Charity might begin at home, but worrying about charity begins at Waitrose. Those little green tokens they give you with your receipt — nice touch, I used to think. If the store won’t give me any of my money back by way of a loyalty card, at least they’ll give it to someone I can vote for, by dropping the token into one of three compartments in a big clear plastic box by the exit. Each compartment relates to a local charity. New line-up every month, new chance to feel good about yourself.
But no good deed goes unpunished, so it didn’t take long for doubts to creep in. There was the whole concept of Waitrose donating to charity, for a start. Given their prices, shouldn’t they be aiming a little higher than the local playground? If I had a pound for everyone who’s told me they can no longer afford to shop solely at Waitrose, I could afford to shop solely at Waitrose. Rake, say, 5 per cent off kumquat profits for a month and the company could fund the entire NHS.
Filing this thought under ‘not worthy’, I progressed to the real problem — which charity to plump for? Some were easy to dismiss; anything with ‘young offenders’ in the description, for example. But the rest lined up like strays at Battersea Dogs Home. To choose one was to reject the others. A vote for the old people’s minibus meant a kick in the teeth for autistic teenagers. Saying ‘yes’ to fighting dyslexia should have felt good, but all I could register was the ‘V’ I’d just flicked to battered wives. Every shopping trip was emotional torture.
I was tempted to take my grandmother’s route of refusing to give to charity at all because ‘you never know how much of your money will get through’. Handy excuse, that. But it doesn’t apply here, because Waitrose will give the money anyway — don’t I have a duty to vote? For a while I evaded tough choices by alternating between the candidates on successive visits — but again, what conviction did that show? The net effect was the same as not voting at all. A slight sop to my conscience is that it isn’t winner takes all: Waitrose split the money in proportion to tokens received. I can vote for my less-favoured charities less often and they’ll get something. But the essential problem remains: how much do I favour each charity?
Part of the trouble is that the clear plastic box lets you see how many tokens each charity has attracted so far, opening up the possibility that your choice could be swayed by other people’s, however subconsciously. Shouldn’t Waitrose follow the lead of the French, who ban opinion polls during general elections for precisely this reason? That way the Scout group would know they’d lost fair and square, not just because the owl sanctuary took an early though unrepresentative lead. (Another procedural anomaly is the number of people who let their toddlers choose which slot to put the token in. Doesn’t that make a mockery of the whole thing?)
My choices tend to go in phases. There’s the ‘sticking to my guns’ phase, in which I resolutely pick the charity that first and most powerfully catches my attention. Then there’s the ‘head over heart’ phase, where I tell myself that charity is too important to be governed by instant emotion, and reject my first choice simply because it is my first choice. The ‘British love of the underdog’ phase also features, where instead of resenting the clear plastic I embrace it, and give my token to whoever is in third place — sometimes even if it’s the young offenders.
These mood swings have come to intrigue me. Normally we see or hear charity appeals in isolation (a newspaper ad, a radio broadcast); only when the competitors are side by side, arranged on Waitrose’s Olympic podium of suffering, do we examine what excites our sympathy most, and why. It’s forced me to confront some prejudices. The young offenders, for instance: if I believe (as I think I do) in carrots as well as sticks to keep them out of trouble, shouldn’t I help pay for the carrots? (If they’re coming from Waitrose, that help will be needed.) Then there are cats. As a dog-lover I’ve always associated cats with Bond villains and incontinent old women. Yet isn’t a cat in hardship just as deserving of my pity and help as a troubled hound? Something about the act of extending my arm towards the box, token gripped in doubtful fingers, makes me ashamed of my whims.
In fact even the thought of the box is making me regret that comment about incontinent old women. Next time their charity comes round I’ll do the necessary. I only hope no one sets up a refuge for distressed Bond villains.
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