Seriously. You could do this with a $4 boxed cake mix. They crank that stuff out in such volume that no single consumer is wasting any appreciable amount of food by baking one cake intended to be destroyed, and it’s not like the baby’s gonna have a gourmand’s discerning palate and turn their nose up at Duncan Hines.

Let’s focus the harping on tacky and lethal gender reveal parties, and let people give their one year old a freaking cake to mess around with. 

Yes.  This article is truly ridiculous. 

I am confused by this article as a whole... like people spend millions of dollars creating restaurants just so Hannahsleigh can pose on the nearest wicker egg chair by a “Zebra Shot with an Arrow” wallpaper for everyone to see. But if its a baby, being celebrated on its first birthday with a photoshoot, surrounded by…

Yeah, this is definitely a “how dare people celebrate life events” piece.

I don’t know if you are wrong but you aren’t alone.

I commented above...I’m a photographer and I do these shoots all the time. The overwhelmingly majority of parents do this just to see the kids reaction - whatever that reaction may be. If they eat it, or dive in or not is not really ever an issue. I’ve had maybe a handful of parents get really upset that the kid…

To have your cake and destroy it too is to parade the fact that such a luxury is disposable, as beautiful and sometimes expensive birthday cakes are made into babies’ playthings in smash cake photoshoots.

I’m with you. My sibs and I all had smash cakes. My brother (40) had cookie monster, I (39) had big bird, and my sisters (35, twins) had little lambs.

Do people consider this a new thing? I’m almost 40 and this has been a normal part of my family tradition since before I was born, I’ve seen pictures of my dad and his smash cake on his 1st birthday. I think the new part is parents paying a ridiculous amount of money for a photo shoot. Seems like a waste of money, but…

Agreed. I liked this article for the history and context, but I don’t have a problem with dressing up, curating, and reselling. I have a good friend who has launched her own small business doing this and loves it, and other friends who rehabilitate furniture otherwise meant for the junkyard. No law against being…

Lmao. Really!? I am a poor and I can’t approve that message. I go into abandoned houses and trailers in my own neigborhood and find stuff sometimes. If I restored and sold some of it am I a monster?

The price of most everything has gone up in the last 20 years, but wages haven’t kept up. What you’re describing isn’t a thrift store issue; it’s a wage issue.

Also this: “There is little evidence that suggests thrift shop prices are uniformly rising in response to secondhand clothing trends.” That should’ve been the end of the article. 

Absolutely yes. The people tagging look stuff up now and price accordingly. I’m sure stuff still slips through but not like it did even 5 or 10 years ago.

In the Before Times, our local Goodwill stores had these HUGE, once a year blowout sales of all the shiny, sequined, boa-ed stuff they’d had donated over the year--it’s basically Black Friday but for terrific sequined smoking jackets. Professional thrifters treat this as their wedding day and Christmas combined. They…

I feel like EVERYTHING is “ambitiously hyperbolic clickbait nonsense” these days. It’s exhausting. 

“Thrift store gentrification describes the phenomenon of affluent shoppers who voluntarily buy merchandise from second-hand clothing stores like Goodwill and Salvation Army. When those same shoppers resell that merchandise on Depop or Poshmark at significantly higher prices, the prices at thrift stores then rise to…

Wouldn’t that affect primarily people who thrift shop not out of necessity, but out of preference? In your area, are you saying there are no usable clothes that aren’t snatched up, or that all of the desirable clothes are snatched up?

This is dumb. I assume next they’ll claim antiquing is “garage sale gentrification.”