Picture this: It's the end of the year 2014 and a family of four - a widow with her three children - needs clothes for their new jobs and for back to school, respectively. After having been houseless for a couple months, the family's resources are very, very limited, but at least housing is not the top concern. Sometimes filling the gas tank of the white van feels like splurging, the same few outfits on rotation have started to draw attention from school bullies, and the office work environment has standards that resemble a suburban PTA meeting. After paying rent for the small bedroom they all share, a trip to KMart can be approached cautiously.
"We'll only get what I need for work," the mother reprimanded when her children asked for toys, for a new plushie, for a box of crayons, for a new pair of jeans.
It's been over ten years, and I think that I still have a blouse that my mother bought for herself around that time. I only got clothes when she got bored of them, at least for the time when she and I were the same size, but that's besides the point right now. For $70 we could get a few new outfits to replace the old clothes that no longer fit my ever-growing siblings. A pair of new earrings that reflected the faint winter sunlight and made my mother's ears look like it had little diamonds felt like the height of luxury.
Simply being able to go to KMart and buy a new pair of jeans when needed felt luxurious, even with my low-paying job as a server. Some days I couldn't believe that I was getting new jeans (!!!), as in, I was removing the labels and the tags the factory put on them, and not new-to-me that I found in the second-hand table at the remate on a Sunday morning. New, good quality, denim jeans (and jeggings because it was 2014-2016) made me feel like the access to nice clothes was everything.
Now that I'm older, I realize that so much more needs to be done for people to afford decent clothing and accessories, starting with the environments where those things are made. I still grieve the absence of KMart sometimes.
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| picture found online that inspired this blog post; apologies for the poor quality, this has likely been shared as a screenshot many times. |
But it's not just KMart.
If you're old enough, you may remember Payless, the shoe store where you could get a pair of shoes for about $10. For a teenager whose mother likely has a shopping addiction, only gave me her hand-me-downs for years (clothes, shoes, hair products), and told me to use what I needed from her closet rather than getting me my own things, stores like KMart, Payless, the 99-Cent Store, and such, were my salvation many times. Things as simple as new jeans, a gray crop top, running shoes, a bottle of curly hair cream, and a red lipstick - all bought in secret with the money I saved - got me feeling like I was balling. But I probably didn't even spend over $50 in all that. After KMart and Payless shut down in my town, I could only see the prices in the remaining stores rise, and when I needed to get something, the emptiness in my wallet felt heavier than before.
Many of the things that I considered small luxuries at the time, and now I know are basic things in a quality bracket higher than what I was used to were made accessible because of the variety in stores. We know these things I mentioned are not luxuries, per se, but the stores competing with each other made them aim to please the clientele. If I couldn't afford a new backpack at Sears, I'd check Walmart, then move to Ross or to KMart until I found a backpack that felt durable enough to last me until graduation.
I didn't get to go to Toys-R-Us nor to fly with Spirit but I've heard the stories. My former classmates recall being kids, roaming the aisles looking for their Christmas or birthday presents while their parents tried to live with normalcy during the 2008 market crash. The Spirit flights with their questionable accommodations, per some videos I watched before the 2020 lockdown, gave people the freedom to check the parades in New Orleans, to take their families to an out-of-satte theme park every year, or to visit family members and meet online friends in person
Neither Toys-R-Us or Spirit or KMart were luxury brands, but they gave many of us the luxury of access to things that we'd seen only our classmates with rich parents could get: being able to get more than only socks for Christmas (not a jab, I love socks as gifts), air travel for leisure, emerging from the store with a couple bags filled with clothing and school supplies. While many of us lived in poverty, goods- and service-providers such as these (and the ones in the picture included) allowed us to not feel like French peasants in modern times, and to present ourselves OK enough in a society that always wants us to pay more for the basic necessities.
