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