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by retcore
1363 days ago
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London (City of London) pre pandemic used to regularly have troops of charity employees hard selling their pitch and only accepting monthly subscription payments via Direct Debit, which is the legal equivalent of granting joint custody of your funds to the extent that the Halifax savings and loan used to refuse to cancel a direct debit payment for the customer, claiming that the customer has no such right, and the severality of granting regulated but effectively unfettered withdrawal authority lead me to think twice about taking them to court. The UK Direct Debit system doesn't even verify the customers name against the account details, wide open to fraud. Anyhow the argument for declining both cash and once off card donations wasn't anything to do with the sidewalk venue, but the charity wanting me to give them my tax deduction as well. They'd be lined up across Cheapside in funnel formations. No wonder that WFH is still so popular. |
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Sometime in the early 2000s the most of British charity was transformed (dragged through the mud) by corporate whackjobs, PR gurus, and Feng Shui design soothsayers to align their ley-lines and whatnot.
Charity shops stopped having any actual bargains in them, and the money boxes we used to enjoy putting spare change into vanished.
They made up all kinds of bizarre, frankly unbelievable stories about how the staff "weren't trained to handle cash" and that robbers would steal their charity tins (in broad daylight outside Waterloo station under 200 CCTV cameras... like Jimmy Reckon!)
Then all those charity scandals about abuse and corruption came out.
Heartbreaking what a few clueless, vicious vandals and scumbags in suits can do to brand reputations earned over centuries.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/secret...