What is a Community Shop?

This website is dedicated to the Community Shop in my home town. It is decorated with images of objects I found there.

A community shop is not exactly a charity shop or second hand shop. If you mistakenly describe it as 'a charity shop' to the proprietoress, she will correct you - because the distinction is important. The goal of a charity shop is to make money for a good cause - but community shops are run for the wellbeing of shoppers. Coats cost £1, and both books and school uniforms are free.

A community shop gives dignity to low and unwaged people in the town because in a consumer society, to go shopping is to be fully human.

Learning about free shops

The 'free shop' or 'giveaway shop' is an anarchist idea that has been used in many places internationally.

Anarchists tend not to like 'charity' as a concept, as it typically emphasises the inequality between the giver and reciever - and often comes with strings attached. Anarchism empowers the downtrodden - for example, enabling people to shop for themselves for what they need, instead of someone else deciding what ought to be handed down. Anarchism recognises that state-run welfare programs are typically cruel and inefficient, and calls on ordinary people to help one another, with the skills and knowledge we already posess.

You could run a free shop in your town. Why not start small by just redistributing something like second-hand school uniforms for free (maybe the school could lend you a cupboard...?)

You don't have to say the word 'anarchist' or use any kind of visual aesthetic - in fact, doing so may spook people who are non-radical, kind, and understand anarchist values intuitively. I don't think my local community shop knows it is doing practical anarchism - it looks like any other volunteer charity shop - but its goal to redistribute things for free, in a manner which isn't patronising or paternal, makes it different.

Community shops help change how we experience objects. I often feel like the Community Shop is an extension of my parlor, and vice versa. I can go to the shop and take whatever I need, as if I was in my own home; and that makes it far easier to take things from my home and put it into the Community Shop for others, as if the things of my life were only ever borrowed, instead of owned. This opens us up to a new way of sensing the interdependency of resources: from manufacture, through ownership, to disposal. When we see the other people within the objects, we understand the structures of the world anew.

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