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.

Not much good will at Goodwill

On Sunday afternoon, my wife dropped off some boxes of children’s toys at the Goodwill store located at 5263 South Power Road in Mesa, Arizona.

These were items our daughters, now grown, had treasured and saved throughout their childhoods, items we’d spent the last two days digging out of various boxes in a hot garage.

My wife brought them inside for triage: she sorted them, washed off any that were dirty, then put all of the various pieces together into sets, making sure each set was complete.

We hoped that through a Goodwill store, these toys might bring the same kind of joy to someone else’s little girls that they’d brought to ours.

So after cleaning and organizing everything, she carefully packed the lot into some banker’s boxes, so they’d be easy for her to transport and easy for the folks at the store to handle.

She arrived at the store donation/drop-off area at about 5:40 PM. It wasn’t busy—she was the only person there. There were two people outside to receive donations. One of them, a dark-haired young man with a goatee or some kind of facial hair, came over to help her unload.

He took the first box out of the trunk and to her shock, hurled through the air, over a line of canvas hoppers full of clothing—to where it crashed to the concrete floor, by her estimate, some fifty feet away.

Toys and pieces of toys flew in all directions.

My wife was stunned. That box had contained a beautiful little plastic jewelry box in perfect condition, electronic toys we’d tested to make sure they all worked, and additional bags of miscellaneous plastic toys.

Alarmed, she asked him to be careful and explained she’d just spent hours cleaning and organizing those toys. He didn’t even give her the courtesy of an answer, although he grudgingly carried (and dropped) the rest of the boxes instead of throwing them.

She left the store in tears. When she got home, I asked her what was wrong. She told me “I can’t say or I’ll start crying again.”

We donate a lot of stuff to Goodwill, and have been doing so for years because we believe in its mission and the good work it (usually) does. When it’s clothing, we always make sure it’s in good, wearable condition. When it’s electronics, we test each piece to make sure everything is in working order. And when it’s toys, we always make sure they’re complete and intact, things a parent can buy for a child and neither of them will be disappointed. If something is broken or worn out, or if it’s simply not something we’d consider buying ourselves, we throw it away.

If that store didn’t want or need those toys, they could have said so and sent my wife to another store. We gladly would have taken them elsewhere and donated them to a church or a women’s shelter or some other charity where they would have been appreciated and, with luck, made a child or children happy.

Treating our donations with such callous disregard—essentially destroying them (and negating the hours of effort that went into getting them ready to donate)—with my wife standing right there was unconscionable and inexcusable.

Am I overreacting?

Well, the day before, she dropped off another carload of items at the Goodwill store located at 868 Gilbert Road, in Gilbert. It was mostly toys—including a big box of dolls and a few “See ‘N Says”—along with some girls’ clothing, and some small appliances (all tested and cleaned up). That place was busy when she arrived, with a number of other cars waiting in line. But she was still a little taken aback when the woman who came over to help unload said, “All of this sh*t?”

So you have to wonder: Is this how Goodwill regards our donations? If that’s all they mean to the people at the stores—things to throw and break, things to denigrate—then as of right now, we’re done making donations to Goodwill.

Their website says Goodwill "treat[s] all people with dignity and respect," but you wouldn’t know it by the treatment we received this past weekend.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve been trying to get in touch with someone at Goodwill of Central Arizona headquarters to discuss these incidents for the past two days. I’ve left multiple voice mails and talked to the woman who answers the phone there at least three times. There are more than a dozen people listed on their website as the “Leadership Team,” but each time I’ve called I was told no one was available to speak with me, and no one has followed up on my messages.

You'd think someone would want to address this insulting, seemingly incomprehensible behavior.