Milestone 5 - Scenarios - Lisa Wharton
Lisa is now cleaning rooms for her two daughters who are now freshman and sophomore at Princeton and Penn State University. There are too many things in their rooms, such as clothes, shoes, bags, lots of textbooks, and an old wooden desk and chair in each. She wants to donate them to Salvation Army, a thrift store five miles away from her house, but she is not sure whether the store accepts all of those items. The last time she donated, Salvation Army said they did were not accepting swimming suits during the winter, which was frustrating because she had to drive to the ReUse Center, a recycling organization that Salvation Army suggested she go to. She didn't want to spend time and money driving to other places, so she just threw them away in the garbage in front of Salvation Army.
Although Lisa donates frequently, she has only shopped at a thrift store once. She went there with one of her daughters while she was still a high school student. Though she thinks it is a good place to find valuable treasures at low prices, she does not like the place at all; she prefers new, high quality things instead of old, broken second-hand items. She also has a bad impression of thrift stores: not organized, old and dirty, and a place for the poor to shop.
But donating to thrift stores makes her feel good, so she decides to be smarter about it this time - she tries to call the Salvation Army first to see whether they accept the items she wants to donates. When she googles for the Salvation Army phone number, she's very surprised to find that there are many more thrift stores and consignment stores than she knew - she's actually only familiar with Salvation Army. While finding the phone number for Salvation Army, she comes across a website to tell people where to donate and what! That is a useful service to her, and means she doesn't have to call the thrift stores herself.
So she clicks on the link excitedly. There are many categories for her to choose. Since her daughters mainly had old clothes, she clicks on Apparel, and then the T-shirts subcategory. There are ten thrift stores which accept clothes so, it would probably be fine to take her daughters' clothes to donate. Then she wants to make sure they accept wooden chairs. She clicks on furniture and then chairs, and finds that only three stores accept chairs: Salvation Army, PTO, and Kiwanis. It's good news to her that Salvation Army accepts chairs since she knows it best. When she moves the mouse to the links of other stores, a window pops up and lists the address, phone number, and open hours in detail, and even a Google map! She noticed that PTO is not far from her home, so next time she might give it a try.
The website piques her interest to find more second-hand stuff on-line. "I need a lamp in the living room," she thinks, so she tries using the item-finding system offered by the website to find "lamps"; it turns out that many thrift stores generally sell lamps. When she moves the mouse on the links to the stores, she can see the contact information and map again. Again, she notices that Salvation Army has lamps, too, but she would prefer one with a blue lampshade. She clicks on the "Submit a Detailed Request" button to send a request to the local thrift stores and describes in detail that she'd like to find a fine-quality lamp with a blue lampshade. "It's easy," she thinks to herself, but she's skeptical of whether she'll get a reply. Even so, she specifies that she would like to know the answer within 3 days.
To her surprise, the very next day Lisa received an email from Treasure Hunter. It says that Salvation Army has an item which is very similar to Lisa's description, and they will hold the lamp for her for two days. Lisa is free that day so she takes her daughters' old stuff and drives to the store a few hours after she gets the email. This time she has a better experience donating things since they accept everything she brings. Then she asks a staff in the store about the item she requested. The staff takes the lamp out of a room and hand it to her; she can't believe it looks exactly like what she wants! What's more, she only spent nine dollars for an almost-new lamp! She thanks the staff at Salvation Army and drives home satisfied.