Charlene Geraci
Dr. Knutson
Inquiry Written Communications
12 October 2021
Goals & Intrinsic Motivation
I step into the entrance of a thrift store I’ve driven past many times in life, but only now noticing it for the first time. Aside from a sign that hangs above Jazzy & Mumbos, and another that cannot be seen very well from the street, the building is very much a gray, rectangular box. Perhaps this is why I have never noticed the building before, as I grew up in the area. Luckily, I am very interested in the psychology of what motivates humans to do good for our environment and society. Thrift stores owners, in my mind, work towards doing good. As a result of this deduction, I had the pleasure of interviewing a delightful thrift store owner: the owner of Jazzy & Mumbos, a non-profit thrift store in Dilworth, MN, that donates 100% of its proceeds, after utilities and rent, to pet parents in need. How selfless the owner of this place has to be I thought, in order to start an entire store from which they gain no monetary benefit! Jumping on this idea, I messaged the thrift store’s Facebook page and asked for an interview with the owner, to which I got a timely and very enthusiastic, “That’d be wonderful!”
After school on September 17th, I made the drive to meet my interviewee, Wendy Doe. Doe is a pseudonym, as Wendy did not provide a last name when introducing herself. As I walked in the front entrance, I immediately noticed a sign indicating that the store was to be vacated in 60 days. Because Wendy was attending to a customer when I walked in, I made a lap around the store. In addition to the two rather obese looking dogs laying behind the front counter, I noticed 50+ pictures of animals whom Jazzy & Mumbos has helped, hung along the West wall of the store. However, these are not all the pets Jazzy & Mumbos has helped, as these stories fill up two 2-inch ring binders. Wendy probably keeps these for non-profit status applications and memories, and to me they showcase the impact she’s had on her community. Wendy kindly greeted me at the front counter, and we decided that we would conduct the interview over the counter so she could easily help customers as they came, and so she could start the clean-up process in preparation to vacate. I changed my interview approach from a computer to pen and paper to fit the new setting, and because I felt a computer inappropriate to use in a thrift store. Regarding the eviction, Wendy plans to keep the store running even after vacating and went to a prospective building tour after our interview together. The interview was very casual, and Wendy occasionally dropped some swear words.
During the interview, I discovered that Wendy is a mom of three, and has had multiple experiences in her life that led her to identify a problem within the pet care industry: the inaccessibility to animal healthcare. These experiences are what founded the name of Jazzy & Mumbos. I constantly saw throughout the interview that because Wendy has had nearly no help in running her non-profit thrift store, that she is motivated by something deeper than peer approval or money. Instead, she runs her store for the satisfaction of running it. In other words, she is intrinsically motivated. When a person is intrinsically motivated, “They aren’t moved to act because of external influences or rewards, they operate simply for the challenge or fun” (Kaplan and Oudeyer). As reflected in the stories and comments made during the interview with the owner of Jazzy & Mumbos, Wendy Doe is more likely to continue to work for her goals that further the common good of society because she is intrinsically motivated by past experiences and powerful emotions.
Almost immediately into the interview, Wendy launched into the stories behind the name “Jazzy & Mumbos.” Jazzy was a dog Wendy was briefly taking care of because the owners were getting a divorce and couldn’t afford the costs to put her in a kennel. After putting an ad in a newspaper, an elderly lady contacted Wendy saying she’d like to take Jazzy in. Wendy, being the concerned pet parent she is, told the lady that she’d make occasional visits just to make sure Jazzy was okay. However, sometime later Jazzy wasn’t eating, and although Wendy had a gut feeling that she should take the dog to her house, she left her with the lady. A few days afterwards, Jazzy died of poisoning, so Wendy was filled with regret that she didn’t take Jazzy home when she could’ve.
Mumbo was her son’s kitten, and because they live on a farm, he became an outdoor cat when he got big enough. For a couple days, he didn’t come back for breakfast or supper like he usually did. When he did, however, his paw was almost completely severed; his paw hanging by a piece of his skin. She called her vet, to whom she had been a client for 20 years, who had recently come out to take care of a pony and give shots to the horses, dogs, and cats.
The first thing they asked was how Wendy was going to pay. Wendy could hardly contain her frustration explaining the situation to me. She recognized she owed them money, but they wouldn’t perform any procedure until she paid the $700+ that she owed (this was back when payment plans were allowed, unlike nowadays where vets like to have you pay up front). Angry, especially because she’d just gotten the bill the day before, she let them have it, saying, “You’re going to sit here and let a kitten suffer because I owe you money…What the hell are you in this business for? Wallet, or to help the animals?”. After that, they told her that if she had the $110 to put Mumbo down, they could do it, as Wendy did not have the $400 to amputate. Wendy was upset about this, but it was her only option, and she had to take a brief pause before admitting to me that she had to put Mumbo down. The anger and sadness Wendy displayed while telling Mumbo’s story gave me an insight into what types of experiences Wendy has allowed to impact her.
Because of this experience, Wendy told me she got to thinking that, “There’s got to be other people like me, who love the animals and want what’s best for them but can’t afford it”. She recognized the argument that if you can’t afford a pet, you shouldn’t have one, but she counters it by saying that sometimes accidents happen and that, “Not everyone has that cushion of a job that pays well. I live paycheck to paycheck, a lot of people do”. This personal experience of not having enough money to get treatment for Mumbo was echoed by third incident. One day while Wendy was driving to work some years ago, a car accident happened in front of her, and one guy had a dog in his car that hit the dashboard, but it was 5 am so the vet wasn’t open. Wendy kept the dog at her work until the vet opened, but she knew the guy owed them money as well, so she told me with a tone of doubt and apprehension that she hopes everything was taken care of. She knew that there had to be more help to pet owners in cases of emergency, and that is why she opened Jazzy & Mumbos, even though her husband “thought she was nuts.”
He probably thought this because Wendy knew nothing about running a store. With immense enthusiasm and excitement, she told me, “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I was like, I’m gonna help people with their animals, I’m gonna do it! But yeah no, I just used my credit card and started up…You just need to have a lot of time”. Wendy works 10–12-hour days at Braaten Cabinets on Mondays-Thursdays, and cleans for other people on Sundays, while dedicating Fridays and Saturdays to working at Jazzy & Mumbos. Consequently, I don’t know how she found time to start the store, but maybe she’s just more time efficient than I am. I told her I think it is incredibly impressive of her to work 12-hour days because she ends up working more hours per week than all her co-workers. Her initial reaction was humble agreement, but as she thought about it more, I could tell I hyped her up. Her busy schedule also indicates her dedication to sacrificing her free time to help pets in the community.
Continuing her start-up story, Wendy told me she didn’t even look up anything online. She doesn’t have to do payroll because she has volunteers so that made it easier and she said that because she knows how to balance her own checkbook, it was easy to learn how to run the store. Most of what she has to do is pay for rent and utilities, clean, and organize inventory, which overwhelmingly flooded in during May 2020 due to everyone cleaning their houses. She had no monetary help from friends and family and told me that the credit debt was scary to look at, but she did it anyway. Because she had no help starting her non-profit and there were no external influences or rewards that pressured her into opening it, intrinsic motivation is what kept her dedicated to making the thrift store dream a reality.
Now that she has achieved her goal of helping people with their animals through her store, Wendy has one big personal goal: to make Jazzy & Mumbos bigger. I know that may seem to some like a business goal, but I asked a second time for her goals outside of work and that’s what she said. It’s interesting that Jazzy & Mumbos has interwoven so tightly with Wendy’s life and mindset that her personal goals are all connected to it. Because she has many requests for help, Wendy can only afford to help the owners with so much of their bill, so that as many people as possible get help. So, she wants to be able to pay more of the bill for people. In addition to growing her thrift store, Wendy wants to get volunteer vets into the shop, so that when pet owners come in with a concern, she can refer them to a vet within the building who can give them the help or resources they need. That way, their bill may be totally paid (she didn’t go into the details, but I assume that she would pay the volunteer vets to be there or just have it in a way that the people wouldn’t have to pay). You can clearly see Wendy’s past experiences with Jazzy and Mumbo reflected in these goals. When I asked her what brought her joy in life, she said her animals did. In fact, one of her favorite parts of running the store is that she gets to bring her pets to work (which explained the dogs behind the counter). This connection between animals and joy is a powerful motivator for her to run her thrift store and benefit animals, supporting the fact that powerful emotions are an element of intrinsic motivation.
The biggest challenge Wendy has faced in running her non-profit is trusting volunteers. This was in context of talking about the different locations Jazzy & Mumbos has occupied, because Wendy has to vacate her current location due to her landlord being misinformed in a business deal. Regardless, in Wendy’s second location, which was along 45th Street in Fargo, ND, she had a volunteer steal money from the store. At her current location, she had another volunteer steal about $2000, which made her mad because it is such a significant amount of money that could’ve been given to pets that need it. The volunteer put some thought into it too, as she stole the other volunteers’ account sheets so Wendy couldn’t initially determine how much money she stole. Wendy has video evidence though, as there are three cameras all pointed at the till (which portrays the lack of thought put in), and is going to court against that volunteer. In summary she told me, “That’s the only hard part is trusting volunteers, because they will either take your money or they won’t open the store”. Despite these setbacks, Wendy persevered due to her strong internal motivation to keep her thrift store up and running.
Wendy clearly showcased to me how she loved the impact she makes on pets and pet owners and said that everybody who comes in has solidified that she was doing what she loved. She loves hearing the joy in the owners’ voices when they receive help, and all the people she’s helped has validated that she’s doing a good thing. Most of the time, however, Wendy does not enjoy interacting with people. When I asked her if she had learned anything about herself from running the store, she jokingly whispered, “How much I hate people,” to which we both started laughing. More seriously, she said, “That I can put up with a lot,”. At this point she unzipped her black sweater to reveal her orange T-shirt which read, “Tell Me ‘It’s Just A Dog’ and I’ll tell you ‘You’re Just An Idiot.’” On a sort of tangent, she told me that some people will come in and complain about prices or that she couldn’t help them with more money, so whenever somebody comes into the store and asks, she says that she’d rather take her dogs over anybody (even her kids). However, Wendy was perfectly friendly to me and all the customers that came through during my interview. She tries to be friendly to everyone despite how they may turn her, but it stands that she would rather spend time with her dogs than with people. I think this shows how she is doing what she’s doing for the animals, and how her love for animals is what drives her to run the thrift store despite unpleasant people.
At the end of our time together, I asked Wendy if there was anything she would like me to tell my classmates, and she replied, “Stop and shop, because the more we make the more help we can give”. So, you know where to go next time you go thrifting. My time with Wendy Doe, the owner of Jazzy & Mumbos, illustrated that she is more likely to work for her goal of improving pets’ and people’s lives because she is intrinsically motivated by past experiences and powerful emotions. Wendy works for the common good by running her thrift store, and her experiences with Jazzy and Mumbo have created for her a lifelong goal of helping animals. Although past experiences were sources of anger and sadness for Wendy, and I witnessed these strong emotions in the interview, they also reflect the joy she feels around her animals and how strong her love for animals is. Without these strong emotional ties, Wendy could have easily given up in the face of starting a thrift store from square one and dishonest volunteers, but she didn’t. She harnessed and used her emotions for good. With no monetary support from family or friends to the extent that some thought she was crazy, Wendy showed me what it means to be an extremely intrinsically motivated person. She enjoys running her store despite having to deal with crabby people and long work hours, and she remarked that it was, “Like Christmas every day”. And I think that’s a good goal for us all to have, to find something that sparks a light inside, and fan that flame, so that we can truly find joy in setting goals.
Works Cited
Doe, Wendy. Personal interview. 17 September 2021.
Kaplan, Frederic. Oudeyer, Pierre-Yves. “What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches.” Edited by Max Lungarella, Frontiers, Frontiers. 02 Nov. 2009. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/neuro.12.006.2007/full 01 Oct. 2021.