Thursday, November 22, 2007

Poor Poor Kids

Hey, I nearly forgot to post tonight with all of this turkey excitement. Good thing I didn't, because I've got a weird one for you guys tonight.

We've all heard about the mass toy recall over the last few months. Most of these recalls are due to the plastic that the toys are made out of being laced with lead (If you haven't heard of this, you can check out a list of some of the toys that were recalled here). This massive toy recall has been a huge inconvenience to many consumers of Mattel products and other companies of similar nature. Further than that, one demographic is finding this more devastating than the parents who have to return little Billy's Batman figurine, and that's charity groups.

Charity groups like the Salvation Army take in box loads of donations daily. At the end of the donation time, staff members sort through clothes, dishes, appliances and crates upon crates of toys. Around Christmas time, this is usually a nice little trend for the groups but now with so many toys being recalled, sorting has become exponentially more tedious.

Because most of the donations given to the Salvation Army are second hand products, most do not come in their original packaging. For that reason, staff members can't just simply see the name of the model and check recall lists, they have to find serial numbers and other forms of i.d's on each toy and call the manufacturer to check. This has become quite the hassle to many of the charities and in response, some have chosen to not accept toy donations anymore.

The reason I felt that this semi-trivial story was worthy of telling you guys is this. These charities are some of the only ways some less fortunate children can get Christmas gifts this year. Many of these stores take toys off of their stock shelves and give them out for free to struggling tots during the holidays. Now that Goodwills and Salvation Armies aren't allowing toys in their stores, there are going to be a lot of disappointed little guys this holiday season.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's so sad. So many giftless children this Christmas :(