KATHRYN HOLZKA
Albuquerque Journal
TAOS, N.M. -- Don't blame it on the Grinch this time.
An annual Christmas toy drive for needy families sponsored by civilian employees of the Taos Police Department got booted out of the local Wal-Mart last week.
And organizers of the annual Angel Tree project are fighting mad.
Shirley Lujan, head of central communications, which dispatches police calls, said she is beyond annoyed and intends "to tell Wal-Mart corporate headquarters what I think about this."
She said it will be a letter they won't soon forget.
"How mean can you get?" she said Thursday while helping Santa Claus -- a.k.a. Jim Simmons, facilities supervisor for the town of Taos convention center -- distribute toys to kids at the town's Coronado Hall complex on Civic Plaza Drive.
"Fortunately, we were able to collect all the toys we needed to meet the kids' needs, so Wal-Mart didn't spoil the kids' Christmas after all," Lujan said, adding that she is especially perplexed because this is the sixth or seventh year the group has collected toys at the Wal-Mart store without complaint.
"The local Wal-Mart people have been just wonderful," she said. "It was some district manager from I don't know where who told me we had to pack up and get out. I don't know his name."
The local acting store manager declined to be interviewed and sent word out via an assistant that "we have no information to share at this time."
A call to Marty Heires, communications spokesman for the New Mexico region at Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters in Arkansas, was not returned Thursday.
Lujan said the unidentified district manager told her only two charity groups were allowed to collect at Wal-Mart stores -- the Miracle Network for Children and a second organization, whose name she said she couldn't remember.
The Angel Tree project set up shop inside Wal-Mart at the end of October, staking out its prime location inside the store with a tree and collection box. Shoppers take a paper Christmas ornament from the tree that requests a gift suitable for either a boy or girl in a specific age range, and then buy a gift and put it in the box with the designated age and gender.
The gifts are then selected according to a list supplied to the Angel Tree project.
"Most of the people interested in donating to Angel Tree bought the gift or toy right there at Wal-Mart," Lujan said. "So I can't help wondering what this is all about.
"And they had to do it just before the biggest weekend before Christmas, when we tend to get the biggest gifts," she said. "But that's OK, we had enough for this year."
Marie Pacheco, who works in the police department records section, said she enlisted the aid of her husband, Paul, when Lujan called her last week and told her they had to get the Angel Tree display out right away or "they were going to pack it up and ship it to us."
Lujan said between the Wal-Mart location and people who dropped off toys and other gifts at police headquarters, the Angel Tree project collected about 300 gifts this year.
The organization had between 225 and 250 kids enrolled, so there were more than enough to go around.
What the heck? I'd think that would be a mutually beneficial set up.
ReplyDeleteThere's a tendency at Wal-Mart, I've seen, for grassroots stuff at the store level to get stomped on by district mangers and their main corporate offices.
ReplyDeleteI know that locally they tried a "singles night" and only did it once before corporate stepped in to stop them. I never thought they'd stop something as inoffensive as a toy drive though.