What is the strangest behaviour you have witnessed in a charity shop?

[CharityShop]

I help out at a very small charity shop. We have no changing room, so customers can return items if they try them on at home and they don't fit.

This morning, a customer didn't want to take a pair of trousers home to try. She took off her own trousers in the middle of the shop in order to try the trousers she wanted to buy on! Cue bemused looks from other customers!

woman buying a 50p paperback asking if she could return it and get her money back if she ‘did not like it’

DD did her DofE volunteering in a charity shop. They had a few regular customers, one of whom was a man who used to come in and select several dresses to try on in the changing room. Not content with that, he would emerge from the changing room in a frock, parade around in it and always made a point of asking the volunteer if she thought it suited him, if it was his colour, etc.

Similar to @LadyGreySpillsTheTea I was in a charity shop in SW England (I live in NE Scotland) and saw a pile of assorted crockery priced £4 for the lot but I only needed the cereal bowls and didn't want to humph the whole lot 600 miles home (plus no room in the car).

The shop wouldn't allow me to pay the £4 and leave the plates behind but they did allow me to buy the whole lot and re-donate the plates. Win-win!

Used to work in a charity shop, strangest thing (but in a nice way) was when a group of people from Thailand who were visiting my town came in, after politely removing their sandals/flipflops at the door, leaving them outside. I know its custom there so understood but was a bit out of place.

And then there was the woman who expressed interest in a jigsaw that we were selling for 50 cents or so. She asked me if all the pieces were there, I said I didn't know for sure but probably. She then insisted I check while she went for lunch. So I counted them all, twice, and that's when I discovered that jigsaws don't actually have the number of pieces they say on the box, they have more. Which was why I counted twice, as I was so confused the first time And then she never bloody came back!

Not odd behaviour, just an odd observation from a few years of volunteering in a charity shop - the most popular items, without fail, are suitcases. Any that came in went straight to the front of the shop and were inevitably snapped up within minutes.

You get quite a lot of them donated but it was the only stock we never had backed up in the storeroom, because you didn’t even need to keep them overnight. I’ve never understood why they were so popular versus other types of stuff!

I was in one when an elderly lady tried to buy a wheelie shopping trolley that already belonged to another lady in the shop. It had all her shopping in it too 😁

Someone brought their dog in, which had dog faeces on it's feet. It walked right around the shop. You could see the filthy paw marks all over the shop. Also smell it. The staff had to wash the whole floor to get rid of the mess.
Dirty, selfish dog owner.

One of my mum's greyhound owning friends went into a charity shop to buy a big teddy for her dog. When she went to pay for it, the volunteer asked if the teddy was for a grandchild. When she said it was for her dog, the volunteer refused to sell it to her. She ended up leaving empty handed.

This was about 30 years ago, and not weird so much as funny. I bought a CD in a charity shop in a small rural town while on holiday with my friends, and the little old lady selling it to me called out to a colleague 'How much is this... video cassette?' Bless her, she didn't even know what a CD was.

I mean, I know most people under 35 now won't know whar a CD is, but at the time you'd have expected people to know!

People stealing, it’s rife. It’s so low, we have had to ban people.

A guy took a broken hobby horse out of our skip at the back, he did not leave a mess and we are ok with that as we have to pay for our skip to be emptied. I saw him later riding round it on the park. Just a lost soul enjoying himself, upset me really.

One shop I volunteer in will let homeless people pick a complete set of clothes and shoes for free. They are also still very cheap and nothing is over £5 with most being £1,£2,£3.

This happened to my DH coat. He took it off to try on a jumper and hung the coat on the rail next to him. Next thing someone had taken it up to the counter and the volunteer was calling the manager because he didn't have a price! We almost didn't get it back!

I volunteered in a charity bookshop in a very affluent market town. A man wanted to buy something and was outraged I wouldn't discount it. "Who's going to want to buy that?" he harrumphed and wasn't best pleased when I replied "well.. you do." And then he bought it full price.

Ha! I can so believe this. There’s a particular type of volunteer who’ll treat the shop as their own little fiefdom and will often make decisions based on their own random views/preferences (i.e. dogs should not be allowed to have teddies meant for children 😂).

Or create ‘rules’ around what other volunteers can or can’t do - “Oooh, no, don’t touch the window display, Beverley does that on Tuesdays and Fridays and gets very upset if anyone moves anything”; “Colin likes all the CDs put to one side so he can alphabetise them on Wednesday morning”; “Barbara only likes doing the till, so you’ll have to do everything else on Saturday”.

Absolute PITA, but the paid managers can’t do much except roll their eyes because these places would be on their arses without volunteers, so you end up having to accommodate the Barbaras and Colins, even though they make more work for everyone else.

Yesterday while browsing, there was a sudden lot of yapping. A customer’s dog and the shop volunteer’s dog evidently didn’t like each other. Customer left then the volunteer rummaged under the clothes racks where I was (a set of spinny ones not a rail) and pulled out a dog bowl. So I guess the dog had been parked under the clothes. It did put me off.

One lady in the shop I volunteer in bought a donated green dress in a size 10 to the till “ do you have this in blue in a 14” she asked!!
Even after I’d explained everything was donated and pretty random she thought we might have one tucked away at the back!! Unbelievable.

Sorry haven't read the whole thread so may be repeating things!

Weirdest behaviour by a customer - arguing endlessly to try to buy a £1 kettle for 25p. Meanwhile a queue of around 15 people (including me) accumulated. I think I was stood there for nearly an hour while she ranted but I really wanted the dress I'd found!

Weirdest behaviour by staff/volunteers - pricing Primark tops at double the price of actual new Primark tops.

🙈🤣

Not weird but I was in one of my local charity shops a few years ago and apparently one of the customers had put some money down on the counter, and then someone else on the shop grabbed it and ran out!!! Didn't see it happen

Someone brought nail scissors, cut a small but noticeable hole in a designer jumper (it was priced at £40) and demanded a discount. The shops policy was no discounts but found out afterwards a week or so before a volunteer went rogue and offered a discount. The jumper ended up being “ragged” as unsellable. (I used to managed a shop)

I was in a shop donating some stuff with DH but we were in a massive rush. The woman working there started asking DH to sign up
for updates etc. I said no we have to go sorry. She looked at DH and said, ‘Can’t you control her?’ Never donated there again!

Two more but to do with other volunteers there.

One lovely old woman insisted on bringing in milk for hot drinks so we didn’t have to buy it out of the petty cash and would bring it in a little juice bottle each day. Except she wouldn’t clean the bottle out. So you’d have milk that tasted like Irn Bru or Coke and it was gross. She would get really upset if we were caught swapping it so we had to pretend that we used it all then go buy one in the shop for the rest of the day. And if you were caught washing the bottle out she would bin it and you’d have a new unwashed one filled with milk the next day.

Another day I showed up to my shift to find the shop closed and totally locked up with no one inside. This was before mobile phones were really common so I just went home again as I had no way to contact anyone and didn’t know the manager’s number. Later on the manager got in contact with me to explain. I had been on close with another volunteer, all the takings had to be double signed then put into the night deposit box at the bank. He knew that I often had to run for a bus at the end of the night and if I missed it I had to either wait an hour or walk for around 45 minutes so got me to sign everything and said he would bank it and I could go get my bus. Except he didn’t bank it. He took all the takings, the petty cash and the float from the safe and went off to the casino and blew the lot. So when the manager showed up the next day she couldn’t open up as there was no float and they didn’t know what had happened. He thankfully admitted to it straight away but I still had to answer a few questions from the police to see if my story was the same as his.

We had this at the shop at the dump! All red books together going to pink, green going to blue etc 😂

Or Margaret who took something home “on appro” every shift, without fail. Even if we didn’t get any donations in her size, she’d find something on which she wanted first refusal. (This was way more important than doing any actual work.)

I work in a charity shop and we have only ever arranged books by author in the fiction section. Other things are arranged by genre and then size within that.
I'd hate to have colour coordination as a yardstick for book sorting.

How it should be 🙂