BTW, about the new blog header...

That's a July 4, 1912 photo, looking west up Chestnut Street from near Main Street in my old home town of Stillwater, Minnesota. And yes, I'm in it, over on the right.

Showing a little more good will at Goodwill

I had a lot to say about a pair of surprising and unfortunate encounters my wife had at a couple of local Goodwill stores while making some donations last week. On Wednesday, I finally got a call from a guy named Dan Kellett. He’s not listed on the Goodwill of Central Arizona “Leadership Team” on their website, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If he's not in the management or PR departments, he should be.

While there was nothing he could do to roll back the clock on Kathleen’s bad experiences, he was plenty reassuring that nothing like what happened to my wife would happen again. He told me GoCA was investigating what had happened and apologized profusely.

I naturally accepted, and told him there wasn’t really anything we wanted from Goodwill, beyond that reassurance. We’ve generally had good experiences with the organization and have been longtime donors and customers, so I appreciated him taking the time to call and talk with me about what happened. I was satisfied that the employees at the two stores in question would be given some additional training on customer relations, and told him I wasn’t out to get anyone fired or anything like that.

Turns out that the last isn’t my call. Dan explained to me that intentionally (or even recklessly) destroying property belonging to Goodwill (which is what that smashed box of toys was, since it belonged to Goodwill the moment we turned it over to a store employee) obviously is against company policy.

Dan said he planned to pull the video from the security cameras at that store and see if any of them captured the incident. Then the store manager and/or HR folks at GoCA will make a decision about the extent of any disciplinary action that might be warranted.

He also offered us a gift card, which we turned down--we're on the donating side, not looking to get anything out of this--and said that if Kathleen has any concerns about returning to either store with additional donations, to call him and he’d meet her there and personally unload her car! I told him that wouldn’t be necessary either, but he gave me his personal cell phone number and told me I could call “any time, 24/7” if we had any additional problems with Goodwill.

Anyhow, very classy guy and we very much appreciate his response.

And we will be donating more stuff to Goodwill, although maybe nothing breakable until we’re certain word has trickled down to the folks working the donation areas. For the time being, that stuff will go out via Freecycle, where we can put it directly into the hands of someone who wants and will appreciate it.