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> One time I was on a team that did a team building exercise where we went to a local charity for sick kids and performed manual labor all day. One small compa
by karatestomp 7y ago
> One time I was on a team that did a team building exercise where we went to a local charity for sick kids and performed manual labor all day.
One small company I worked for once did this, but with gathering apples that would otherwise have gone to waste ("gleaning") to give them to homeless shelters or something. Took up two or three hours, total, lots of driving (gas burnt), and so on. Fifteen or twenty people.
We wouldn't even have had to pay minimum wage workers to do what we did to substantially beat our productivity that day. Simply buying apples with ~3x the average worker's hourly wage times the number of workers we had there would have been embarrassingly more effective. I question the entire exercise and charity org behind it, actually. I suspect someone's making money off it one way or another, maybe just by building a "personal brand" as a corporate charity consultant or some such. The market's pretty efficient at getting cheap food to paying customers, and you probably can't beat the efficiency of simply buying food even at minimum wage rates, by manually harvesting from leftovers, however sad it may seem to let that food rot.
It's kinda a dumb idea, if your main goal is improving the world, to such a high degree that I think it'd set of alarm bells for even people who aren't into the effective-altruism thing.
[EDIT] back-of-envelope we could have bought 750-1000 pounds of apples without even getting some kind of bulk price. I think we "gleaned" like 200-300 pounds, tops, and it may have been less. It'd be much higher still if we figured it using company revenue for that span of 3 hours, rather than worker pay, and that's not factoring in all the costs of driving-people-to-the-orchard and all the driving-apples-all-over-the-place that the organization's volunteers did, nor their time. Overall I bet we weren't much more than 10% as effective as just buying apples.