Your Used Clothes Last Stop is in Africa

I need running shoes.  The African style heavy rice and oil diet has added a few pounds to this frail skeleton and so I need to get down to business and start exercising again. The first phase is to get new shoes.  I headed to Waterside, a large shopping district with endless clothing and shoe option available but before you consider this to be a shopping Mecca, you need to know where the clothes come from and what this place is like…

I originally thought that the clothing pathway was:

1. Manufacturer
2. Clothing store
3. Customer
4. Used clothing store
5. Incinerator

In fact, I was told that once the clothes reach the Goodwill or Salvation army, there is only one more stop for them, the used clothing buy-by-the-pound store and then it is off to the incinerator but this is not true.  After the last stop in the USA, your used clothes come to Africa.

Clothes are packed in tight bundles of about 1/2 m wide x 1/2 m high x 1 m long, labelled and wrapped in plastic wrap.  The buyers then pick their bundle and have a Russian Roulette with the clothes they get.  Inside the bundle could be a great prize and highly saleable items or total ripped up garbage.  It is a gamble but big business here.   I got a price for a bundle at $35 which may contain 30 or more pieces depending on what is purchased.  I was tempted to buy one but my mission was for shoes.

The shoe district was a jungle of footwear, mostly without strings (shoelaces isn’t a word here) and with or without a floor (aka insole).  Shoes were piled high in random order.  The “stores” were actually just shoes piled together on the asphalt by general style: running, dress, colour etc… I tried to provide some insight into shoe store management by telling the workers to have the shoes presented by SIZE and style instead of just style but my advice fell on deaf ears.  To add to the ambiance, the shoe “stores” were next to the local garbage piles and, wait for it, the garbage was on fire and smoking nicely to give the place that new burning garbage dump smell.  For some reason, I could handle the garbage and the smoke and the insane numbers of people trying to sell me stuff.  The one thing that bothered me was the flies.  God, so many flies.  Flies around used shoes is not a pretty sight. 

Eventually I got a pair of runners which were USD$35 but I traded a pair of shoes which were to small for me and got the shoes for $15.  I am sure that I got enormously scammed but my white skin is a ticket to get screwed so I just accepted the monstrous price hike.  The smoke from the burning plastic garbage was getting to me…

I got the shoes home to discover that the colour in the soles weren’t printed properly – the red colour bled into the parts that should be white and then I realised that these shoes, a red set of Puma Cell, were cheap Chinese knockoffs.  Screw #2!!! 

I pray I never need to shop for anything here ever again.

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