Sunday, October 28, 2007

Cube Wisdom -- On Charitable Giving

When you spend most of your life planted in a cube farm, you get to overhear stunning snippets of wisdom, such as this:

Fashionable Person, speaking to another Fashionable Person: "I need to get some old clothes out of my closet, but I don't like donating things to the Salvation Army. Do you know what they do with all the clothes people donate to them?"

The answer, in a loud whisper, as if revealing outrageous secret: "THEY SELL THEM! They take what people GIVE to them and turn around and sell it in their store!"
OMG, I feel so used. How dare they take my worn out jeans and sell them for 50 cents to make money for their programs!

2 comments:

Random Michelle K said...

Well... to be honest, I kinda feel the same way. I know it isn't a secret though.

Thing is, there are programs in town that give away the items they receive and still manage to run holiday food drives. So compared to that, SA doesn't come across so great.

But maybe it's just me, and my bias against religious prostelization.

S said...

Perhaps I'm in the minority on this one -- that definitely wouldn't be a first ;)

Almost all of my experience with the SA came from a different part of the state, where to my limited knowledge, it was one of or the only such organization (that took donations of clothing, etc., and also did programs to help needy people in the region). So when we had things that we no longer needed, it became a habit to drop things off there.

But you're right, here in town there is another organization that takes clothes and gives them away. When I donate clothes here, that's where I take things (the staff just seems friendlier), but usually I drag them all the way back to my homeland and donate them to the SA there. For some reason...habit, I suppose.