Are there any "Free Stores" in your city?

[enree erzweglle]

Someone here suggested that I watch Morgan Spurlock's "30 Days" (on TV) and I did. I've enjoyed all of the episodes, but the one about living on minimum wage (or close to minimum wage) for 30 days was particuarly well done and insightful.

In that episode, Spurlock mentioned how the city where they were set up for that month (Columbus, Ohio, I think) had a "free store," which is a store and everything in it is donated and is free for others to take if they need it. The store had clothes, blankets, kitchenware, furniture, etc. It looked like they even offered free delivery on furniture as well.

I've never heard of a free store before. Do other cities have them? How do they work? Like do shoppers have to prove eligibility and are stores like that state run? I have never heard of this concept and I'm curious about it.

Do you have free stores in your city?

(I'm not talking about Salvation Army types of stores or Goodwill. I'm talking about stores where everything in them is completely free. I suspect that the free store in this episode was not state run but was maybe sponsored by local charities or a church. It was set up in what looked like an old department store, so it had that Goodwill feel to it and it really felt like the people in the store were shopping.)

If you do have a store like that in your city or are familiar with the one from Columbus, please tell me more about it. (I couldn't find anything about this through Google but it's probably just that I did faulty searches.)

If you do have these stores in your city, I'd love to have the names of them and any contact information that you can find. Thanks so much.