Emmaüs: Thrift Store Shopping in France | Hacker News Reader

Emmaüs: Thrift Store Shopping in France

lamelonne.substack.com

67 pointsWuTangCFO30 comments

Emmaüs also refurbish a lot of used computers, so they maintain a dedicated low specs linux distribution just for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmabunt%C3%BCs

They are also doing a lot of reintegration work which is very often copied by other associations or the private sector if it seems profitable. As part of their computer refurbishment activity, they have been promoting their own Debian-based distribution for years. https://emmabuntus.org/

France is a very socialized country, but with the specificity of having transferred a lot of initiatives to associative actors. I think that what Emmaus is doing is very good, but sometimes I wonder if the French way of doing things has not frozen everything in a bit of mediocrity. A majority of the people supported by Emmaus would be better off in a country that doesn't destroy its industries and its professional education.

People supported by Emmaus usually are not a good fit for job market. The goal is to help them grow. In the end, most of them will stay there. It's not an achievable goal for everyone. I don't think you can blame "frozen mediocrity" for this. Many supported people have not been raised in France.

Funny thing is that the quality of stuff depends heavily on the location.

For example Emmaus close to a rich holiday littoral city I know is very often be full of super nice furniture, including golf gear because it's basically rich people getting rid of old stuff because they want something new at home.

On the other hand Emmaus in the north of paris (poor) is really full of super old damaged furniture and ugly clothes.

Nothing surprising except maybe the first part because many people dont' expect stuf that nice to be given. But rich people who dont' care about money still do.

You can ask Emmaus to empty house of deceased people. Say your parents near the sea died and you want to sell the house, you go there to get stuff you want and then you call Emmaus to get the rest.

Emmaus will make money and get work for people, while you have cleared your parents house.

So, the best Emmaus are the one where rich old people live

Some localizations are more complicated.

The Emmaus center for Versailles and other cosy cities around is located in Trappes. Trappes is one of the most "difficult" cities in France.

I give to Emmaus quite often and see very diverse population and donated objects. So what you get there is really random, and usually falls into the category of "great" or "mediocre", with not too much in between.

For the American audience: Emmaus is the Goodwill for France.

And much like Goodwill, it's rare to find a bargain that wasn't filtered before coming in the store.

It's overall quite true. But I found that the smaller stores, that live in the shadows of a larger one, do still offer the actual bargains. For example, in Emmaüs Tarare, a smaller city 30 min away from Lyon, you still find solid furniture that can be up to 4 or 5 times cheaper than flimsier pieces in Emmaüs Lyon. I don't quite know what the dynamics are, here.

I guess it's the same for other charities/thrift shops/second-hand shops worldwide. I've seen the same with Stockholms Stadsmisssion in Sweden: more centrally located stores have nothing of note, more remote ones and smaller ones may have actual treasures.

Your best bet is a less dense but affluent area. The general level of income near thrift shops is probably the best proxy to whether or not good deals will be there across the board.

It's now extended far beyond France - the linked article says there are now "400 Emmaüs organisations in 44 countries", though their website lists "410 organisations in 41 countries" [1]. There are quite a few shops and communities in the UK, for example.

[1]: https://www.emmaus-international.org/en/who-are-we/emmaus-ar...

Similarly in the Netherlands we have Kringloopwinkels.

Sort of related is one of my favorite things in NL: the “mini bibliotheek”, the free for all bookcases to share books (often placed in front of a house by the residents).

Here’s an example one: https://velsencityblog.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/groot.j...

In the US, the "mini bibliotheek" is called a "Little Free Library". There are four or five within a fifteen-minute walk of where I live.

Every year, while visiting family in France, we dedicate days to visiting these shops as well as brocantes (antique/vintage markets). I used to do the same in the US, starting as a child when I hopped around Salvation Army shops and garage sales with my mother. They are an incredibly important part of who I am and they have deeply shaped how I view things like commerce and consumption — and given my tech doings, they’ve tended to make me deeply cynical about modern e-commerce. But before I digress, I’ll agree that it seems gems are getting harder to come by. This is especially true in fashion where we’re starting to see the longer impact of fast fashion (see recent NY Times article entitled ~The end of the golden age in thrifting). I hope the world moves back in a direction where things we make will eventually hold real value past their first, second or even third owners.

Off topic, but I'm curious about the two dots over the letter u, which is something I've never seen before in French. Living in a German-speaking land, I'm used to seeing the same name written as Emmäus, where the umlaut serves not only to shift the sound of the a vowel but also to imply the emphasis goes there... Now I understand the normal French u-sound is naturally closer to the German ü than any English vowel without the need for a diacritical mark, so I wonder what effect the dots have here and if they appear in other French words, or is it only something rare such as, in this case, when importing a place name from Hebrew via Greek... Any experts in French orthography with an opinion on this?

It's for correct pronunciation. If there's no two dots on the u letter, french people may pronouce it 'emmo' because an 'a' followed by 'u' is pronounced 'o'. But there's no need because Emmaüs is so well known in France that everybody knows how to say it. You can find other examples in words like 'aigü' (acute) where you have to say the u like german ü.

"Aigu" does not take a trema. The feminine form "aigüe" does, and the trema is there because otherwise you'd pronounce it "/ɛɡ/" instead of "/ɛ.ɡy/". It does not change the sound of the "u" at all.

To add to the strangeness of it all, "aigüe" used to be incorrect and "aiguë" was correct. Since it does not make sense now both words are correct.

The two dots here are not an umlaut. They're a trema [0], which happens to look the same. It's used to break digraphs or diphtongs into separate vowels.

Without the trema, this word would be pronounced something like "/emo/". With it, it's pronounced "/ema.yz/".

If you see two dots in French, Spanish, Portuguese (and English as written by The New Yorker!) you're looking at a trema.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)

As a French, I really like Emmaus (and similar organisations). I gave them a lot of stuff over the years.

1. It's good to recycle 2. You help the people working there 3. You help the people buying second-hand furniture 4. I don't accumulate stuff I don't need at my place

The sky blue cocotte is a childhood classic :-)

Ahah yeah! We had the orange one at home :p

Should be placed on a yellow formica table ^^

Souvenirs, souvenirs...

Everytime I move to a new city, this is my first stop.

You unload what you can't move (or don't need) before you go, then you buy what you left (or now need) once you arrive.

It's like renting furnitures :)

They also have an online shop [1] shared with other organisations like the red cross.

[1] https://www.label-emmaus.co

eBay has programs to bring these things online:

https://www.ebayforcharity.org/how-it-works

Emmaus seem to appear independantly by location:

https://www.charity.ebay.co.uk/charity/i/Emmaus-Cambridge/20...

"No, really! I'm compiling on your grandpa's VAX! _This is fucking awesome_"

(paraphrasing Macklemore)

We have an Emmaus in Bolton UK, as well as the above they also have a woodworking shop and garden centre and sell custom woodworking pieces.

Our stop gap sofa came from there when we moved house, and we often go for a browse.

It's lovely, and a great philosophy.

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