Shields Shuts Down Free Store Without Ever Seeing It

Tim Blagg, the editor of the Recorder in Greenfield, MA, wrote a column today that made a whole lot of sense. The subject was the town landfill’s Free Store. This is a place where people can take and leave objects of value, too good to just chuck into the landfill. In other towns this works well…you take it or you leave it, and it just makes New England Yankee sense.

I remember going to the West Tisbury landfill’s Take it or Leave it store and finding an incredible array of valuable stuff like clothing and furniture. Of course this was on tony Martha’s Vineyard–but the point is that it is a sensible idea.

In Greenfield, the acting Public Works Superintendent Sandra Shields has never been to the Free Store. Yet she decided last week to close the store. “It was an idea so good, that it got too big for its own good,” she sniffed. Blagg wrote that ‘too many people were using the facility–a wide spot in the road–and that created some problems. Rather than trying to fix the problem, or getting the community involved in trying to help solve them, the town decided to just close it down.’

Shields says people from out of town were using the store (the horror!) and they were (oh no!) collecting good items to sell at tag sales. SO WHAT!

Blagg finishes: The bottom line is that most of the things that used to be brought to the Free Store didn’t wind up in the landfill or incinerator. “These people really needed the store, and they shut their source down,” said Wayne Elie, the volunteer who ran it.