The Salvation Army Thrift Store in Williams Lake appreciates the community’s generosity however, store manager Eric Christensen is hoping to focus this generosity a bit.
Christensen wants to confine donations to within the store’s open hours, which are Monday to Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Most of those six days he says staff are even still around until 5:30 p.m., extending these hours for donations.
“We are so grateful for the donations that we receive at our thrift store - without them we would not be able to fund our various programs in the community,” said Christensen, who explained 100 per cent of the proceeds from the thrift store go towards the organization’s local programs which include the food bank, drop-in centre, and addictions programs.
They also give away over $30,000 in vouchers each year for those in need to purchase goods at the store.
As the manager of the store for the past year, Christensen has been working hard to try and deal with the time-consuming challenge of cleaning up scattered, picked through and damaged donations left at the store outside of open hours.
“I feel bad, I don’t want people to not donate,” explained Christensen to the Tribune on April 26. “It’s just a mess.”
While he knows the intent of the donors is to support the community, “unfortunately, donations left unattended outside are stolen or thrown all over the parking lot, being damaged.”
During his tenure, Christensen has placed donation bins outside of the store, but these are also being accessed by people who pick through and pull out items. He also put up a large sign outside the door, asking people to only donate during store hours, and the bins are cleared out first thing in the morning and before the store closes for the night each day, but still people are leaving donations unattended.
The impact goes beyond the time and effort for staff to clean up the mess and any losses of donated items, it is also impacting neighbouring businesses.
Donations are often scattered much farther than the Salvation Army parking lot, and so Christensen gets calls from nearby businesses to come and clean up the mess left in other parking areas and the back alley.
He estimates staff spends about 30 minutes every day to clean up the mess left by scavenged through donations.
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