28 Jan February at Experienced Goods

Warm blankets for a snowy day on sale at the Shop

by Jennie Reichman

My dear friend who lives in western Washington State gets very excited every time we have a major snowstorm in Vermont. She emails me or texts me, “You got snowed on! You’re so lucky!” Yes, I am aware of the 12 inches on my walkway and my car, and yes, I will be shoveling and moving snow for the next hour. I write back and do my best to share in her vicarious joy, and in so doing realize how beautiful and transformative snow can be. Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I understand the thrill of waking up to a snow-covered landscape, especially as a child when it meant no school and a day of sledding and snowman building. It snows so rarely there that when it does, even an inch or two, almost everything shuts down, plans are cancelled, schools are closed, people stay put and most delight in the anomaly of winter weather that isn’t rain. I remember waking up to a snowy morning and knowing with a jolt of excitement that the world had been transformed even before I peeked through my bedroom curtains. The light was different, the air smelled different. Hooray, no school today! What had been ordinary had been imbued with magic and fairytale wonder.

As humans, we long for familiarity, it makes us feel safe. But sometimes changes in our environments, even small ones, can allow us to see clearly something that has become so familiar we are blind to it. Like snow transforming a landscape or the way a trail through the woods can look utterly different on the way back than it did on the way in, a shift in the scenery can wake us up, remind us to look at and take in what is in front of us. At Experienced Goods, we are always looking for ways to improve or tweak the store landscape, moving racks around, changing displays, adding or subtracting features of different departments to make shopping (and working) more fun or ergonomic. We recently noticed that the long wood and glass display case in the housewares department was shockingly rickety, that pushing on it even slightly caused it to wobble and bend like it was made of rubber. Dangerous! If it collapsed, the glass panels would shatter and the wooden frame would splinter, causing at best a huge mess and at worst potential injuries. What had been a familiar fixture at the store for at least 15 years and had served us well as a place to display fragile or more expensive items was now a hazard and had outlived its purpose. So one morning before the store opened we dismantled it, recycled the components and replaced it with two attractive shelving units and new artwork on the wall behind them. What a difference! It looked so nice, we wondered why we hadn’t made the change sooner. By letting go of the old, we had created space for a new reality we couldn’t have imagined before necessity stepped in.

Have customers noticed? Yes, and surprisingly some have mourned the demise of the display case. You never know what is going to be an emotional anchor for a person, and stopping and gazing at the items in the case was, for some, a part of the ritual of a trip to Experienced Goods. In a year chock full of change and adjustment, the last thing most of us need is one more monkey wrench in the works. But our customers are a resilient and forgiving bunch, and they seem to be taking this scene change in stride. We are doing so many things differently at Experienced Goods since we re-opened in July, from store layout to the way we take in and process donations, from mask wearing and store cleaning to new store hours and limiting the number of shoppers in the store at any given time. We’ve made these changes in order to create a safe, healthy shopping and working environment during the ongoing pandemic. As employees, we’ve adjusted well to all the newness, and in many cases realized that the old way of doing things was just that: Old. Looking at what needed to be streamlined and updated to make the store safer gave us the opportunity to invent an improved version of Experienced Goods, one that runs more smoothly and requires less energy output. Still familiar, still fascinating and intriguing, still welcoming and comforting.

That said, our customers and donors are always admirably patient with us when we change things up and move the furniture around. I sometimes think they look at us the way Vermonters look at yet another snowstorm: “Well, here we go again! Where’s the shovel?”