Donating your old items to a thrift store can be tricky, but the idea is that your items will get a second life. After the donation, it will be transferred to the new owner. But how do you prepare these things for reuse?
26 Valencia in San Francisco is a modest three-story warehouse that used to be an old shoe factory. Now endless donations to the Salvation Army are sorted here, and inside it's like a small town.
“Now we are at the unloading area,” Cindy Engler, public relations manager for The Salvation Army, tells me. We saw trailers full of trash bags, boxes, lanterns, stray stuffed animals - things kept coming and the place was noisy.
“So this is the first step,” she said. "It's taken off the truck and then sorted depending on which part of the building it's headed to for further sorting."
Engler and I went down into the depths of this huge three-story warehouse. Everywhere you go, someone sorts donations into hundreds of plastic machines. Each section of the warehouse has its own character: there's a library of five rooms with 20-foot-high bookshelves, a place where mattresses are baked in a giant oven to make sure they're safe for resale, and a place to store knick-knacks.
Engler walked past one of the carts. “Figurines, soft toys, baskets, you never know what's going on here,” she exclaims.
“It probably came yesterday,” Engler said as we passed people rummaging through piles of clothes.
“This morning we sorted them for tomorrow’s shelves,” Engler added, “we process 12,000 garments a day.”
Clothes that cannot be sold are placed in balers. The Baler is a giant press that grinds all unsellable clothes into bed-sized cubes. Engler looked at the weight of one of the bags: "This one weighs 1,118 pounds."
The bale will then be sold to others, who will likely use it for things like stuffing carpets.
“Thus, even torn and damaged objects have life,” Engler told me. “We make some things go very far. We appreciate every donation."
The building continues to be built, it looks like a labyrinth. There's a kitchen, a chapel, and Engler told me there used to be a bowling alley. Suddenly the bell rang - it was dinner time.
It's not just a warehouse, it's also a house. Warehouse work is part of the Salvation Army drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. Participants live, work and receive treatment here for six months. Engler told me that there are 112 men who eat three meals a day.
The program is free and funded by the profits of the store across the street. Each member has a full-time job, individual and group counseling, and a big part of that is spirituality. The Salvation Army refers to 501c3 and describes itself as "the evangelical part of the Universal Christian Church".
"You don't think too much about what happened in the past," he said. “You can look to the future and work towards your goals. I need to have God in my life, I need to relearn how to work, and this place taught me that.”
I walk across the street to the store. Things that once belonged to someone else now seem to be mine. I looked through the ties and found an old piano in the furniture department. Finally, at Cookware, I found a really nice plate for $1.39. I decided to buy it.
This plate went through many hands before it ended up in my bag. You could say army. Who knows, if I don't break him, he might end up here again.
Post time: Jul-21-2023