Greenlife needs to re-evaluate what community is

In the third paragraph of Greenlife’s letter in the Nov. 23 issue of Mountain Xpress, Sherri Sterken states, “Greenlife remains as committed as ever to Asheville, and during the past year our contributions to the community have amplified.”

This statement confuses me.

During the last week of June 2011, a group of us noticed a large Dumpster in the lower parking lot of the Greenlife store. In it were things that were obviously deemed “trash” by the management at Greenlife. This “trash” included three large coffee makers, an industrial mixer, commercial pots, pans and lids and 20 or more unopened boxes of paper and plastic to-go items, including coffee cups, condiment cups, soup containers, plasticware, french-fries containers and more.

If Greenlife considers itself “the community market,” why didn’t it donate some of these useful and usable items to a community organization?

As a group of concerned citizens, we did just that. We Dumpster-dived, pulling out the unopened cases. We took the coffee makers, etc., home, cleaned them up and donated these perfectly good items to the Red Cross, the shelter on Patton Avenue, Eblen Charities and a few more. We were told that any of these organizations would have been happy to pick up any or all of these items, had they been notified of the availability.

If Greenlife wants to be identified as “the community market,” it needs to re-evaluate what community is, and what it can, or rather, should have done, to support the community that supports it.

— C.L. Classen
Marshall