Thieves target Sherwood Park Salvation Army thrift store

EDMONTON – Staff at a Sherwood Park Salvation Army thrift shop are cleaning up after thieves broke into the store earlier this week.

Karin Adshead, the store manager, received a call from RCMP early Tuesday morning saying someone had smashed through the store’s front door.

“They had opened the cabinets for our silent auction and stolen all the jewellery that we had in the silent auction for December,” she said. “We had been saving a lot of really good jewellery to try and raise more money for (the Christmas) kettle fund.

“It’s sad. I don’t really understand what would motivate somebody to do that.”

“It’s disheartening, it’s horrible,” added Doug Pearman, a Sherwood Park resident who regularly donates items to the store. “You’re giving stuff to help other people and it doesn’t get distributed to the people who really need it… I guess that’s just how low people will stoop.”

Adshead says nothing else was taken from the store. She estimates the jewellery would have brought in about $3,000 from the auction. With that loss of revenue, plus the additional cost of fixing the front entrance, Adshead says it really hurts the bottom line, especially during the holidays.

“At this time of year we’re focusing on helping families in need have a good Christmas. And so that’s where most of the funds in December get channeled into,” she said Saturday morning. “I’m thinking that we could have helped 20 to 30 families with the money we would have raised from that jewellery.”

The theft is the latest setback for the Sherwood Park location. In September, the store’s front entrance was smashed when a vehicle drove through it.

“I guess it’s been kind of a bad year,” said Shannon Pagett-Coupal, a store employee.

Pagett-Coupal says as disappointing as it is, this week’s break and enter doesn’t really surprise her because the store often experiences thefts from its donation bins.

“It’s pretty much nightly that people go through the donations at the back, ransack it so bags are ripped open, there’s clothes all over the parking lot. They steal anything of value.”

Adshead says whoever took the jewellery still has time to do the right thing by anonymously donating it back to the Salvation Army.

“I focus on trying to help people fulfill their potential in life and I would hope that they would see that this isn’t the way to do that.”

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With files from Shannon Greer, Global News.