### The Path of Donated Footwear: A TikTok Experiment with AirTags
Have you ever considered where your donated footwear truly ends up? One TikTok user set out to discover the answer by placing an AirTag inside a pair of sneakers, leaving them at a Red Cross bin, and monitoring their route using the Find My app.
In a now-popular video, TikTok user Moe.Ha showcases how he inserted an AirTag into a pair of sneakers prior to donating them at a Red Cross drop-off point in Munich. Five days and several border crossings later, the sneakers reappeared in a thrift shop almost 800km away, in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As per his Find My app, the AirTag-laden donation made stops in Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia before arriving at a Bosnian resale store, where the sneakers were being offered for approximately 10 euros. Naturally, he journeyed all the way there, spotted them on the shelf, and repurchased them.
When inquiring about the sneakers’ origins, the shop staff mentioned that the items were brought in by her boss, who resides in Germany.
### So… was this a scam?
Not exactly. While it may initially appear strange to trace your AirTagged donated sneakers to a resale rack in another nation, this actually reflects a component of how clothing donations operate, at least for the Red Cross.
Here’s how their German website outlines their sorting process:
> “We have around 18,000 used clothing containers throughout Germany. (…) Following that, there are two distinct recycling models. In the “clothing depot model,” the clothing is sorted by the German Red Cross (DRK), and appropriate items are distributed to our depots and thrift shops. The surplus is sold to a recycling company. In the “recycler model,” the entire contents of the container are sold to a business. The revenue the Red Cross earns from this supports our statutory missions.”
Thus, while it might seem questionable at first, a donated pair of shoes appearing with a price tag four countries away and 500 miles distant isn’t necessarily a scam, but rather part of the operational system. Still, there’s something a little surreal about coming to the realization that an old pair of sneakers might have experienced more of Europe than their original owner.
