The Free Store has been open at 38 Ghuznee Street for 11 days now and word has cer­tain­ly got out that there is such a thing as a free lunch.  The Free Store is due to shut up shop on Sat­ur­day this week so if you want to take or give to the project you have 5 more days.

There are a lot of ideas packed into this shop.  Part art­work, part social exper­i­ment the Free Store is part two of the Let­ting Space series that began with Pop­u­lar Arche­ol­o­gy: A Sound Archive.  One of the stat­ed inten­tions of the project is to:

high­light the under­ground ‘free econ­o­my’ that redis­trib­utes pro­duce and food around Welling­ton, [Kim Paton] is cur­rent­ly mak­ing a call to sell­ers of fresh pro­duce, as well as to to cafes and super­mar­kets for their excess stock.

The logos of some of the par­tic­i­pat­ing busi­ness­es grace the chalk­board.

Stock comes in at vari­able times, feast or famine if you will.  But the obser­vant and dare we say the needy, are dis­cov­er­ing what time dis­card­ed cafe food is due to arrive and loi­ter­ing ready to descend.  This makes for a chal­leng­ing project for those vol­un­teers who are staffing the shop.  I can imag­ine they are expe­ri­enc­ing the busi­ness end of what must be a nor­mal day for Down­town City Mis­sion staff, although pos­si­bly with more hip­sters.

So, what can you for­age for? Peo­ple have emerged clutch­ing sham­poo and pota­toes.  One disheveled local painter emerged with a filled roll and a bag of cof­fee, he then plucked up the con­fi­dence to head across the road to drink the free wine at an art open­ing. Your intre­pid reporter scored a bat­tered pear, a bag of rock­et, a cof­fee sack, some pota­toes, two soft­drinks and a piece of home­made banana cake (greedy per­haps).  Dis­con­tin­ued soft­drinks, cof­fee sacks, crates of bruised bananas were arriv­ing as we sat there and a pho­tog­ra­ph­er was doc­u­ment­ing it all.

Our two cents worth for free? 

One: The Down­town City Mis­sion has col­lec­tion points for essen­tials if you would like to con­tribute to the under­ground free econ­o­my more often. The unem­ploy­ment rate is expect­ed to stay ele­vat­ed until 2011, just sayin.

Two: On a more fru­gal chic note, if you missed out on the fab­u­lous cof­fee sacks donat­ed by Mojo you can head on down to the fac­to­ry on the Water­front and for a gold coin dona­tion to the Neona­tal Trust they are hap­py to give you their sur­plus sacks.  These can be trans­formed into cork­boards, wal­lets, bags, weedblock/sheet mulch, homes for plants or styl­ish chair uphol­stery.  You could then par­tic­i­pate in a dif­fer­ent kind of under­ground econ­o­my with your very own pop-up shop (since when did we start say­ing ‘store’).

Pho­to cred­it: Mur­ray Lloyd Pho­tog­ra­phy