Donations stream in as thrift store plans to reopen after lifting of coronavirus order
Cars pulled into an empty parking lot and continued along the side of the Idaho Youth Ranch store at 250 N. Orchard St. in Boise.
A steady stream of donors brought clothing, tables and other home furnishings for the thrift store, which has been closed since Gov. Brad Little issued his March 25 stay-home order that mandated the closing of nonessential businesses.
That order is set to expire at the end of Thursday. The Youth Ranch is planning to reopen its 24 stores across Idaho on Friday.
“We are thrilled to be having our stores back open to the public,” CEO Scott Curtis said in an interview Wednesday at the Orchard Street store. “These stores provide support for all of our other work throughout the state: therapeutic services, mental health and our residential center.”
Other retail stores will be allowed to reopen on Friday as well, if they can maintain social distancing and follow other safety protocols. Little’s recovery plan, announced last week, reopens the state in four stages between May 1 and June 26.
Moving to each new stage requires a slowing of the number of cases of the coronavirus and other requirements. The stages could be stopped or move backward if conditions worsen.
Two other thrift store chains that operate in the Treasure Valley, St. Vincent de Paul and Goodwill, also plan to reopen Friday. Those stores have not yet begun accepting donations again.
The Youth Ranch began accepting donations again on Monday. They amounted to about half the haul of a normal day before the coronavirus pandemic, spokesman Jeff Myers said. On Tuesday the total was about 70% of normal. Myers expected Wednesday’s total would be even higher.
“We’ve heard from so many people that they’ve been filling their garages with stuff, waiting for us to be able to take it,” Myers said. “So there’s a lot of people excited to be able to get around in their garages again.”
Donations are being taken to the Youth Ranch’s distribution center at 5465 W. Irving St., where they will be placed in quarantine for at least 72 hours to ensure that the coronavirus isn’t present. Then they will be distributed to stores.
“For most materials, the virus doesn’t survive that long,” Curtis said. “The longest is metal surfaces, and we sterilize those.”
Jenny Zoellner, who lives near the Orchard Street store, dropped off clothing and other items Wednesday morning. She declined a Youth Ranch worker’s offer to take them out of her trunk. She laid the items on a table, while the worker stood more than 6 feet away.
“I’ve got a lot of junk,” she said, laughing.
She said she had held onto the items for a couple of weeks, waiting for the Youth Ranch to begin accepting donations again.
“Can I go in and shop now?” she asked, laughing.
“Friday. Friday,” came the answer.
Curtis said he doesn’t know whether customers will be waiting outside stores Friday morning waiting for the doors to open or whether it might take some time for customers to stream in.
“We really don’t know, but we know the better job we do of sharing with the public the measures we’re taking, that increases their confidence in us,” he said.
All Youth Ranch workers will wear face masks, and Curtis encourages customers to do the same. Stores will have signs marking one-way travel lanes and floor markings in checkstand lines to keep customers 6 feet from one another. The checkstands have been fitted with Plexiglas sneeze screens.
Workers handling donations are wearing gloves and sanitizing them after handling each donor’s items. Store workers will not wear them.
The Youth Ranch furloughed about 300 of its 425 employees for two and a half weeks during the pandemic. It continued to provide health insurance and other benefits and provided a two-week incremental leave benefit for furloughed employees, Myers said.
The organization placed some of its workers at food banks and other nonprofit organizations to keep them working.
The Youth Ranch received $2.8 million from the federal Paycheck Protection Program offered through the Small Business Administration under the coronavirus relief law Congress passed in March. Curtis said that money helped keep workers employed.
Curtis said he’s glad to be able to get the stores back open, supplying low-cost products to people who need them the most. But he’s unsure what the future holds.
“We don’t know how the economy is going to respond,” Curtis said. “And we don’t know how this virus is going to respond, whether we might see another time when we have to close our doors.”
