Every 3 or 4 months, every house in my neighborhood gets a flyer and an empty plastic bag attached to the door, seeming put there by a volunteer while everybody is away at the office. The flyer says something to the effect of “We are a charity that gives away shoes to poor people in developing nations, tomorrow one of our trucks will be in your neighborhood. Please put any used shoes you would like to donate into this bag and we’ll pick it up.”
Is this for real? I’m pretty sure it’s a scam, just because it is so different from other charitable giving pitches. Consider, there is no way to get a receipt to claim against taxes. I have three ideas of what’s really going on.
Some guy collects all these shoes and then donates them to a real charity (like the Red Cross or something) then takes a huge tax deduction for it.
It’s a way to determine who is predisposed to fall for scams. The houses with shoes left out front can then be targeted later with “i just need a few dollars for gas” type scams.
It’s a way to determine who is out of town. The houses which still have the flyer stuck to the door can be targeted later for burglary. Also, the criminal can case the neighborhood while he has ready excuse for being on peoples’ front porch.
It has some generic sounding charity name, which I unfortunately don’t recall. I just toss the thing in the recycles and forget it. The most recent one was a week ago and it just occurred to me today to ask you all. Next time I intend to look it up.
Both look awfully shoestring (pun intended), and neither charitywatch.org nor charitynavigator list them. However lots of charities seem to be collecting shoes for developing nations, so it’s likely that the need, at least, is real.
I doesn’t sound very scammy to me.
If someone was really casing the neighborhood why bother with flyers AND plastic bags? Sound kind of expensive. Why not just bogus flyers?
I doubt you can really write off that much for used shoes. I think the limit for charitable donation tax deductions on clothing is pretty low.
And I think the correlation between people who would leave old shoes out for charity and those who would fall for other scams would be low. Smart people are pretty protective about their money, not so protective about an old pair of shoes.
If you hung around the next day to see the truck that comes to pick them up I’m sure the driver would be happy to tell you where the shoes are going.
I know I’ve herad somewhere, possibly here on the SDMB, that many people have a weird idea of charity – ad this is one of the no-nos: used shoes? The cost of collecting, cleaning, sorting, repairing what is reparable, discarding what isn too worn to use, then shipping to another country, likely one with less than optimal infrastructure – that’s just so not worth it. Really, like the O.P. alarm bells go off forr me at the premise. You want cash to buy new shoes with, sure that at least makes sense.
[EDIT]
Aha, read the links posted. Yes, second hand children shoes – likely grown out of before worn out. Yes. That makes sense. But adult shoes? Maybe. If some wall street exec has to discard perfectly good shoes because they don’t math the power suit. But … does someone in Africa want a slightly used wingtip?
To be fair, I did once give shoes to Good Will. They were safety-toed shoes, that I had bought the wrong size. I’m sure they came in handy for some workman. But I’ve seen my and friend’s shoe closets – yesh, a rancid pack of worn fabric and leather. Shudders to think of giving that to someone.
On the other hand, Nike has a shoe-recycling program where the shoes are ground up and used for rubber mulch in playgrounds, to pad falls. Since it’s domestic and the quality of the shoes doesn’t matter, that seems a lot more plausible to me.
One thing that happens a lot here in the UK is for a company to leave plastic sacks and flyers asking you to fill them up with old clothes and other unneeded tat.
Now the logo on the sacks and flyers make it seem like they are from the NSPCC or similar legit charity. But look closer and you’ll find a tiny disclaimer which says something to the effect of
“For every ton of clothes collected we donate £75 to the NSPCC, anything over that is our profit…little Johnny needs new calipers? screw him, I’ve got a BMW to buy. Little Lisa needs a trip to Disneyland before popping her clogs? sorry, Tuscan Villa swimming pools don’t buy themselves you know.”
Admittedly, the disclaimer may not use that exact turn of phrase but you get the picture. Duplicitous scum, and I don’t often get chance to say that and really mean it.
I dunno, I’ve worked with some women that went through shoes like nobody’s business. They’d give away shoes that had never been worn, or only worn a couple of times, to make room for new shoes.
That said, we’ve had similar donation boxes here for several years. Book donations, clothing donation, shoe donations. I was suspicious because they didn’t list a charity name.
Sure enough, it’s a scam like previously mentioned. They take the stuff people give them and sell it, then donate a token amount to charity so they can claim they’re taking charitable donations.
I worked in a local charity shop last year during a period of unemployment - we would never turn away donations of clothing, even if the items were completely unsaleable - they would just be bagged up for collection by ‘the textile man’ once a week - he paid quite decent money for bagged assorted textiles. Shoes were bagged separately, as were handbags and luggage items, but they were all collected at the same time, and all paid for quite handsomely.
The itemswere apparently destined for developing countries, but I expect some sorting would have happened at a depot this side, picking out obviously valuable items for auction or selling on to vintage clothing sellers, etc. Anything else would be exported for sale, repair and re-use, or recycling somewhere in Africa, I expect.
So there certainly are cases out there where charities legitimately get interested in second hand shoes - in fact most local recycling centres here have shoe banks owned by Oxfam, the Salvation Army or some other charity.
There is an organization called Planet Aid that maintains clothing donation boxes all over Washington DC and presumably other cities as well. The boxes are meant to give the impression that this is a charity, but in fact they resell the donated clothes and use the proceeds (millions of dollars) to fund a cult in Denmark.
It may be somewhat deceptive, but I wouldn’t completely dismiss the value of this model. The organization is doing the work to keep what can be kept out of landfills, out of landfills. They are selling used goods at (presumably) used goods prices, which enhances the competitiveness of the market. The availability of used goods for purchase does benefit low-income people.
There are only so many volunteers who are willing to sort through the dreck that is donated clothes to provide the usable portion for free to the neediest in society. A model in which some people earn wages or profits for providing sorted used goods to recyclers or used-goods markets may still be better than what most people would actually do with their used clothes and shoes (hold onto them forever, throw them out).
That may be so, but we have Goodwill, Salvation Army, and numerous local churches that do the same things, without skimming the vast majority off for their own pockets.
I know that Goodwill, at least, uses paid employees and gives them job training and experience (that’s their primary mission).
From what I’ve heard, the dropboxes are cutting heavily into donations for actual charities.
I do wonder why every dropbox I’ve seen seems to be scammers. Have the legit charities considered trying this model?
This is the owner of the UPS store I used to ship the Christmas gifts to my sister. I didn’t know he was collecting shoes or I would have brought some. Instead, I gave him $20. At the time, I think his goal was to collect 50,000 pairs of shoes before the spring collection. I don’t remember where the shoes were originally supposed to be going.
So, yes…it is probably real. People really do collect used shoes.
In my area of the US, we do have Goodwill dropboxes. Mostly at Goodwill sites for use during off hours, but I think they have a couple of other locations.
The more entrepreneurial, less charitable organizations seem to put their boxes in more convenient locations. They will also sometimes partner with churches, paying some amount (a percentage, or maybe rent) to be able to locate the box there. I do think charities with long, stable track records adopting the same user-friendly collection methods would ultimately prevail.
But those user-friendly methods would probably add to Goodwill’s overhead, and the “entrepreneurial” groups could improve their track record of outcomes, so it could just be moving toward a new equilibrium.
I would not think of a scam or of a tax receipt the first thing when hearing “charity collects clothing/ shoes from houses by driving by”, but rather, the stories about the disastrous effects of used 2nd hand clothing from Europe sent to Africa had in the 90s, which is why people here are told to only donate used clothes to approved charities like the Red Cross or refugee aid here.
Basically, the problem was that people thought their used clothes would help some poor African child, when - after the sorting, when some clothes were simply given to 2nd hand clothes store here in Europe, and some only fit to be made into rags - the clothes were dumped on the African market, and because they were very cheap (but not free!), it crashed the carefully built-up market of local ethnic wear, that aid org. had spent years trying to build up (by giving people courses in sewing, credit to buy a sewing machine, and tell them that buying homemade ethnic prints was better for them than that cheap European crap).
Therefore, we only give used clothes to specific charities that will use the clothes in our country: to give to homeless people (like Goodwill, I think) or for newly arrived refugees / asylum seekers, or special stores for poor people.
I would apply similar for shoes. Don’t send shoes all the way to Africa. Send money to Africa to buy shoes there. Give shoes to poor people in the neighborhood or to charities that help those.
My office collected 500 pairs of shoes last Christmas. A local chiropractor was doing a mass collection in the area, and taking them to Haiti. So yes, shoe collections/donations really do happen.
