Please No After Hour Dumping

We have had a few people dropping items off after hours. We appreciate your donations, but please do not leave them after hours. We have a problem with feral cats in the area. They spray the items and they are then useless to us and we have to pay to dispose of them. The higher costs of disposing of these items takes away from our food budget! Please, we have very needy people relying on us to provide them with food, so please bring your good, sellable, clean donations to us during our open hours.

Illegal dumping has happened as well. Large items have been dropped off when we are closed. Most of the larger items are not sellable. They are dirty, ripped, water logged and smelly. Our security cameras recently caught two women and a man in a mini-van leaving off a large couch in this condition. We had to pay to have it removed and the cost to do so was the equivalent of 270 pounds of food. A past boardmember who is now an employee took a snap shot of the offender off the security camera and placed it in the window. Many of our loyal neighbors and customers are not happy with the people who did this, and we agree with them. Dumping is occurring at several other non-profits as well, and at businesses who have drop boxes to benefit the needy, the costs of removing the items is rising for them, too. We have our property posted asking people not to leave things after hours and for police to take notice. Please adhere to this policy. If costs to remove these items keep going up, I am afraid that we will have to raise prices in our thrift store to accomodate the costs and we do not want to have to do that with the economy the way it is. We have not raised our prices since May of 2006 accept for books and cards. So if you know someone, or if you are one who has dumped off these bad items, please stop doing it.

The Board of Directors thank you in advance for understanding about this. And we thank you for your support throughout the years.