Little Free Failure of Capitalism - Restock: September 2025
Read this online at https://lffc.us/posts/restock-2025-09/.
Welcome to the Restock!
Updates and Changes
Compared to last month’s complete rebuild, this month’s changes are much milder. Last month, we added LED lighting to the inside of LFFC, but had done a fairly quick job of it to move onto other projects. A visitor, clearly incensed by our lack of professionalism, decided to rid us of the hack lighting job to incentivize better work! Accordingly, we took the hint and have done a much more professional job this time around. We’re pretty pleased with the result! This quick video shows the lighting at about 90% completed, in “night” mode; since then, we added one more long loop of lights in the upper half of LFFC, to better light the art section and generally make everything easier to see. (No photos yet, but we’ll update the ones on the about page soon!) The lighting outside the cabinets serves to draw people in, and the lighting inside the cabinets makes it so that people can see what we have available at night (which, in Seattle in winter, lasts from approximately 4:30pm to 9am). In October, we intend to add a presence sensor so that rather than merely having “day” (pretty lights) and “night” (all-white lights inside to better light the interior for guests) modes, we can have pretty lights all the time, switching to white interior lighting when someone comes by.
We also built a sandwich board (one of those A-frame sidewalk signs) and have started putting up various messages, with more to come. It’s fun to work on the art parts of LFFC!
For those curious, donations never go to anything other than the actual goods we distribute; the art, electronics, and other weird things just make us happy and enhances neighbor appeal.
We added three new items to what we stock for visitors this month. At the request of a visitor, we started stocking single-serving hand sanitizer packets, which are small enough to take several even with limited cargo space, and cost-effective for us to distribute. At the suggestion of Katy (the source of many of our best ideas), we also added small paper sacks to enable people to carry the myriad small things they might grab from LFFC (a few condoms, a toothbrush and toothpaste, some hand sanitizer, some wound care products, and soon either you need a bag or a juggling hobby!). Finally, at the suggestion of our friends at King County Public Health, we’ve added injectable naloxone in addition to the nasal spray. All three items had immediate strong uptake, which is a sign that they’re meeting a need.
The temperature is dropping rapidly, and soon we’ll add winter supplies (hats, warm gloves, and handwarmers) back into the mix. We’re experimenting with a new handwarmer vendor this year, who have a direct-to-consumer model and promise substantially higher quality than our previous handwarmers (the big name brand ones) at lower cost. If that’s true, we’ll sing their praises!
Monthly Usage
This month, we had thirty-four outgoing completed calls made from our Futel phone, as well as 69 calls made from our first Connections node install–at the Dunlap Seattle Community Fridge site, just a mile south of LFFC. (Another Connections node will come fully online in the next week!)
This month, we distributed:
- 258 pairs of thermal socks
- 1120 Band-Aids
- 85 CoBan rolls
- 40 ABD gauze pads, and 52 non-adherent pads
- 572 nitrile gloves
- 160 packets of Vaseline
- 83 sunscreen packets
- 232 masks (N95 and KF94)
- 183 doses of ibuprofen
- 85 pairs of earplugs
- 44 ponchos
- 153 pencils
- 78 bars of soap
- 199 toothbrushes
- 146 tubes of toothpaste
- 64 tampons
- 35 menstrual pads (across all sizes)
- 142 packets of hand sanitizer
- 109 paper bags
- 518 condoms, 29 internal (“female”) condoms, and 237 lubricant packets
- 53 boxes (106 doses) of naloxone nasal spray, and 17 kits (34 doses) of injectable naloxone
Our COGGA for this month is $845.21, not including naloxone, condoms, or lubricants (all of which are provided by outside groups at no cost to us).
We received donations this month from Harley LaRoux, Rebecca Francis, Andrew Smart, Aidan Sjothun, and Father Ron Mrozinski, as well as one from an anonymous donor. Thank you all so much!
Conclusion
That’s it for this month’s Restock! If there’s more information you’d like to know, please feel free to use our Suggestions Form or email us at info@lffc.us.