We typically reach our storage capacity of donated bikes around this time of year. Our process is to assess and price bikes before selling them (cash or volunteer equity), but we can get gridlocked if we have too many incoming donations. We're considering an annual bike giveaway, and I'm looking for some wisdom/experience. My pros and cons list for a giveaway event for un-assessed donations:

Pros

Expose more public to the shop

Clear out bikes that are a physical and mental burden on the volunteers

Redistribute more bikes! (part of our mission)

Cons

Breaks our principle of earned equity vs hand-out.

Would likely lead to redistributing bikes that we'll need to work on anyway.

Along the same lines, could hurt our rep if we give away broken or dangerous bikes.

Could still leave us with the bottom-of-the-barrel bikes.

Does anyone have a consistent method for managing bike capacity? My gut tells me we should just commit to a bike-count, and stick with it. Then we can hone our process for pulling the wheat from the chaff on an ongoing basis.

-Andy

Brok Spoke, Lexington