One step forward, two steps back Unemployment has become a waltz A vicious circle A movement A way of life The Unemployment Waltz from Anthony Ferraro on Vimeo. Also see Anthony Ferraro’s A Funny Thing Happened the Day After I Got Laid Off.

Following up on our last post on thrifting blogs, these items:

How I I Paid My Rent For 6 Months By Thrifting (Things I Found at the Thrift Store)

Let me first start by saying that having to make rent this way was in no way fun or recommended. Unless you’re retired or insanely dedicated to it. Paying my rent for 6 months via scraping by on reselling thrifted goods was a ton of work. I was able to utilize my in-depth knowledge of web-selling platforms to more easily liquidate most of the items. I was able to achieve this feat mainly by selling just a few items each month that made up most of my then $800 a month rent. On a soapbox-rant side note: let me say that when congress or some rogue old senator (who you know doesn’t even use the web) dabbles with the idea of taxing people’s income from selling items on sites like eBay and Etsy, it makes me seriously cringe. Some folks do this for a living and it’s grueling. An extremely slim percentage of the web sellers are making good coin from doing it. Like I said above, reselling items for a living is not what I’d call fun.

From Wikipedia: “Thrifting refers to the act of shopping at a thrift store, flea market, garage sale, or a shop of a charitable organization, usually with the intent of finding interesting items at a cheap price… Thrifting lures a variety of different audiences. Two most commonly come to mind: 1) People who have no economic [...]

David Gillette, creator of IllustratedEssays, has a new one out about the disappointing Copenhagen climate change talks. If you missed last month’s Gillette/Robert Reich essay on EconomyStory called “Why the Recovery is Happening Without Us,” here it is again:

As described in our last post, the retailer H&M is suffering a public relations nightmare stemming from a New York grad student’s noticing on the street hundreds of unsold garments that it destroyed. Twitter, Facebook, and the blogs are all ablaze in condemning H&M for not donating the clothes to charity. The H&M Facebook page [...]

You may have heard about the big to-do going on over H&M (as well as Wal-Mart) dumping unsold clothes instead of donating them to charity. A few days ago a City University of New York grad student noticed hundreds of the stores’ discarded garments and called the New York Times, which wrote up a story.

What happened next has become a familiar story in the annals of bad corporate p.r. H&M took too long to respond, and the Web went wild. A day later, H&M issued a statement. Wallet Pop…

In this episode of the EconomyBeat Podcast, I thought we’d take a break from the banker, broker, speculator type of con man who torpedoed the economy and focus on the much more charming street con man who provides such rich grist for our Hollywood movies. In three-card monte, con artists use swift hand moves and [...]

Click on an image to see it full size. More photos here.

Just saw this item. Saddled with debt, the legendary New York restaurant Tavern on the Green, located in Central Park, had its last seating on New Year’s Eve. The web site is still functioning, however, as are the memories of people who ate there, snapped photos available on Flickr or shot video available on YouTube. [...]

Times being what they are, a lot of people have been lurking in the “Free Stuff” section on Craigslist, hoping to spend no more than some time and sweat — you almost always have to pick up the stuff and haul it away. So it’s the proverbial “win-win situation”: You get a freebie, the posters [...]