Reality Check

[billeyler]

Today is the annual ARC (Assoc of Retarded Citizens) mass pickup of clothing and household articles. They had left a card on the door that we can leave donated goods in front of the house by 8am and they would all be picked up today. I always support them when I can.

So Danny and I had sorted out what turned out to be 5 large bags of old clothing, towels, drapes, coats and such, as well as all the unused household articles from our major cleanup of the storage room last week. I woke pre-dawn and carted it all out of the house by 6:30, and labeled it for ARC pickup.

At 6:55am, Danny looked out the front window and said, "Oh, they're already here!". Turns out there were scavengers stealing the stuff. 4 bags of the clothing and towels made it into their SUV before I shooed the woman off.

Some people...we were fuming, but we can't sit in front of the house guarding the stuff all day.

Driving to work through our neighborhood, I saw a bunch of folks had left charitable goods out, but most of the piles looked like someone had already picked through them by 7:45am.

Sigh.

Comments

[rifesterich.livejournal.com]

I live just two or three blocks (depending on how you count blocks in Chicago) away from The Brown Elephant which is the donated goods store for the Howard Brown Clinic. People are always leaving stuff outside the door after hours, and when I go by it seems the bags of stuff have been picked through before they get into the store.

I wonder WHY people do this: are they too poor to buy inside? A nice suit goes for $20! Any shirt for $2.00 and a pair of pants for $6. You have to be pretty poor to not be able to pay that much for clothing. Or are these just vultures? I've never seen the people picking through the bags outside the door so I don't know what to think. If they're poor and living in their cars or something like that, well that's one thing. But if they're stealing someone else's charity that's pretty scummy.

What did these ladies look like?

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

We're thinking that since Latisha ran back to a fairly recent model SUV, that she and her driver partner were probably going to take them to the local flea market and sell them. Woo. 30 towels and a bunch of pre-worn clothes.