The Choice Shop held their second-annual Thanksgiving Back this past October, an event where over the course of the four-day weekend, for every article of clothing or pair of shoes they sold, they donated one to underprivileged kids in the local school system. This year, they donated a whopping $14,200 worth of apparel.
Co-owners Mike Peabody and Joey Sandberg started the event last year, after noticing that some retail stores will do a sale or special promotion for Thanksgiving weekend.
“I guess Joey and I just put our minds together to come up with something better,” said Peabody. “With some teacher friends of ours, we knew that there was definitely some kids that don’t have a whole lot in our local school system. So we looked a little further into it and in total there’s over 100 kids that really don’t have any source of, not just buying clothes, but even doing their own laundry. So we we wanted to give back to our local school kids and this is the idea we came up with.”
Their total last year was $6,800 and they were hoping to do a little better this time around, maybe $7,000 or $7,500, Peabody said. They were pretty surprised when they crunched the numbers and discovered they’d raised over $14,000.
The clothing goes to Mount Baker, Laurie Middle School, Parkland and McKim Middle School in Kimberley.
“A lot of the brands we sell are more kind of tailored to pre-teens and the teenagers, so it’s a lot easier for us to get sizes. But looking at the numbers that we did this year, I think we’ll definitely look at trying to help out some elementary schools next year.”