Two

Hopefully all has been cleared up and it is clear that one, this was not my idea and two, it was Jen’s idea and three, she made it up mostly by herself. Explained in more detail here.  I love the idea of number blogging. As Jen talks about it in her blog too, it makes one go around paying a little more attention. Sometimes I seem not be aware of it. I would go about my business and suddenly a number jumps at me out of nowhere! But need not worry, usually they aren’t particularly violent and I haven’t been mobbed by a number yet. 

This number was a sudden realisation as well, that ‘hey, I collect numbers’, and there it was. 

The picture quality is low. It’s a price tag. Says ‘2€’.  I wonder if anyone can make out what is the item for 2€. I wasn’t completely sure myself yet I have had my surrounding as the context to interpret the shape and its possible household function.

It’s a lamp.

I happened to be in the recycling centre shop here in Oulu when taking this image. I think there must have been plenty of such price tags around me at the time and this is how eventually one I had to use. Things are cheap there. And it used to be a wonderful shop for a fantastic array of cheap furniture, lamps, some clothes and whatever household appliance and crap one can think of. 

A couple of years ago I tried to start up a website in Oulu for people to post their items they aren’t in need anymore to be given away for free to those who would need them. It’s an environmentalist idea. It never came to anything. By now Facebook would have killed it anyways. It killed the recycling centre shop. (well contributed to sending it into a vegetative state).

There are those newish pages on facebook where one can post whatever item they want to get rid of and then people can contact them with an offer. Mittens for a euro or red cabinet for 10. Stuff that before these pages they would probably have given away for free now people play business with. So the poor… doesn’t get to buy cheap second hand stuff so much anymore.

The coup de grace for the recycling centre shop as a decent place to do shopping is even here can be credited to the banking industry and the generated financial meltdown that lead, leads to the real or at least perceived (, but also helped by the financial sector ) economic hardships.

For one, people probably throw less stuff away. As we have seen, when they do, they try to make money of it and what is left and gets to the recycling centre is very quickly whipped up by the vultures! Well, I guess they may be vultures in this lower end of capitalist enterprising, seen perhaps only by the really poor, or the stayathomemumhobbyshopper me. Secondhand markets are popular places. Some do it as a serious business and they quick to pick up good stuff at the recycling centre and sell it on at a considerable profit at a ‘proper’ second hand market.

I do suspect that the price tag on that lamp will have to be changed, or taken off altogether for it to shift.