My wife and several of her friends lunched together to catch up. They dined at a small local restaurant called Sauce. It’s normally a very popular lunch site.

“It was weird,” my wife related. “Besides us three, there were only two other people in the restaurant. None of us had ever seen it so empty at lunch time.”

It got better (worse?). After she ate, my wife went clothes shopping. Few places in Ashland offer new clothes; we instead have several ‘used-clothes’ boutiques, such as the Good Will. She says she’s outraged by the new clothes being sold, less by the prices and more by how cheaply they’re made. She’s bought stuff and had it fall apart after one or two outings. This infuriates her.

Her second point about buying used clothes is that it makes her feel better about being a consumer. “I’d rather buy used clothes and give them a second life, than have those clothes thrown away and filling landfills.”

I agree with that. She went on, “Besides that, we have an older population in Ashland. Most are retired professionals who have generous retirement incomes. A lot of times, I can find new clothes with the tags still on them.” And, because of those factors which she cited, the used clothes tend to be from better brands.

So she went shopping at her favorite used-clothing store today, Deja Vu in the Ashland Shopping Center on Ashland Street. When she returned home, she said, “Michael, you should have seen it. They had so many pieces of used clothing, the store was filled. They had it piled everywhere. But there were only two or three other people shopping. I heard an employee say to another customer, ‘Nobody is buying. Everyone is selling.'”

Don’t know how much these anecdotes reveal about the state of the union, but they say volumes about what’s happening in little Ashland, Oregon.