Safari
The Safari is an organized event designed to allow customers and volunteers organized and supervised access to purchase items from the warehouse. It came as a response to a few issues:
- Volunteers were wanting to purchase things they found while working in the warehouse
- Customers were wanting to purchase things that weren't in the store, but that we were recycling in abundance
- Workers in all areas were getting overburdened with the above requests.
So in early 2009, it was proposed to designate one, set time for customers to gather in the Thrift Store for a "Safari."
Currently the Safari embarks from the Thrift Store promply at 3:00 pm on Wednesdays. It lasts as long as need be, up to one hour.
This event is not widely advertised; it is explicitly not mentioned on our website or in print. It is solely a word-of-mouth affair, primarily designed to offer staff and volunteers a clear answer other than "no" when they are encountered with a request to buy some shiny, silly thing "from the back." If its popularity continues to grow, other arrangements will need to be made, such as adding additional times/days, adding supervision, setting a cap on number of participants, or other measures to ensure safe, controlled functioning of the event.
The Safari will be of interest to artists, roboticists, people searching for oddball items that are below our criteria for reuse (laptop docking stations, printer parts, broken vacuum cleaners, etc.). People are allowed some time/space/tools for basic disassembly, but if the work is too fussy, the person will be sold the entire item, and asked to promise to bring all unused materials back to the Geek for proper recycling.
Due to unmanageable demand and safety concerns, laptop parts are no longer available on Safari. As of July, 2009, we are making laptop parts available through the Scraptop Bazaar, an offshoot of Safari. Tuesdays at 3pm, to-be-recycled laptop parts are made available for sale through the store for an hour, before they are taken back to the warehouse for recycling. (The first day of this will be July 14, 2009 and will actually happen at 4pm. Future events will be at 3. sorry for the confusion).
Items are priced based on the value of the commodity (estimated scrap value) plus a nominal surcharge for the pain-in-the-but tax (just enough to make it worth our while to continue).
All blame for this event may be heaped on Tonyc.