MowCow Owner Receives 100's of Packages from Amazon

A few months ago, Richard and Cindy received over a hundred Amazon boxes on their front porch all addressed to the same person – who did not live in their house. The boxes were packed with 1,200+ good-quality headlamps, 800 glue guns, and children’s binoculars.  “We could have sold all the contents, but somehow that seemed ‘wrong’. Amazon told us to throw it away, give it away, or donate it”, but as a sustainability-minded couple, they decided not to send them to the landfill. Instead, along with family members, they distributed hundreds of headlamps and glue guns to friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Richard and Cindy made a point to give them away to ‘targeted’ audiences.

Cindy is a passionate environmental educator (and GMU professor) and loves connecting people to nature. Thus, they chose to give headlamps to Master Naturalists, Master Gardeners, Audubon, Rangers at local and State Parks, county nature programs, and Neighborhood Watch programs in underserved neighborhoods – groups that get kids learning and playing outdoors. Numerous emergency medical teams and fire and police departments also received headlamps to aid in night rescues. Cindy integrated the children’s binoculars into youth bird watching activities at Mason’s Potomac Science Center where she directs STEM outreach programs. After watching staff walk dogs in the dark outside the Manassas emergency veterinary clinic where they took their cat, Moby, when he was very sick, Richard and Cindy donated a bunch of headlamps to them as well as to an animal shelter in Fairfax.

In the hope of getting more families to learn outdoors, Cindy and her niece, Kristi Moon, a kindergarten teacher, developed a Nighttime Frog Spotting Activity, which can be downloaded for free on her website, drcindysmith.com. Of course, the frog spotting activity integrates headlamps to illuminate a whole different world at night. Kristi and Cindy also gave away over 500 popular glue guns and headlamps to families at a large youth education convention in Richmond. They handed out the remaining headlamps to Richmond Convention Center custodians, security guards, and many, many kayakers and dog owners who get their exercise at night.

After Cindy shared about distributing the Amazon box contents during her talk to members of the Prince William County Green Business Council, the investigative reporting team at WUSA9 contacted her. Richard and Cindy initially believed that they had received the packages as part of a ‘brushing scam,’ in which fake reviews are written on Amazon for every product that showed up at their home. The fake five star reviews make online shoppers believe that products are highly rated. Investigators with the WUSA9 news team discovered a different story, which you can watch and read here. We are thrilled to have such community-minded owners at MowCow, who love helping other firms be more successful.