, people clothe themselves in secondhand garments, furnish their homes with secondhand furniture and appliances, and educate and entertain themselves with secondhand electronics. In many small towns and villages, secondhand stores are more common than stores that sell new merchandise. It’s one of North America’s most environmentally sustainable businesses, but nobody notices unless they’re in it.
On weekends, a mile-long swap meet pops up on Colosio, a winding boulevard in Nogales, Sonora, just across the border from Nogales, Arizona. Vendors set up tents and tables and hang clothes on support poles and racks rolled out to the edge of the street. Used shoes are piled up; used car wheels are stacked up; used bicycles are kept beneath the tents, just in case somebody in passing becomes greedy and brave. Children’s clothes are popular; so are chainsaws and generators. There’s a stand selling fresh fruit and another selling tamales. Folks stroll slowly, enjoying the Sunday.
I’d like to stroll, but I’m riding in a late-model pickup driven by Shoe Guy, a nickname for an established forty-one-year-old Mexican used-goods trader well known in Tucson’s Goodwills (Shoe Guy requested that I use the nickname to protect his anonymity). He’s a native of Nogales and, by his account, a thirty-five-year veteran of the cross-border trade in secondhand. Five days per week (and occasionally more), he drives between Nogales and Tucson for the sole purpose of shopping at the city’s sixteen Goodwill stores. He figures he travels around fifty thousand miles per year.
Shoe Guy takes a left off Colosio and sees a friend seated in a plush recliner on the side of the road. We step out of the truck. Shoe Guy is just under six feet, with a broad, muscular body, a round face with prominent cheekbones, and a deep voice that speaks English like he walks: confident and fast. He has a carefully trimmed short beard and mustache, and he always wears a baseball cap. He’s a natural extrovert, with a sharp, subtle sense of humor that often goes over my head.
Shoe Guy’s friend is reclining beside a new black Ford pickup hooked to a long trailer. Beside it are four mattresses, an oversize plastic cooler, a wooden kitchen table and four chairs, a microwave, two children’s bicycles, and a top-loading freezer that excites Shoe Guy. “You can get a lot of money for one of those if it’s older and not made in China.” The man in the recliner tells Shoe Guy that he bought the freezer at a Phoenix-area Goodwill. As they chat, I look out at the tall border fence less than a mile away. It’s built from steel bars spaced at four-inch intervals, some as high as thirty feet. From a distance, those repeating spaces give it a slightly hazy look, like a mirage.
Back in the pickup, we head to the Nogales-Mariposa Port of Entry. In 2017 more than three million personal vehicles crossed it, and Shoe Guy accounted for several hundred of those trips. “I’ll tell you why secondhand is big,” he says, one eye on the road and the other on WhatsApp messages coming onto his phone. “In Mexico people make, like, a thousand pesos [$60] per day. And say they want a mattress. A mattress [in Mexico] is ten thousand pesos. And they’ll give you credit so that you end up spending three times that.” At the border, U.S. agents wave us—and the truck—into an X-ray machine that the signage swears won’t be harmful to our health. “But in Tucson you get a mattress for free.”
“No. Bedbugs and all that. It’s kind of disgusting. I don’t like it. But I can make more money doing it than anything else. Mattresses are the biggest money. In order, biggest money: mattresses, appliances, and clothes.”
But Shoe Guy doesn’t do big volumes in any of them. Instead, he does shoes—mostly used ones, but if he can find good deals at new-goods outlets (often using coupons), he’ll get those, too. At Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona, he’s considered a big buyer (which is saying something). On the other side of the border he has a network of seven wholesale buyers, some of whom take as many as one hundred pairs of shoes at a time.
His true passion, though, is toys. “Check it out—1983 Wicket Ewok Doll,” he says as he pushes his phone at me. On the screen is a furry, monkeylike Ewok from the 1983 Star Wars film Return of the Jedi. “I bought it at Bear Canyon [Goodwill] for two dollars. Sold it for more to a guy in Monterrey.”
The X-ray is complete, and a customs agent waves us into the United States. “How’d you get started in this?” I ask.
“Papa was a fruit and vegetable seller.” The family had enough money for a television at home, and Shoe Guy learned English by watching it. He says his favorite shows were the 1950s American comedies Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which idealized suburban middle-class lifestyles. When he started spending time at American-side swap meets, that TV time paid off. “There were these chinos,” he says, using his catch-all term for Asians. “Koreans. I spoke English, and they hired me for four dollars per day.”
“Do you speak Korean?”
“A bit.”
He spent years hustling and perfecting his business skills and knowledge of the secondhand market. Meanwhile, he and his family were always on the lookout for a break. “So there was this Korean guy who loved cocaine and was in the shoe business,” he recounts. The Korean asked Shoe Guy’s father to lend him money, and then proceeded to blow it. As compensation, he offered Shoe Guy’s father his house. “My father didn’t want his house,” Shoe Guy says. “So he gave us all his shoes. That was the start.”
He pulls the truck up to the gate of a self-storage facility in Nogales, opens his window, and punches in a code. The gate opens and he drives up to a unit. Like the other fifty-four thousand or so U.S. self-storage locations, this one is largely devoted to the overflow of stuff from American homes. But it differs in one respect. “Everybody who rents here uses it to store the stuff they buy up north.” He lifts the metal curtain door.
It holds shoes, mostly. There are shoes on two sets of shelves that go to the ceiling. There are small shopping bags full of shoes and garbage bags full of shoes. There are plastic tubs of shoes, and there are loose shoes that Shoe Guy stuffs into garbage bags for the trip back across the border. There’s other stuff, too. A Wii gaming unit sits on a shelf; a mini-fridge with a boxed Lasko fan on top sits on the floor; a Vizio TV is propped on plastic tubs. And near the TV is a tub of receipts from Goodwill.
Shoe Guy loads the mini-fridge and the Vizio TV into the back of his truck along with a few additional bags of shoes, and we drive back into Mexico. Shoe Guy’s customer base is growing, he says, and that’s a good thing. Competition is also growing, and the small-scale secondhand traders are becoming more professional. “In 1991, swap meets were a joke. People thought we were like carneys or something, a low thing. Now everybody is doing it.”
“Why?”
“Big money. In 2000, there was a big crackdown on the mafia, so people jumped to secondhand from drugs.” That makes some sense. Sensitivity to fast-changing markets and a talent for moving contraband help in both professions. “Now you see people driving big pickups, spending five thousand, ten thousand dollars at a time on used goods. They went clean. It’s funny. What we do is not legal but it’s legal somehow.”
Shoe Guy takes a right turn through an arched gate and into the walled confines of the Tianguis Canoas, the largest swap meet in Nogales. He parks on an open gravel patch in front of a small stall with corrugated steel siding. It’s connected to hundreds of others that snake around this wide space, which was founded in 1990 with thirty dealers. Today, hundreds are spread over several acres.
Dining room chairs, several mattresses, and a bicyle outside of a typical stall at the Tianguis Canoas in Nogales, Mexico. In the early 1990s, the market catered to locals. Now, locals sell wholesale to Mexicans from lesser developed parts of the country.
Shoe Guy’s stall holds a rowdy assortment of stuff: shoes, of course, and bins of tennis balls, baseballs, and baseball bats, as well as a plug-in Nativity scene, a dollhouse, a stack of tires, bags of action figures, several large Ninja Turtles on a shelf, pots, pans, a leaf blower, a baby walker, and a boxed Moses action figure. “Got it in Goodwill yesterday,” he says. “I also found Jesus.” I laugh, but he’s not joking. He reaches behind Moses and reveals a Jesus action figure.
“How’s business?” I ask the relative behind the counter.
“People here don’t buy a lot. They say it’s all too expensive to be used.”
“They’re too uptight,” Shoe Guy says with a smirk, and then leads me around the corner and into the market. “No reason for me to be here, actually. My business is becoming wholesale. For me, the swap meet is just a chance to know new people from down south.” He’s talking about the used-goods dealers from cities like Hermosillo and Mexico City. But the end market isn’t just the big cities. Prosperity is trickling south into Mexico’s most remote areas, and they want stuff, too.
We zip past stalls with bikes, stalls with lawnmowers, stalls with bikes and lawnmowers. We pass a few stalls selling toys, and Shoe Guy sees someone he knows. “This guy buys from me,” he says and pauses to shake hands with a man presiding over a table of Hot Wheels and assorted action figures.
Then we turn the corner into rows of stalls selling refrigerators, washers, dryers, dishwashers—it’s a veritable used-appliance superstore. “If I bring ten washers, I’ll sell them quick.” But there’s a twist: a new appliance is nice; a broken one is profitable. “If you get a broken machine, bring it across the border and fix it, you’ll earn three times what you paid for it. Can’t do that if you buy new ones. Guy I sell washers to, he’ll tear them down, clean them up, triple his money.”
We emerge into a paved, roofed-over section of the swap meet. It’s not exactly upscale, but it’s less dusty and chaotic. There’s none of the ramshackle randomness of Colosio’s clothing racks, where colors and styles are mixed together. Here there’s organization: dresses with dresses, blue with blue, white with white; NFL jerseys are segregated by team; T-shirts are arranged by size. There’s a reason for the order. “This is all new,” I say.
“New pushed used out a few years ago. Chinos moved in.” He nods at a middle-aged Chinese couple seated in a stall filled with what Shoe Guy claims are knockoff NFL jerseys. “Chinese bring in the new stuff from L.A. Mostly fakes and knockoffs. Everything is shit—even the good brands are shit.”
I look around. Most of the stalls are managed by Chinese—some are speaking their dialects, some are watching Chinese television shows on their phones, and some are using WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese social media service, on their phones. I approach one of the stalls selling women’s apparel. The fabric is thin and rough, the stitching is sloppy, and it’s priced to move. Essentially, it’s disposable clothing. Wash, toss, buy another.
I’ve seen this kind of thing before. In the early 2000s, Shanghai’s subway stations filled up with tiny stalls selling similar cheap, poorly made but fashionable clothes that copied whatever was walking down the runways. The customers were teenagers, mostly (still are), flush with a bit of cash from their parents or grandparents and keen to be consumers. Used clothes weren’t an option: China banned their import (effectively, unlike Mexico), and no self-respecting, upwardly mobile Shanghainese is going to be caught wearing used. Sure, everyone knows the new clothes won’t survive five washes. But that’s not a problem when everybody’s making enough money to buy more in a few weeks.
Is it China’s fault that quality is in decline? No. Initially, at least, China’s apparel industry simply manufactured to the standards set by foreign companies seeking cheaper factories. And those foreign companies were only doing what good companies always do: responding to customers. Walmart and Ralph Lauren, alike, bet that price—more than quality—moves product. As it turned out, they were correct, and nobody in Germany complained when Walmart dropped the price of its in-house George jeans from $26.67 to $7.85 in the space of a few years. Walmart’s competitors—desperate to keep up on the price points that matter to consumers—made the same compromises. These days, critics of fast fashion complain that Walmart has lowered everyone’s quality standards. That’s probably true; but the flip side is that it’s also lowered every consumer’s expectations of what a new wardrobe, a new toaster, and a new set of furniture should cost. In a world where new consumers are minted daily, low-price expectations matter more.
As Shoe Guy watches me, I wander the clothing section at Tianguis Canoas. “People care if it’s shit?” I ask.
“If it’s a choice between a five-dollar used shirt and a five-dollar new one, people are going to buy new. People wanna party, so they want new when they go out.”
“I’m pretty much the same,” I concede.
We turn another corner and walk into an open area bordered by the stone walls of the swap meet. Under steel roofs, dozens of mattresses belonging to perhaps a dozen vendors are set out for sale. “Mattresses make the most money because there’s no Chinese competition to undercut them,” Shoe Guy explains. “It’s not just Chinese doing knockoffs. Mexicans, too, in Moroleón. They’re making fakes.”
The future, as Shoe Guy sees it, is more formal: a shop that upgrades his personal brand, maybe distinguishes him in a nice way from the sellers of cheap fakes. He plans to open a showroom in Nogales where he can display the goods he’s become adept at procuring over the border. It’s not a unique idea, he says. “Everyone has shops in their houses now. I have one, too. A house full of furniture, bikes, and TVs that I use as a showroom for buyers from down south. But I’m going to do something different: open a showroom near a fashionable area with hot women.”
“You can do that?”
“Everybody is getting into this business. Even people with lots of money. They don’t need it, but they want it. More money. More things. It’s like the mafia—you can’t stop it.”
Every day Anna and her sister (who won’t reveal her name) drive from their Tucson home to a gray strip mall on East Irvington Road on the city’s south side. They arrive before eight, then wait for the manager of the Goodwill Outlet Center to unlock the glass doors. As they wait for the doors to open, Anna tells me they’re from Hermosillo, the capital of Mexico’s Sonora state, and their mother still lives there. But Anna isn’t in the mood for small talk. As a handful of competing Mexican used-goods traders arrive, Anna edges closer to the door, broad shoulders telegraphing her intention to be first through it. I’m in the way.
Six years ago it was Anna’s mother who was maneuvering to be the first in line. She was living in Arizona when she heard about the booming market in used American stuff back home. Hermosillo was on the economic upswing, thanks to an influx of investment from the United States and other countries. As incomes grew, so too did lifestyle expectations. Farmers who’d never had a closet full of clothes, a living room with up-to-date electronics, or a kitchen with appliances now wanted it all. New was too expensive, so affordable used goods became the means to fill the aching need. Anna’s mother got into the business, and it quickly grew beyond her ability to manage everything on her own. Ideally, she’d have a store in Hermosillo and somebody in Arizona to do the buying. Instead, she was doing it all.
Anna was then working at a foreign-owned logistics warehouse, scraping by on more than she’d ever earned before. So when Anna’s mother asked her and her sister to join the burgeoning used-goods business, the two young women didn’t hesitate. The sisters moved to Tucson to do the buying, and their mother moved back to Hermosillo to sell from her store.
I ask Anna if she regrets the career change.
“Nope.” Anna is small in stature, but her steely presence fills the space between us. She turns it to the window and squints at one hundred or so tables of stuff laid out for sale. This is no time for conversation; the doors will open soon.
I thank her and walk around to the back of the building and a loading dock. Inside, I find Abel Medina, the store’s twenty-eight-year-old manager, driving a forklift. He waves his greeting to me as he drives by carrying a hulking washing machine box full of stuff topped by a vacuum-cleaner hose, a purple plastic basket, a wooden extendable child barrier, and a pair of skis.
To my right are rows of tall blue plastic “cages” identical to the ones used to stash fresh donations at the Goodwill Store on South Houghton and East Golf Links (and every other Goodwill in the Southern Arizona system). But these cages aren’t filled with fresh donations. Instead, they’re filled with unsold items from Goodwill stores around Southern Arizona. If stuff doesn’t sell in a store after six weeks, it’s delivered here or to an outlet center in Nogales for one last shot and a massive discount. It’s a lot of stuff: roughly two-thirds of the used merchandise stocked on the shelves at Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona’s stores fails to sell in the store. Here it’s priced to move. According to signs hung throughout the Goodwill Outlet Center:
CLOTHING/ROPA
$1.49 per lb.
HARD GOODS/CHÁCHARAS
$0.89 per lb.
GLASS/VIDRIO
$0.29 per lb.
By-the-pound works well: this Outlet Center is typically one of the top three stores for sales in Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona’s network. Yesterday, an ordinary weekday, it sold just over five thousand dollars’ worth of stuff. That’s good for Goodwill. Not only does it squeeze extra revenue from donations, but it also reduces the costs of landfilling the stuff that doesn’t sell.
Abel stops the forklift and steps off. He’s an affable presence and—at just over six feet and 280 pounds—an intimidating one, too. He leads me closer to the cages and pulls out a Tupperware bowl that looks like a small toy in his huge hands. “Toys and Legos do great if they’re in good condition. Tupperware, not really. Things that don’t move are things you can buy at a dollar store. You can buy Tupperware for a dollar.” He points at a dining room table that’s sitting just inside the doors that lead to the sales floor. “My process for furniture: if it’s not moving, I’ll drop it to forty-nine cents. For that price, people will come take a look.”
“What about free?”
“Free? If you can’t move it for forty-nine cents, you can’t move it. Then it’s going to the landfill.”
A few feet away, another worker is watching as a cage is placed into a machine that tips it onto a table with a screeching crash. There’s nothing particularly careful or elegant about the process. Nor, I suppose, should care be taken: this is stuff that’s priced by the pound. The staff evens it out and then pushes the table onto the sales floor.
By the doors, two carts of clothing sit covered in sheets, looking like very big bodies bound for a morgue. Abel gestures for me to follow him and pushes one through the doors; another employee follows behind with another cart.
“Lot of our customers are here every day,” Abel explains to me as we head into the brightly lit, utilitarian store. There are perhaps another hundred carts lined up throughout the space, and customers are rummaging through them, looking for deals. “Eight-to-five or whenever, that’s when they come.” He estimates that 80 to 90 percent of the customers are Mexicans purchasing goods bound for resale over the border.
It’s a big business. Large resalers in Mexico pay groups of “pickers” to spend their days at the Outlet Center, waiting for new inventory to roll onto the floor. Anna and her sister are small-time compared with the groups who compete against them. “It can get a little tense at times,” Abel concedes with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Things get carried over from the swap meets on the other side of the border. But fortunately we haven’t had an incident in over a year. And that one wasn’t too bad. I just hope people buy pounds of stuff.”
As the two carts are pushed to an open space already partly occupied by two carts covered in bedsheets, twenty or so customers drop what they’re rummaging and encircle the soon-to-be-uncovered merchandise. Abel grabs a corner of one of the sheets and pulls it off. The pickers pounce, digging into three hundred to four hundred pounds of clothing, pulling and searching for what they know they can sell in Mexico. Sleeves and pant legs flap in the air like popcorn kernels as buyers dig, toss, and yank the stuff.
“Men’s jeans don’t really sell,” Abel observes coolly. “They’re usually worn out, and they weigh more than women’s, so people have to pay more at the register.”
Traders pounce on a table of “hard goods” just rolled onto the floor at the Goodwill of Southern Arizona’s outlet store on Irvington Road. Almost 90 percent of the goods will go unsold.
“People are that price-sensitive?”
“Oh yeah.” Abel crosses his ham-sized forearms and watches the buying frenzy with a placid smile. “What’s going to sell will sell in the first twenty minutes. After that, not much. We leave the carts out about an hour, sometimes a little longer, depending on what we have for inventory.” I glance around the room. Most of the other hundred or so carts lack shoppers; here and there, pickers dig in without much conviction. Most of the other pickers are seated on random pieces of for-sale furniture at the back of the store, waiting for the next rollout of hard goods (including toys, containers, and suitcases) or glassware. After two minutes, the frenzy has slowed, but there appears to be roughly the same amount of stuff on the carts.
“Doesn’t look like much is selling.”
“Only twelve percent of the stuff that shows up here sells. The rest heads to Cherrybell,” he says, referring to the street where the central warehouse is located. By my calculation, that means that less than half the donations received by Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona actually sell in Arizona.
A cashier waves for Abel, so I wander over to Anna and her sister. They’re standing beside a shopping cart full of clothes, double-checking what they pulled and throwing back garments they decide won’t sell. “Our clients don’t like boot-cut,” Anna says as she tosses back a pair of jeans. She picks up a red skirt and carefully folds it into a keeper pile. “This’ll go for two or three dollars in Hermosillo.”
Anna works quickly, extracting a pair of jeans that she examines with little more than a glance before draping them across her left arm. “Some weeks we spend nine hundred or a thousand dollars,” she explains. “Some days we only spend twenty. Some, we spend four hundred.” Her sister reaches for a nearby shopping cart and places it next to Anna. “You have to make double or triple what you spend,” Anna adds as she drops a sequined T-shirt into the cart.
This week she’s keen to pull children’s clothing. The school year is starting in Mexico, and her mother says there’s a run on small sizes. But she’s also on the hunt for winter clothes, because cold weather isn’t far off, either. And it’s also time to start looking for Christmas. “Our warehouse is a four-bedroom house in Tucson,” she adds. “We have room. The problem is time.”
“Time?”
“The quality of clothes is going down. Used to be it’d take two or three days of work and we’d have a load to send home. Now it takes six days to find the same amount of stuff.”
“I’ve heard that from other people.”
“Everybody knows it.”
Across the store, two employees have just rolled out four fresh carts of hard goods. Anna looks up as the sheets are lifted from them and the pickers pounce. “My mom’s store in Hermosillo is just like this. She opens the doors and people rush in.” Anna, her sister, and the dozens of Hispanic pickers who work here are their proxies.
Nobody knows how many secondhand stores and swap meets exist in Mexico, how much money the trade earns, or—most important—what percentage of an average Mexican home is filled with secondhand stuff. There’s a reason for that: small-scale secondhand is largely conducted in cash transactions that can’t be traced—as is much of the Mexican economy. By one recent accounting, almost half of Mexico’s gross domestic product is off the books and untraceable. Secondhand, invisible but essential, is the key to what everyone is missing. You just need to ask.
Later, as I wander back into the Outlet Center’s warehouse, I wonder what the customers rushing Anna’s mother’s store would do if they saw the carts full of unwanted stuff as they’re rolled off the floor. Surely, they’d buy more than the 12 percent that’s taken by the traders. If the middlewoman and -man could be cut out, those carts might be cleaned off.
But that’s not how secondhand works in the real world. It costs money for Goodwill to open a store and run its sprawling social services network. It costs money for Anna and her sister to spend a day at the outlet, drive their purchases home, and then drive them to Mexico. Here and there, maybe somebody does it for charity. The reality is that almost nobody is going to dig around in old clothes and broken toys for free.
Nearby, a young man is using a snow shovel to dig up unsold hard goods from a cart that’s had its hour on the outlet’s floor. Each shovelful is dumped into a giant washing-machine box. I see a picture frame drop from the shovel. It holds a master’s of science diploma given by Northern Arizona University in 1981 to someone named Ronald Henry DeWitt. Then it’s covered by another shovelful of stuff.
When that cart is empty, it’ll be filled up with stuff tipped from a just-delivered cage, and the washing machine box will be set aside until it’s loaded onto a truck bound for Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona’s central warehouse. For almost everything, that’s the end of the line. The unsold clothing will be repacked for export to destinations around the world. But the hard goods—toys, mixers, bowling balls, planters, and everything else that constitutes the universe of what most Americans think of as “stuff”—are done. Some might get sorted out for recycling, but most everything else is landfill-bound. There’s just not much else that can be done with an unwanted plastic toy airplane, a beat-up particleboard television cabinet, or a vacuum cleaner hose missing its vacuum. If there were, Goodwill would’ve tried it.
It could be worse. If Mexico or the United States somehow prevented secondhand traders from doing their business—if the border were blocked, if the bans on secondhand imports were enforced—Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona would have far fewer customers, and far more of Tucson’s property would end up unwanted and landfilled. Meanwhile, the vast social services network that’s funded by Goodwill’s stores would shrink, leaving many needy residents of Tucson without access to education and other resources that help them obtain jobs.
Early on a Saturday evening, I’m in a hotel room next to Tucson International Airport when Shoe Guy messages me. He’s just crossed the border to go shopping. “Meet at 5:45 at Valencia?” he texts. “Valencia” is shorthand for the Goodwill on West Valencia Road on the south side of Tucson. I tell him I’ll be there and drive to the strip mall where the store is located.
When I arrive, he’s not there. He’s late, he tells me via WhatsApp, because of a traffic backup on the Mexican side of the border. When he finally pulls up, ten minutes late, I see there’s another reason, too: a refrigerator strapped to the bed of his pickup. As he explains it, he was speeding north from Nogales when he decided to stop into the Goodwill in Green Valley, roughly twenty miles south of Tucson. There was no resisting that fridge. “Price was right,” he says sheepishly, shakes my hand, and then leads me into the store.
“I can do ten Goodwill stores in three hours,” he boasts. The secret to his efficiency is frequency. He visits Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona’s sixteen shops multiple times per week—sometimes twice a day. So if there’s something new on a sales floor, he notices.
Shoes are first. We slow but don’t stop at the rack. Shoe Guy grabs a pair of black ASICS. “These are retro and people like them, but the sole falls apart. See?” He shows me a small one-inch tear in the shoe and places them back on the shelf. Next, he reaches for a pair of K-Swiss and—without looking at the tag inside or at the bottom—announces, “Size seven.” He shows me the size-seven tag inside one of the shoes and puts them back with a smile, grabs two pairs of Air Jordans (“China-made but I can sell them”), a black pair of Reeboks, and a pair of ballet shoes, which he hands to me to carry. We’re off to the appliance section. “I’d like a washer,” he says as he scans a space holding several fridges and an industrial vacuum cleaner. “Nothing.” He starts moving but stops short at the sight of a heavy wooden kitchen table. “Only three chairs. If it had four chairs, I’d buy it.”
“What’s wrong with three chairs?”
“Nobody wants a table with three chairs. It’s been here three days. Trust me, they’ll never sell it.”
“Really?”
“Three chairs, nobody.”
At that, we’re headed to the register. The cashier smiles at him. “Hey, Mr. Shoes.”
He gives her a shy smile and hands over one of the Goodwill gift cards he prefers over cash. “Cash slows you down,” he explains to me. The total is $34.96.
I follow him out the door and to his pickup. Inside, he tosses the bag of shoes behind the passenger seat, and soon we’re driving up Interstate 10. “Do you ever shop the outlet?” I ask.
“I don’t like the outlet scene. Everybody knows everybody’s business.” Tucson’s modest skyline is in the distance, reflecting a sharp desert sunset into our eyes. “And I don’t like to waste time. The thing is, when I find something, I buy it. I’m not like this” —he takes his phone and turns it in his hand, pretending to examine every crack in the glass (at seventy-five miles per hour). As he does, a WhatsApp message appears on the screen. He glances at it, then places the phone into his lap. “Gotta buy new, too,” he says.
“You do?”
“If you don’t spend money on new stuff, the world doesn’t work. Go to restaurants, pay people, buy stuff! We all have to spend. Otherwise everything falls apart. Socialism.”
I tend to agree with him. But I’m curious to see where this goes. “How about the environment?”
“I’m eco-friendly, pro-animal—what do you say?—rights. The other day I hit a javelina on the highway. I felt terrible. But now I’m good with Jesus: I was in a highway gas station bathroom, and I saw a man pass out, grabbed him before he fell. Good with Jesus. But still, you gotta buy stuff and help people live.”
Shoe Guy pulls up to the Goodwill at West Ina and North Shannon Roads. Just as he did at West Valencia, he dashes through the door and around the store. He picks up another pair of black Air Jordans midflight and checks them out as he moves along the shoe rack, looking for more. There’s a size-thirteen pair of Nike basketball shoes. “Nice,” he sighs. “People are big enough for these. Indians in Sonora. But they want sandals. They have wide feet.”
We walk past a rack filled with new Halloween decorations. “If it’s Christmas, I’ll buy right away.”
“Even if they’re new?”
“Sure. Where do you get used Halloween stuff?”
We’re approaching the appliances when Shoe Guy spots a doughnut maker. “If I knew someone who made doughnuts …” He stops to think. “But if you made doughnuts, you probably wouldn’t buy this.” In the toy section, he spots a plastic bag containing three Lord of the Rings hobbit figurines, a Star Wars TIE fighter, and a Harry Potter action figure. The price is $2.99. “I can make money on that.” He also grabs a bank that looks like a brown M&M. “Everyone likes M&Ms.”
As we whip through women’s clothes, he stops at a table of shorts and grabs a pair of the very shortest. “Hollister, size three. This is for skinny white girls. Mexican girls are bigger.”
I raise my brow.
“Seriously,” he says. “You gotta know your market.”
It’s been less than five minutes, and we’re already in line for a register. Before we get to the front, a cashier looks up with a smile. “How’s it going, Mr. Shoes?” He looks at the pair of Nikes, the M&M bank, and the bag of toys in his hands. “I need more stuff.”
It goes like this for the next ninety minutes. We drive from Goodwill to Goodwill, crisscrossing Tucson, following a route he’s made thousands of times. In the stores his routes are just as well-worn: shoes to furniture to appliances to toys, more or less, depending on the layout.
It’s usually a successful tack. Tonight, though, there’s not much to buy. “This was bad,” he says with a shrug as he drives me back to my rental car in the parking lot on West Valencia. “Probably better on the weekend. Tonight was bad, though. Really bad. Should be better this weekend.”
“You’ll be back?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll do something else, too? A movie.”
“Nah, too busy.”
Shoe Guy doesn’t share much personally. He has family in the area and often stays with them. He also likes dogs (he keeps rescue dogs), Bruce Lee, and being recognized by Goodwill cashiers. But that’s mentioned only in passing. Instead, the one subject that comes up more than stuff is the volume of time he spends alone. “Hard to have someone if you live like I do, driving around buying stuff, back and forth. I live on the road. I’m free.”