I worked on putting the batting and backing on a small quilt today. I've got it pinned and will finish it up tomorrow. Then I have another one waiting for me to do the same thing. It's kind of hard as my working area is limited. I stopped at noon and decided I wanted a Penny Saver Turkey Mighty Bite sandwich. I drove down there and picked up a Hit 5 ticket too. Then it was over to Safeway parking lot to eat it and people watch.
Things thrift store businesses wish you would stop donating:
Cassette tapes and players. These are garbage. We
literally cannot GIVE them away. Believe me, we've tried. VHS tapes won't sell
either, but people will at least take them off our hands. Cassettes just end up
in the trash.
Old, awful furniture. Guys. If your 15 year-old 300 pound
torn-up cat hair-covered and mysteriously but thoroughly stained futon was too
janky for you to want it around anymore, odds are good that no one else wants
it, either, and it's a whole lot of trouble for us to get rid of. And on the
subject of stained and hairy…
Horribly ripped, stained, hairy, or smelly clothes. You would not believe the amount of clothes we receive, and everyone claims that their clothes are great. For the most part, everyone is, at best, seeing their items through extremely rose-colored glasses, because we only keep about a quarter of what we get.
We don't have the time to wash and clean your clothes. If it's ripped and stained or covered in your pet hair, no one wants to pay money for it. No one. Homeless people won't even take it. Additionally, if your bag smells like cigarette smoke the second we open it, it doesn't matter the quality of the clothes. If we put any of that out, it'll gradually make the entire store smell awful. This being said, if you have clothes that aren't great, but decent, we do have folks who we'll send them on to for a small profit. They'll bale them all up and send them to disaster relief victims, which is awesome! However, I'm willing to bet those victims don't want your old stained underwear and single mismatched sock any more than we do. This isn't an episode of Survivor.
4. Mismatched dishes and old Tupperware. Any thrift store will tell you that we're absolutely drowning in dishes. Millennials aren't interested in their parents’ old china, even if it's a good set. NO ONE is interested in those three chipped plates and one bowl left over from the set you got as a wedding gift decades ago. If it's a single mug in good shape, that's fine. People will buy mugs. A single plate or bowl, however? That's a no-go. Same goes for scratched and/or dirty Tupperware. Good Tupperware flies off the shelves, but the scratched stuff goes straight in the garbage.
5. Old electronics. Folks, please, PLEASE do your
research on these! Some places WILL take them for recycling programs. Some will
not. When you dump your massive old TV that no one wants (partly because no one
can move it) on a store like the one I work for, you're forcing charitable
organizations to spend time and money to transport your electronics to where
you might have taken them in the first place. Help us out by being willing to
drive the extra mile! We sure appreciate it!
And this one:
Is there a celebrity you admire for something other than
what he is famous for?
Firstly, I admire him as a self-made success story. His
father abandoned the family when he was 2, leaving his mother to raise him and
his older brother on her own, often in abject poverty. He attended the
University of Maine on a scholarship, and during his time in college he lived
on the $5 a week that his mother could afford to send him. He also met his
wife, Tabitha, and their daughter Naomi was born in 1970, when King was 22 and
Tabitha, 21. Two years later their son Joe was born. King worked as a high
school English teacher, but his salary was not enough to provide for his
family, so he supplemented his income by working in an industrial laundry, and
wrote when he could in the cramped laundry room of the family's trailer home.
When he first started writing Carrie, he became stuck and tossed the manuscript
in the trash. Tabitha fished it out, read it, and encouraged him to keep
writing. It ended up being his first published novel, and finally the Kings
climbed out of poverty. (His youngest son Owen was born in 1977, rounding out
the family.) He has now sold over 350 million books and has an estimated net
worth of 400 million dollars. That’s a heck of a rags-to-riches story.
I also admire his philanthropy. He and his wife donate about
4 million dollars a year to local Maine libraries, fire departments, schools,
community sports programs, and several organizations that underwrite the arts.
Their charity, the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, ranks 6th among Maine
charities in giving, with an estimated 2.8 million dollars a year in grants
given, and in 2011, the foundation, through a Bangor radio station owned by the
Kings, matched listener donations to the tune of $70,000 to help pay the
heating bills of needy local families.
Too often, people become rich and famous and it changes them
for the worse. King is someone who is vastly successful - based entirely on his
own talent and efforts - yet has never forgotten where he came from, and has
used his success to help others in need. That to me is definitely something to
be admired.
And even though I've shown these before and after pictures before, I still enjoy looking at them. The F Street house where I lived in 1973-75 and how the area looks today. (click to enlarge)
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