The Dogwood Shop

If there was ever a time for thriftiness, it’s now. Luckily, there are entire shops devoted to thrift where you can go to save money for more important things like food and rent. If you’ve lived in Chattanooga for any time at all, you know where to find the big thrift stores, but they’re not the only ones around. One of the smaller stores, the Dogwood Shop in Hixson, is actually run by the Partnership. I paid a visit to the Dogwood shop recently and spoke to Sue, the proprietor, and Betty, one of her many volunteer workers.

Dogwood has been around for sixteen years, and Sue has worked there for eleven of those. It was originally owned by The Cancer Society, then it changed to Lutheran Services, and last February marked the store’s fifth year with the Partnership. The transition from Lutheran Services to the Partnership was smooth according to Sue. She told me that the Partnership is a good organization that lets her do her own thing, which seems to be working for her.

Besides Sue, the Dogwood Shop is staffed by elderly volunteers. Many of her volunteers, including Betty, have been at the shop for close to ten years, almost as long as her, and a few have been there even longer. Some are in their 80’s and still working for the simple joy of it, but most of them are around 70. Betty takes clothes and other crafts home and mends them, and her husband pitches in as well by fixing watches and performing any technicall work he can get his hands on. “If he can fix it he will,” Sue said. He often mends jewelry, and he recently repaired a manger made out of olive wood by meticulously cutting new pieces to replace the ones that had broken away.

“They’re just wonderful ladies,” Sue said. “They do what they like to do.”

They must like what they do (after all, they’re still volunteering when they don’t have to work any more) but that doesn’t mean that their work is easy. “We work very hard to keep everything looking nice,” Sue said. Everyone pitches in with mending and cleaning – and make no mistake, everything needs to be mended or cleaned. If you buy something from the Dogwood Shop, you can rest assured that it has been thoroughly washed, disinfected, scrubbed, washed again, steamed, ironed, stitched, and patched.

They sell more than linens, clothes and decorations though – a whole wall and another shelf near the counter was full to bursting with every kind of book. The Grumpy’s that used to be next door to the shop has moved, and McKay’s recently moved farther away from most of the area’s customers as well, which has led to slightly increased book donations. This is good for us bibliophiles because Dogwood’s markup is noticeably less than the two big used bookstores.

There isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to the donations that the shop gets and the business they do, but a few things can be counted on: inclement weather is bad for business, as is the Christmas season, oddly enough. They do the best business at the beginning of each season, when people are repurposing their wardrobes to the changing temperatures, but Spring and Summer, when people are having yard sales and donating anything left over, are the peak.

As with everything else, the Dogwood Shop has been hurt by the recession. This didn’t make sense at first (after all, what better time to shop at a thrift store than an economic climate that requires thriftiness) but Sue reminded me that most of a thrift store’s clientele shop there no matter what, and a recession means that that customer base often goes from having just enough money to shop at stores like Dogwood to having almost none.

On a lighter note, McCallie recently donated sixty-five prom dresses to the Dogwood Shop. There were fifty left when I spoke to Sue, but it’s been a few weeks since then. There should still be some left though – she told me that their sizes ran small, which was keeping them from flying off the shelves. Still, I had a look at them, and there isn’t a thing wrong with them. If prom isn’t already over and you or a girl you know doesn’t already have a dress, you can’t go wrong taking a look at Dogwood’s selection.