Does tradition limit acts of philanthropy?

This winter there have been a string of reports about retailers that destroy unsold merchandise rather than donating such items to local charities.   Brand new clothes from H&M and Wal-Mart wound up slice and diced, then left at the curb for garbage pick up.  H&M quickly responded to the attention, promising it would never happen again.  Then employees of Borders Books made public the destruction of what totals up to 1 billion unsold books per year when they spoke up about what was to become of leftover books after the closing of 200 Walden Bookstores.  (Covers are torn off and returned to the publisher for a refund, while the rest of the tomes are tossed in the trash.  Roughly twenty to forty percent of published books wind up dumpstered every year as a standard business practice of publishing houses dating back to the 1930s.)

It’s not as though there is a shortage of alternate disposal methods that could benefit society.  Last month, the NYTimes covered the New York Clothing bank, which distributes $10 million worth of clothing donated by retailers and designers each year to over 80,00o needy individuals.  Feeding America supplies food banks with grocery overstock. DonorsChoose is one of many nonprofits that could help book retailers and publishers match their unsold stock with underfunded school districts and classrooms, like Ms. P’s, which needs 64 copies of Tony Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Doesn’t it make you wonder how many other businesses are letting perfectly good products go to waste? Excess inventory should never wind up in a dumpster when so many families and children are in need.  Thirty-nine percent of children (29 million) live in poverty in the United States and 1 in 8 Americans reach out to food banks to try to keep their families fed.

And you have to wonder how many businesses are changing the protocols for end of season leftovers or irregular products because no one at the company has even decided to question the status quo?   It’s just easier to keep on keeping on the way things have always been than to reconsider the current model and possibly create more work in rendering a more equitable and efficient system.

Thus I direct you to a great story about five monkeys;  traditions (workplace and otherwise) don’t always serve a meaningful purpose.  Sometimes just asking “why” will help move you in a better direction.

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