"We'd Spend Hours Each Week Unpacking & Throwing the Food Away" donated from Amazon

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This wasn’t the first charitable gift Amazon has given Mary’s Place. In 2016, the company provided the nonprofit with one of its unused properties in downtown Seattle, a former Travelodge, to create a temporary homeless shelter. After that building closed for construction, the shelter moved to another unused Amazon building in the same area, a former Days Inn, where it’s currently based. A few months after that, in late 2016, the company also started offering Mary’s Place free food for residents. It had just opened its new checkout-free Amazon Go store down the street from the shelter—at first as a service for its own employees, though it opened to the public earlier this year. Like most grocery operations, at the end of the day the store had leftover, pre-made food that was still good to eat but wouldn’t be sold the following day.

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The sandwich handoff was supposed to be simple. At first, according to three former Mary’s Place employees, Amazon would deliver crates of pre-made food to the shelter; once the shelter moved to the Days Inn location in 2017, it was close enough to the Amazon Go store that Mary’s Place employees went to pick up the food themselves. But former and current staff told me it was hard to predict how much food the shelter would receive each day, with the haul ranging anywhere from five to 40 crates filled with packaged meals, like tuna and chicken-salad sandwiches, the bulk of which needed refrigeration. At around 9:30 p.m. on Monday through Friday, Amazon Go would have the food ready for pickup. Not only did staff not know how much to expect, they often didn’t have enough refrigerator space back at Mary’s Place to store it all—which meant the small, already time-strapped shelter staff on evening or overnight shifts had to throw away the food or else find another home for it, since it was too late to serve it at that evening’s meal.

“It would be this panicked scramble,” one of the former Mary’s Place employees said. “It was always more than we could fit in the refrigerators that we had, which were mostly full of the food that we as a shelter bought to feed people.”

“It would be this panicked scramble.”
— A former Mary’s Place employee
Staff also weren’t told how long it had been since the food was last refrigerated. “We often don’t know how long the food has been sitting out,” the current Mary’s Place employee said. “We care about the people who the food is meant to serve, and even if [the food] does get to guests, it’s not in the best condition.”

In addition to the downtown location, Mary’s Place operates six other shelters in Seattle, serving individuals and families with 680 beds each night. But Amazon didn’t deliver the food to the other Mary’s Place locations, nor did the shelter consistently set aside additional resources to distribute the donations each night, according to four sources. Often that meant Mary’s Place employees had to drive some food to other locations themselves—that is, when they didn’t simply toss it because of refrigeration space or concerns over its freshness. And since Seattle has strict composting rules, the foodstuffs had to be separated from the packaging first. “The last thing we wanted to do was throw out food,” one former Mary’s Place employee told me. “Still, we’d spend hours each week unpacking and throwing the food away.”

https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/amazon-gives-seattles-marys-place-free-food-and-real-estate-and-is-a-total-pain.html