On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 10:27 +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
As to the annoyance factor; it's probably a necessary evil but I'd rather it was done properly (ie not getting two bags, and getting a collection on the date promised) than have it mismanaged. I tend to take things to my local charity shop, but if I were to fill a bag and not have it collected I think I'd be quite annoyed by that.
Sorry I don't have any software suggestions but on the subject of getting it done properly my experience is that the bags are generally thrown into our side garden (where the "front" door is) rather than put through the letterbox and specify only a day of the week for collection rather than a date.
The result is we never know how long a bag has been sitting in the garden before we found it and if it was put out and not collected we would not know if this was because we had already missed the collection day or the collectors had not turned up.
Those limitation make the system essentially useless for us even before taking account of how, for many of these schemes, the charity in whose name the whole thing is done receives a relatively small proportion of the proceeds of selling what is donated.
Regards, Steve.