Thrift stores frustrated with dumpers

Charity-run thrift stores are always looking for donations, but shops in St. Albert have been dealing with a lot of unwanted items lately.

On Monday morning, volunteers and employees at the LoSeCa Foundation arrived to their Carnegie Drive headquarters — home to both their day programs for adults with developmental disabilities and their I’m Unique Thrift Store — to find a load of garbage dumped on their front step.

“It was just broken tables — just stuff that, out of the whole thing, I probably pulled five things out we could even use in the store,” said store manager Sharon Baker.

“The biggest thing was that we have an electric gate, and they piled it across the electric gate. There are other businesses in this complex, and they could not even get in to work. … I normally get Mondays off, and I had to come in, just to clean. The first thing I was looking for was names and addresses, because I was going to press charges.”

Aside from that, though, the mess prevented buses and taxi cabs from getting to the door of the foundation and dropping off clients. Even then, some clients had to be pulled out of programs to help with the cleanup.

“When you work with these individuals, they like to have everything on a schedule, so to be disrupted like that puts a damper on their day, as well as their staff’s, because then the staff has to calm them down,” Baker said. “It’s very stressful for them; one was almost in tears.”

This is not a new phenomenon for the store, however; Baker said that situations like this occur almost every Monday morning throughout the summer.

“A couple of weeks ago, it was the same thing, but we had had people who had rifled through the stuff, so it was all over the parking lot,” she said. “There was broken glass and that — it’s a hazard to other people working here.”

This time of year is particularly bad for dumping, Baker added, with items that can’t be sold at garage sales around town finding their way to the foundation’s front step.

LoSeCa’s website, located at www.loseca.ca, provides a list of items that their thrift store does not accept as donations, which includes mattresses, televisions and barbecues.

Meanwhile, across town at the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Tudor Glen Place, assistant manager Susan Kwak said dumping is a problem they deal with on an almost daily basis.

“Most people, if they know it’s something we don’t take, they don’t even walk in the door. They just dump it outside when we’re not looking and run,” she said.

Kwak said it’s frustrating, especially when items are dumped after hours and people have a chance to pick through the items before they are taken in.

“Scavengers come through and scatter it all across the parking lot, break the glass and all the rest of it,” she said.

For both the Salvation Army and LoSeCa, the cost of hauling away garbage eats away at their bottom line and, ultimately, at the amount of help they can provide their clients.

“We pay for our garbage pickup … Mondays especially are bad, because we’re closed on Sundays. So we’re probably doing two or three dumps on a Monday of our dumpster,” Kwak said, adding that any money made at the store goes toward family services at the Salvation Army church on Liberton Drive. But that’s also where the money for garbage pickup has to come from.

Other charities that collect used items also say dumping is a problem, although their situations are not quite as dire as the thrift stores’.

“For us, it’s not a huge deal. It’s just something we’ve learned to deal with. It’s to be expected,” said Katie Ostler, a spokesperson for the Alberta/Northwest Territories chapter of the Canadian Diabetes Foundation, whose Clothesline program has collected clothes and shoes at dropboxes around the country — including two in St. Albert — for more than a quarter-century.

Still, the stores say they’re happy to take items off people’s hands, so long as they’re the right items delivered at the right time.

“It’s not that we don’t want donations,” Kwak said. “If you can do it during regular hours and make sure it’s something sellable, then we’re happy to have it.”