200 charity shops closing (cancer research)

@CrostaDiPizza
Why is it harder to carry a paperback "around the shops" than it is to carry one to work?
I don't understand that thought at all.

the big difference is those books are free @Needmorelego
There's your answer. There's a difference between picking up a book before sitting on a train and carrying a book round the shops. Nice Town charity shops are clean, sell nice, sellable stock (Boden, Seasalt, designer etc). Rundown Town shops aren't very appealing but are cheap.

@Auburngal , I live near a couple of touristy towns, and the stock is different to what's in my own (run-down) town.

An example, might be in Nice Town, I saw a nice, intact Barbour wax jacket for £68. It didn't look brand new, but it looked like it hadn't been worn more than a few times.
In Rundown Town, I saw the same coat in a different colour for £10. it looked like it had been worn a lot, and it would not appeal to someone looking for a coat.

I bought both. The tatty one was tidied up and re-proofed, the nearly new one had a light reproof. I put both on ebay. The nearly new one sold within weeks. The older one took longer to sell but I made far more profit, as it was a rare colour and had a lived-in look.

Don't hate me for reselling them. I kept one that fitted.

As a book lover I do make a point of purposely going to shops for books - whether that's Waterstones, a secondhand bookshop or a charity shop.
I don't think I am the only person who does that.
My point is though if people could just literally pop into a charity shop as they pass one to see if they have any books by Anthony Horowitz they can go straight to the shelves and look under H for Horowitz.
In and out in a couple of minutes.
No having to rummage through dusty piles in boxes.

Yeah - but shelves on railway stations, etc work because people at railway stations generally want a book for the journey and have forgotten their book/kindle etc. People don't make special trips to bookshops or to rummage through books in charity shops, because buying digital is generally so much easier.

Books are still popular.
Where I live there's loads of those community bookshelves at railway stations etc and they seem very popular.
Obviously the big difference is those books are free but charity shops you have to pay but people definitely still like having physical books.
As I've said on this thread charity shops need to actually display the books better.
Spines by colour - no
Dumped all muddled in a rummage basket - no
Tightly packed on a spinner so you can see what there is - no
Piled up in a wobbly pile on a high shelf - no
On an ordinary shelf in A-Z by author - yes please.

Then there are those charity shops that charge stupid prices for touristy/posh areas. Places like Harrogate, York, Bath, Chester.

We have stopped off in an average town or suburb for lunch and if see any CS, pop in.

And the quality really isn't as bad as people say. Anyone who says it's bad quality has never bought it.
I've seen plenty of it in charity shops, and it's mass-produced and the fabric is flimsy. It's not bad quality for what it is.
It's not as good as supermarket clothes or Pimark.

I agree. I volunteered in a CRUK shop for 4 years until recently when a new manager was brought in. The new manager only wanted young volunteers and was extremely rude to the older volunteers who had kept the shop running for over a year when there was no permanent manager. The long standing volunteers left months ago and I left more recently. The new manager raised the prices considerably and sales dropped like a stone. It isn't one of the shops closing in the first tranche but I think it will go in the next closures. I am applying to volunteer in a charity shop for a local Hospice.

The cost of running the charity shop is going through the roof. So they put prices up, so fewer people shop there. Our local charity shop has prices that are higher than Vinted and even the likes of eBay. I used to shop there a lot, now I don't. I can get what I need for cheaper.

Then you have the likes of Shein and Temu where you can get brand new clothes for cheaper than second hand. And the quality really isn't as bad as people say. Anyone who says it's bad quality has never bought it.

People don't have as much free time to volunteer as they used to. Whether that's due to having to take on extra hours at work, or because there are more distractions which give an illusion of having no spare time.

I have noticed a lot refusing to take books in though, maybe that’s just a general shift of people not wanting books anymore?
They don't sell. Books are often heavy, and people don't want to carry them round the shops. People read online.
I buy them, but I prefer to read print.
DVDs and CDs don't sell - I've got some but I'd have to dig out the DVD player to use them.

I have noticed a lot refusing to take books in though, maybe that’s just a general shift of people not wanting books anymore?

Given that if I just want something to read, there's always a pretty wide choice of Kindle books at 99p, I'm unlikely to buy a charity shop book at £3 or whatever, unless it's one I specifically want. I don't think £3 is unreasonable as a price, per se, just there's a lot of easy competition now.

Ditto for DVDs vs Netflix (lots of shops seem to sell DVDs for 50p or 3 for £1 now, to reflect this)

@SorcererGaheris
Paid staff are on NMW but the manager is only getting about 30p an hour more than us which is ridiculous. This isn't attracting the best staff and if our vacancy list is to be believed, most of the vacancies are for shop manager's and assistants who are prepared to accept 7hr p/wk contracts but be fully flexible on commitment and when they work.

@Nocookiesforme

Good point about the pressure that some charity shop managers face from above. Apparently they want our Oxfam bookshop to be open longer during the week (it opens 10-5 Monday to Saturday and 11.15-4 on Sundays.)

I understand that they want to maximise the time the shop is open (and to be fair, some years back we did open from 9.30-5.30 on Monday to Fridays) but I think the amount of pressure that our manager seems to experience is rather too much, considering that her role isn't that well paid.

@gamerchick You're probably right - some people don't care about the charity cause and just the prices.
We have many, many 'regulars'. Some care and some don't but they keep coming back to our shop because we fight to keep our prices reasonable and as a result get a lot of donations which stabilises our turnover. Does that earn us any respect from area management? No....because we can always do better/make more money.....apparently!

I agree - some charities have lost their way regarding pricing. I work for one of the big charity retailers and we are also looking at large scale redundancies and closures. Our shop is hugely successful due to location but we also price things realistically. We have a manager plus a small number of paid part time staff and we have volunteers to help run the shop.
We are a success and are high up the weekly takings lists but we are constantly harassed by area management to make more money - mainly by putting up prices. We try this periodically to prove that selling higher causes a drop in income - we're told to price a coat at £20 (whereas we'd have priced it and sold it at £8) and it sits there taking up space for a month and is then reduced to £10 and it still sits there for another month and then we have to take it off sale to go to a different shop who have to start the whole £20 shite all over again. It's madness. Other shops in our area are under performing so they're told to increase prices to make more money and they then make less because the prices were already too high. When we were ordered to do £1 week we lost thousands. We sold the same number of items but only for £1 each rather than the usual £2-£10 (a good label dress or coat sells for between £7-£12 here). So we got it in the neck for underperforming that week even though we produced figures to show how much we lost from bloody £1 week. The interference and pressure applied from the top is huge.

You know, deep down, we don't give a fuck where the money goes. I also don't care how much my donations get sold for either.

We care about how much things cost. That's it. We're not going to take anything into consideration about where the money goes. That's not why we go to charity shops.

This is why we tend to swerve the expensive ones and clear out the ones who don't take your eyeballs.

This is why they're being closed down.

If people can't understand this then meh

I think charity shops have lost there way
it used to be cheap now there isn’t much different in buying new

there’s a charity shop near us which has £1,£2 and £3 section does really well also they have a free section for stuff not really fit to sell but maybe some use

I go to charity shops for the sort of good quality, long-lasting items that don’t really get manufactured any more, and I’m happy to pay accordingly on the (increasingly rare) occasions I stumble across them.
People aren't donating them any more. We've been buying fast fashion for decades.
Retail has changed from what it was when we were buying well-made clothes.

This. They are ridiculously overpriced. It's much easier to find something you actually want, in the right size for a fair price online. £5 for a washed out Primark tee that costs £2 new is just nonsensical.

For me, personally, it’s not the price.
If there is something good quality that I need, I will buy it, I tend to look round the charity shops with something specific in mind.

I don’t want to buy brand new stuff that’s been donated straight from the retailer because they couldn’t manage to sell it in their own shops - I can go to TK Max for that. We have a couple of charity shops locally that are more and more taken over by brand new tat - I don’t even bother going in any more.

I go to charity shops for the sort of good quality, long-lasting items that don’t really get manufactured any more, and I’m happy to pay accordingly on the (increasingly rare) occasions I stumble across them.

I don’t like buying things online, I prefer to touch them and look at them properly- photos are not the same.

I really do think many charity shops would do better if they gave up selling clothes and focused on other goods.

But exactly. If all your donations are stuff that people would not want to buy then you can’t expect to sell them and the shop is redundant!

Obviously donation quality has plummeted since the advent of eBay/Vinted and, added to which, more people buy Primark/Shien etc and that has a poor resale value. We all know this. So trying to flog a dead (clothes) horse seems not to be a good business move now and that is why charities are closing their shops.

I don’t think all cs workers are stupid, but frankly some are, shall we say, blinkered . One independent shop near me has a sign outside with a big hand on it saying No Donations. I did ask if they wanted dh’s work shirts (Thomas Pink etc) and the woman was very rude and barked they had to clear all their stock before taking anything else. Perusing every so often, after the initial fanfare opening, they have had exactly the same stock for three years (and actually they have just closed down).

I am not racist. When the police (a bloody rare thing) came in to get CCTV images plus spoke to a few staff. I saw the shoplifters as they were legging it. I looked at the footage and said they went down my road the previous day, taking bags of donations that people left outside their homes. Police interested and took a description of the van.

The pair of thieves belonged to a group of people of eastern European travellers that spend time in various parts of the Midlands, before being removed and then set up camp somewhere, shoplifting at the shops nearby etc.

It's just people round here call those people g.

@MaturingCheeseball charity shops can only sell what is donated though.
If all they get is old Primark and Shein donations then that's all they can sell.

It does depend where you live. The charity shops near me are, well, awful. Awful stock and awful prices. But I went to Edinburgh last year and came home groaning under the weight of purchases: a Hobbs skirt I’ve worn to death, a Mint Velvet coat and a Brora cardigan - all at very fair prices.