to think charging £40 for a dress in charity shop is not on!!

[lisad123isgoingcrazy]

Stopped off in little village charity shop today on way home. I normally find some nice little bargins in my local. There was a lovely dress, BNWT but they wanted £40 I know what the price said on tag was £120 new but tbh its properly gone in sale since.
They also wanted £4 for a furby toy, £2 for a kids book and £4.50 for a demin bag!
Anyone else been out priced b charity shop.

Many of the managers in these shops are not
your standard "old dears" as stated but younger ladies earning a good salary,I
applied as assistant manager to one very
popular shop on Wirral and the prices where
dictated from head office with no negotiation
at all,the same shop is now selling garden
decorations etc for £3.99 which in
poundland opposite are obviously £3.00
cheaper,so someone has got it very wrong.
I would however pay £40.00 for a dress if it
was what I wanted and a bit differant.

some of the goods they do pay for some shops (BHF) sell a range of gifts and jewellery which is obviously charged for,

this may be useful

look

bugger wrong thread, soz

Riven - how old is dd? Wonder if we've got anything that might be useful to her?

we call Oxfam the harrods of the charity world, their prices are ludicrous.

Agh - I think my two's stuff will be too old/big then (dd2 is 13). Sorry - would have loved to be able to send you some stuff.

I don't think £40 for a £120 dress is too bad. I would pay that if I really liked it and I had the money. Especially if it was a charity I wanted to support.
Charging more than the new price for stuff seems a bit off though. Surely the items wouldn't sell. I can only imagine that the people pricing the stuff have no idea how cheaply you can stuff clothes in shops like Primark these days.

I don't see why a charity shop manager (and staff) shouldn't receive a salary. Otherwise they are effectively donating thousands of pounds a year to the charity which is more than most of us do.

Spotted a Marc Jacobs dress in local charity shop for £60 this weekend. No idea if this is a bargain or not

The charity shops where I live are very variable - there's one which rotates stock on a (I think) 4 week basis, after the 4 weeks it's put on the £1 rail - I've managed to find Boden, Gap etc for £1, but this is also the worst culprit for the washed-out, bobbly, misshapen Primark specials. There is another across the road which sells beautiful dresses, coats and suits but you can easily pay up to £7 for a top, £12 for a pair of jeans, etc. There are a couple of others, one which sells a lot of (very overpriced, IMO) furniture - warped, faded, dated sofas for £90, 80s plywood sideboard for £50, things like that. We also have a weird little shop run by the local Conservatives which sells an small array of amusingly middle-class items.

YANBU anyway. They're better off to have a higher turnover with lower prices. I think this also encourages people to donate their clothes rather than sell them. If you had donated the £120 dress and then seen it was fetching £40, you might be tempted to eBay it next time.

My mum works in a charity shop in a low income area - they charge a lot less than London shops purely because otherwise things would not sell. A store in Richmond had a fairly worn Debenhams coat for £50 and Primark dresses for £12 - I have no idea who would buy such things there...

I like Traid as the goods are well-sorted, the vintage rails are well stocked, and I don't mind paying eBay type prices for something I like. They also have a £2 sale now and again which is when I pop in for vintage bits.

the purpose of a charity shop is to raise money for charity - not to provide you with cheap clothing. I am with the poster who suggests you go to primark if you want cheap clothes.

I don't think they have done wrong in charging a fair price for a brand new dress.

Their purpose is to raise money for charity.

Their purpose is not to provide the public with cheap products.

I don;t think the other items/prices seem wrong either.

i can see your piont you shop there to get a bargin, however it grieves me when i donate to a charity shop and then they charge pennies for it when its woth a lot more, eg i donated a complete cotbed, in fantastic condition, they put it up for just ten pounds i waqs really anoyed with them!!!!

gagamama, I disagree with the ebay comment. I took a coast dress that I had only worn once to my local shop. I am in there quite a lot, the volunteers are always happy to see my little boy and always save anything they think he will like for me to see as we are always friendly to them. I made a point of telling them it had cost me £140 and had onyl been worn once. I've lost a serious amount of weight since the wedding I wore it to and tbh it's no good to me. I told them to put a decent price on it. They put it in the window priced at £45 and it was gone by the end of the day. If I wanted to ebay it I'd have done it myself. As it was, I wanred the charity to benefit, and for them to get as much as they could from it.
Today I managed to get my ds a boxful of brio in a charity shop for a tenner, which no doubt many would think far too high a price. But I know that that stuff costs a bomb, and tbh at ten quid, for the ammount of time my ds will play with it (and we're probably talking years) it's worth every penny. I do think charity shops have a duty to try and get as much as they can for stuff, but they need someone in the shop who can realistically price things. A paid manager is the perfect person to do that imo.

Emmakate- but I dont think it's ethical to shop in primark, I'd rather go without and wear clothes with holes/permanent stains than shop there.

Anyway the most profitable Oxfam shop in the UK is a bookshop which doesn't sell any clothes. Shouldn't less well-off people have access to reasonably priced books?

And before you start shouting 'library' at me, none of my local authority's libraries stock the breadth of books I buy from charity shops.

I agree some charity shops seem to be taking the piss at the moment. Maybe because of that damn queen of charityh shops show.

That said, I once bought a vintage Betsey Johnson dress for £50 in a charity shop in Marylebone High Street. I was annoyed at the time but absolutely had to have the dress. It has been my favourite dress for years and introduced me to a designer I love.

I've been touring a few local towns' charity shops looking for music. Oxfam charging £3.99 for CDs! double what everybody else charges. I may as well just go to Amazon.

I do notice that much of the stuff some shops sell isn't donations, it's branded products. Some seem to be turning into regular shops.

I've spent £22 on a dress in a charity shops but then it looked hardly worn and was Comptoir des Cotonniers. I spent a couple of days mulling the expense over though

"I do notice that much of the stuff some shops sell isn't donations, it's branded products. Some seem to be turning into regular shops."

Some shops sell their own-brand stuff. I know the traders in town get upset by this: the charity get the full-price income from new stuff but only pay reduced, charitable rates to the Council.
There also seems to be a trend in some shops where they get a job-lot of (presumably end of season) clothes BNWT from manufacturers.

I very seldom go into our Oxfam bookshop because it is so overpriced (unless they have seen sense recently and reduced their prices, but I wouldn't know because I never bother to look anymore).

I have to say, Oxfam's charging has put me off buying books- they opened a bookshop near me, and I thought it seemed a great idea to donate books, buy more books and redonate them once read. But they seem to have a standard charge of half price the RRP, regardless of the state of the book. And given that loads of books now have their RRP inflated so that the big chains can offer huge discounts on them, it seems nonsensical- often Oxfam's pricing structure means that it is more expensive than it would be to buy brand new.

So, instead of having a customer who would be part of a chain of donating and buying and so raising quite a lot of money, they aren't making any from me because of their ridiculous pricing.