Charity shops have lost the plot

Quite a lot of the charity shops round here have had a 'shabby chic' makeover. All well and good, but they are still selling the same old bric-a-brac and saggy jumpers as they always did - just beautifully curated. At three times the price.

I'd much rather they adopted the US system of thrift stores which follow the 'pile it high, sell it cheap' methodology. They still raise money for the charities, the needy can buy stuff they can afford and the collectors & upcyclers can fill their boots.

I used to love a rummage in a charity shop. I’ll still wander in one if I’m nearby but the ones I’m thinking of are either just the worst rags ever, everything polyester and stained and yet still weirdly expensive, or a Dogs Trust that’s called a boutique or similar that’s crazy expensive but occasionally there is something lovely that’s dear but not so expensive, so it’s worth getting.

My favourite charity shop is in my home town. Local charity, good prices, proper rummage type place (none of your boutique nonsense) and always full of people. I rarely leave empty handed and it's my first port of call when I have nice things to donate.

Apart from the odd scarf I very rarely buy clothes from charity shops, I go in to look at the books, china & glass etc. I'm not going to pay £1.95 for a random paperback in a charity shop when I can get 3 for £1 at a car boot sale on Sunday. The silly thing is, if they were 50p each I'd probably buy a couple a week, read them, then donate them right back to the charity shop again.

Well, yes, as you so rightly say, you make your comment I make mine, which is exactly what I have done…hardly a debate! I have no idea what Harold Shipman has to do in a post about charity shops 🤷🏼‍♀️ but as you were….

The shops have to gauge their prices to ensure maximum profits. There's a balance between raising prices and losing customers. You can price everything at 10p, sell everything but make a loss. You can price everything so high you sell nothing. Somewhere in the middle you maximise profits, which is what they want.

Gifted link to the excellent Telegraph investigation on what happens to unsold & overpriced charity stock:

**
While volunteers keep charity shops alive, a billionaire prince is profiting
Donating our unwanted clothes is intended to benefit those less fortunate, but the ultra-wealthy are literally turning rags to riches

www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/1bb3bb9cfb09db28

Do you work for a charity? I'm wondering how you know that that charity shop strategy isn't working but, according to you, charities don't know?

I think the trouble lies in the idea of charity turned trader.

Every decent charity organisation thinks
that making money is as easy as sticking your hand out. They’re right.

Begging works very, very well. But now the same people have got to run businesses and that’s a huge culture shock.

They’ve got to contribute (a tiny bit) to the local economy (rent but no rates), pay staff (badly) and make business offers that work (not the £10 primark vest). It’s a rude shock. That’s why they moan in outrage at paying the electric light bill.

No other business does cos they aren’t used to getting stuff free.

This is well worth a read - good journalism.

Thanks for sharing @Supersimkin7

I wonder how that journalist sleeps at night. That's a disgraceful article. Charities save lives, provide care, advice and a whole raft of other kind and needed services. To write an article like that which serves no purpose other than to be in inflammatory and with no thought to the damage it is doing to the reputations of thousands of amazing Charities is disgraceful.

The problem in the world is too many people buying too much stuff which needs recycling or disposing of. Finding a way to blame charities for this is just weird. Why would she do that... other than to raise the frothiness of mouths for clicks and a piece of self-serving attention.

In many charities, the fundraising roles are separate from the operational ones. Which charities are you talking about where it's the same person?

2 of our local charity shops have closed within the last few weeks.They were very overpriced and quite frankly stocked with rubbish as most people tend to dump the dregs on them after selling the decent stuff on Facebook Marketplace,/ Vinted/eBay.

That Mary Portas series came out a few years ago. The landscape has changed. It’s now easy to sell good quality items on Vinted and simultaneously buy much cheaper new clothes from the likes of Shein or Temu.

The charity shop business model needs to move with the times , but it’s hard to know how.

Did we read the same article?

It made me feel sorry for the charity shop staff and volunteers. The writer describes volunteers struggling through huge volumes of donated items, working long hours, and dealing with bags of poor-quality clothing. It portrays charities as well-intentioned organisations struggling with the consequences of consumer waste and changing shopping habits.

Perhaps if this rag trade is so profitable to have a prince investing in it, perhaps there needs to be environmental taxes on profits that help address some of the damage with a kick back to charities.

I was also left with the feeling that there is a long way to go in educating the public about fast fashion and consumption. And to not donate something if it isn’t in good enough condition for someone to buy.

Max Studio is nothing to do with TK Maxx - it’s a separate brand. It’s definitely not designer.

2009 - that's 17 years ago. The retail environment, not just charity retail, has changed completely since then.

Its an odd one.

I see charity shops as both raising money for charity and helping the environment by recycling clothes.

By raising prices, they may be making slightly more profit, but their turn over of stock is less so their environmental side suffers.

I buy nearly all my clothes second hand for environmental reasons but since charity shops started charging ridiculous amounts I now use Vinted a lot more.

I mean £4 for a primary tshirt that cost £3 brand new?!?!?

We have certain local charity shops that do price sensibly and when they have too much stock they do bargain week where you can fill an entire bag for £10! I told to use these shops.

Clothes nowadays are far too cheap, both in quality and in price.
A decent t-shirt should be of sufficient quality to be wearable for at least five to ten years, a jumper or cardigan at least five years, and a jacket or coat should have at least fifteen to twenty years of useful life.
The only way to stop the wild excesses of the modern era will be for prices to rise drastically. If a coat cost £1,000 to buy new, maybe we would think twice about having half a dozen coats in our wardrobes and just have one coat that we wear every winter until it can no longer be mended.
If clothing were of high quality, as it used to be, there would be a strong secondhand market for it.
Furniture should be similar, very expensive to buy new but very high quality, such that you could perhaps buy it when buy your first home, or receive it as a wedding present from a well off relative, and keep it for the rest of your life. The only reason that people keep changing their furnishings is because it's cheap quality and cheap prices.

Yes, charity shops are businesses and they have to make money. But they sell stock that has cost them nothing, sold behind the till by a person who usually isn't being paid, have no card fees charged to them on transactions and pay vastly reduced business rates. They aren't "normal" businesses and too many of them are being greedy and pricing themselves out of a crowded resale market.

That's a great policy, provided they have enough new stock coming in

Yes that is true, but as you can see from this thread they are probably getting it a bit wrong because the perception of most people is charity shops are a place to find a good bargain and lots of people on this thread feel things are not priced correctly and it's putting them off. Perhaps there is a disconnect between what the charity shops want to be and what the general public perceive and want them to be.

The most busy charity shops in my town are ones where they tend to have generic pricing for them items regardless of what label it is, or there is a generic price for an upper tier of labels of about £8, so you don't have staff whacking a £30 price tag on something because it is a particular label. Of course the shop doesn't have to do this, but it's just my observation that these shops are more popular. If you go in a shop and know most tops are £4, you might a a real gem in there, and that's a bit more appealing than seeing something you like and going 😮 at the price tag. I'm more likely to return to those shops where I know what to expect in terms of pricing.

I also don't know my arse from my elbow with labels, so sometimes it is a bit baffling why something is priced really high. Likewise some shops see M&S and Next as a label and price it high, when to me it is just a high street shop. I only gravitate towards that stuff because I know it, not because I think it is anything particularly special.

have no card fees charged to them on transaction

Not true.

It’s not like someone doesn’t KNOW investing in a higher quality product for more money will (hopefully) mean better quality and longevity, it’s that they only have the budget to access the product at a cheaper price point.

I don't think that's entirely true. OK, not many people have £1000 to spend on a coat. But many people are only interested in having clothes for NOW, to wear two or three times and then discard. They don't want clothes which are going to last for years. This is the attitude which needs to shift - we should be encouraging a mindset where you buy something at whatever price point and wear it to death until it literally falls to bits. Then you use it for cleaning or whatever. There is enough clothing on this planet already for the next 6 generations and that is outrageous.