You bastard. Here is yet another reason that we usually donate to other agencies.
My husband wanted to drop off some garage litter at the Goodwill. The litter included toys, clothes, baby equipment and a computer monitor. He gets to the drop-off point and starts handing over the goodies. The toys go into the back of the truck. The high chair goes into the back of the truck. The clothes go into the back of the truck. The monitor goes next to the truck.
Okay, hubby thinks, he’s going to be very careful with the monitor and wrap it up when he has a chance.
Nope. As hubby is driving away, he sees the guy look around, pick up the monitor and put it over by his own vehicle. It is my assumption that he is snagging the monitor for himself.
You prick. I want to call and report you. My husband feels that the last laugh will be on the worker, as the monitor is useless to him due to some outdated connector issue that I don’t understand. So what? I am still so pissed.
Happened to my family when we were dropping off our huge, old, dead Sony TV at the Goodwill truck. As we were pulling away, a car pulled up and loaded it!
We figured all it was good for was an end table, anyhow (maybe a fishtank?). But we were shocked too!
So what’s the use in giving it to Goodwill? Throw the monitor out with the rest of your trash. You aren’t getting a receipt and claiming a useless monitor as a tax decuction, are you? :dubious:
I was told to donate it, regardless of condition, because they may be able to use it in their vocational training, or recondition it to be usable again. But for the average joe, it shouldn’t work.
A friend used to work for the local children’s hospital thrift shop. She told me that the woman in charge of that particular shop would go through all the kid’s clothes, for example, take out all the nice things and take them home with her to give out to people she knew. She even tried to get my friend to take things home for her children.
Hello? I could give away my kid’s nice things to all and sundry or sell them on ebay, but I donate them specifically to help raise money for the hospital and give people of lower incomes a chance to buy good quality, attractive clothes for their children. Both of which are defeated by you making off with the donations, you empty headed bitch. Argh.
Yup. I just acquired a Sinclair 16K RAM pack on that basis.
On the other hand, there are some unbelievable fuckers out there. I just spent a couple of months working in a charity shop, and in just one week we had four shoplifters and someone stole the collecting tin from the desk while we were busy. Who the fuck steals from a charity that raises money for sick and abused children?
Since you have concerns (and they may well be valid - I don’t know the procedures- there may be reasons they set more fragile things to the side), call the main office for your local Goodwill. My brother essentially (he doesn’t have the title, but he has the responsibility) runs a local Goodwill organization, and he would want to know about concerns like this. Make sure you know the location of the drop off, and the date - that will let them identify the worker manning the facility at that time.
If the man at the drop off location was following procedures, you should be told that. And if not, they’ll want to know - because at that point it becomes a matter of theft (in my opinion, at least).
Someone gave me a 21" monitor when they were super expensive. It was fixed-frequency and used BNC connectors. AFAIK, that means 5 separate coax cables. There are such video cards for PCs but I didn’t know it. (7-8 years ago)
Wow, really? I live in a tiny town (12,000 or so) and our Goodwill probably has at least a dozen monitors, all priced between $10 and $20. I even bought one a couple months ago when using a hand me down before buying my Dell.
If we have them, I can’t imagine why anyone else wouldn’t.
Modern computer technology (monitors included) is full of lovely heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and copper. If the Goodwill can’t get rid of the old gear (unlikely, but this is a geek talking here ;)), they’ll be stuck with stuff they can’t exactly pitch in the local dumpster. And, as The Devil’s Grandmother said, it can cost money to recycle the stuff, probably because the plant needs to follow environmental and workers’ safety regulations related to the aforementioned metals.
Plus, monitors can carry a pretty damned hefty wallop in terms of stored voltage. I don’t care how long the capacitors are `supposed’ to be able to hold a charge, it’s simply good practice to treat them as live.
All of that said, you might be able to sell the stuff for a song yourself by putting up fliers in likely places. Then you can donate the money to the charity of your choice.
A newspaper columnist here got suspicious about a holiday food bank donation box at a local supermarket after she saw a box of organic, buy-it-only-at-a-specialty-shop stuff on the shelf of this lower end grocery store and had donated that very same product to the food bank donation box. So she brought in a bunch of canned foods and a few non-perishables and put them in the donation box.
The next day she returned to the store, to check the store’s shelves, sure enough, the items on the bottom of which she had drawn her initials with a magic marker were now on the shelves, having been removed from the donation bin.
:mad:
Lesson learned folks – donate your food drive stuff to the actual food bank.
I usually donate clothes to a local womens recovery center, and I will continue to do so. They let the women choose what they need (many are there straight out of jail), then sell the rest in their own resale boutique.
This was a spur-of-the-moment donation, and it will be the last.
I remember being pissed like this over accusations of funds mismanagement by the Red Cross after 9/11/01, which had me resolved to donate only blood to that organization.