or is my local charity shop having a laugh?

[AmberNectarine]

Just popped in for a quick browse, and was staggered at the prices:

Not terribly nice Kurt Geiger flats - £45
Radley bag - £100
Primark acrylic jumper - £6.50

Haven't done any charity shopping since I moved to the area (though have dropped off a couple of bags) but is this the norm now? While I appreciate they are trying to make money for the charity, surely people would buy new rather than pay these prices? As a case in point we bought MIL a Radley last Xmas - it was £95 but John Lewis were doing a 20% disount so it ended up being seventy-something, and it was brand new...

Flame me if I'm wide of the mark here but aren't they going to put themselves out of business?

I used to work in a St. Leonard's Hospice charity shop and I did sometimes have to surreptitiously remove the Primark 300% increase and swap it for something more reasonable.

But, I mean- no one is forcing you to buy these things, it's for charity, it doesn't exist primarily to meet a consumer demand, does it? They're on the ball, off the ball, you need to shop around like you do everywhere else.

Our local one is unbelievable. They are so rude and they reguarly throw donated goods out. We have watched them emptying things into the big bin at the back. Once, my friend and I even went and looked after they had closed which we would NEVER normally do, but her daughter had said she'd watched them throw loads of good things away - she was 10 at the time and shocked! So we looked and there was a massive bag full of childrens books - not tat either, things like Dear Zoo, all in as new condition and loads of children's jigsaws that were painfully sorted by someone into pieces and placed in bags - all complete made us really mad - have since seen her throwing LOADS of stuff into the bin now, but they rip everything up now before they do so.

The woman who is "in charge" thinks she is the Queen bee, honestly, she is awful. At the moment they Have a sign on the door saying "NO MORE TOYS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE" (yeah, just before Christmas) and i kid ye not, this is because the small, 2 foot by half a foot shelf they dedicate to toys , has 3 toys sat on it. Then they have a large box on the floor which contains broken cars and Mcdonald toys for 30p each - but even this only ever has about 10 things in it.

It makes me so angry as it is a cancer shop (not cancer research) and FIL died this year of cancer, but I WILL NOT donate to them.

They (think) they have the shop arranged in such a fashionable trendy way, but all it means is, is that half the shop is empty (though because of the layout they deem it full) and that if you have a pushchair or a wheelchair you won't stand a cat in hells chance of getting around it.

Rant over

The charity shop at the end of Northcote Rd in Battersea is like this. There's also a kids' branch, where I often see Primark's early years range on sale for prices higher than they are new.

YANBU at all. Its not like days of yore when I used to frequent them in the 80's and you could pick up a genuine bargain. Full of overpriced tut that I could be for the same price or near from Tesco, Primark etc.

Blimey, I just sold an unused, BNWT and dustbag Radley on ebay. For £65. And it was a limited edition one.

Oh FARA. I got a rather nice M&S work suit there for about 15 quid which seemed fair. And I like their kids shop, it still has some quite nice stuff (at a price) though it is definitely not bargainacious - a few years ago they used to have big heaps of books at 5 for a quid but those days are long gone.

Cancer Research seems to be massively overpriced everywhere -- at least, my local one is and my sister's local CR shop actually tries to sell some stuff for more than the original price. And our local hospice shop seems to have watched too much Mary Portas as they are now laid out like a fairly minimalist boutique, the sort of terribly chi-chi shop where you're afraid to go in and touch anything. I shop quite a lot in the British Heart Foundation shop (generally reasonably priced, although with the occasional wierdly overpriced item) and in Oxfam (not bad at all except for the shoes, where I think they are rather over-optimistic).

Some depressing stories here.
Can't say that I've ever encountered any of it irl, though, and have shopped almost exclusively in charity shops for most of 2 decades.
I heard that Alderley Edge charity shops are ridiculous prices, too.

That's a good point re wanting to donate to charity, not be a charity.
I used to donate any decent kids' clothes to Sally Army through their clothes banks - I think at the time the clothes were actually taken to their shelters.

The banks seem to have disappeared locally now, so presumably they don't do it any more.

I did prefer the idea of the clothes going straight to people who needed them.

I tried to donate some almost perfect kids toys (nothing wrong with them and not played with much) to one of our local shops that had a sign saying 'stock wanted'. The reaction of the woman was horrific when i asked if they'd like them...she looked like I'd just offered her a dead dog to sell or something. They weren't big, bulkly, electrical or anything. She didn't even look in the bag.

Don't understand....ebayed them instead and only sold some for 99p but I'm pleased people that wanted them got them cheap as chips before Xmas.

miserablemum - you MUST have taken them to the charity shop by me

ragged - I too have been shopping in charity shops for years and have never come across any like the one I mentioned above - you really do have to see it! It's a joke now between us all how much they'll advertise things for, what they'll throw away and when they'll decide they have too much of everything - well toys and books at any rate

We've got one good one where we are, I normally pop in every fortnight or so and generally come away with a few bargains (Pumpkin patch jeans for dd that had hardly been worn for £1, kids videos for 10p, books for 20-50p) but the other main chains are too overpriced for me.

It's sad as I take dd in with me and at 9 even she notices that they're more expensive than some shops. When I was a teenager I used to get most of my clothes from charity shops, to make my paltry earnings stretch further, but there's no chance of that happening now.

It changes who I'll donate to as well. The shop I buy from receives all my donations, the others get nothing unfortunately.

I have had some real bargains imo from charity shops and tbh they have generally been ones that are either independent or ones where there were very few branches and that benefited a local charity. What - have bought jave largely been accessories ( seventies bag for less than four quid the modern version sells, with all the same details basically, for nearly forty quid and both not leather) however I have noticed the prices for stuff from Primark being the same as new Primark stuff.I have also seen fake designer bags being sold as though they are the genuine thing and seamingly authenticated by someone who used to work for them but works for the brand now

I had a discussion once with a manager about throwing things out because I overheard her conversation with her colleague. They were clearing the shelves of some bric-a-brac and the colleague was told to damage the goods before they went in the bin. The manager explained that they were fed up with car-booters rumaging in the bin so they made sure that the goods were unsellable. She couldn't really answer my question as to how car-booters could manage to sell the stuff when the shop couldn't.

GreyGardens Yep the ones in Dulwich I've been in are decent charity shops where you can still get a bargain (ironic as - on the whole - those living in Dulwich could afford to pay more), but there are loads elsewhere in SE London that are way overpriced and throw perfectly good unused stuff in the bins after they've closed every evening. I have seen people waiting until the shop closes so they can rummage through the bags and get stuff for free. Stuff that people donated in the belief that it would help with fund raising. I think SCOPE is one of the worst offenders.

I really wish there was a documentary exposure on the amount of stuff thrown away by charity shops or creamed off by staff.

I've seen it my charity shop too. Loads of overpriced Primark stuff and then theyll sell some posh L'occitan toiletries for pennies. As the staff are volunteers and there is often a high turnover / lots of staff, I guess it follows that some staff don't know the market value of these items to have the skills to set reasonable prices. This is juxtaposed to shops like primark/ peacocks selling lots of items for just £3.

The charity shops here are all out for every penny they can get and do little to serve the poorer community with such high prices. The charity shops here see themselves as chic boutiques for some reason!? They actually sell broken and incomplete or faded items at silly prices also. I have stopped giving them things to sell - particularly after i gave them baby equipment item which would have cost 3 pounds in good condition on ebay but charity shop priced my old seriously faded version at 13. Now where is the charity in that?

I was in barnardos last week with DD -saw high school musical hoody in her size and she decided she wanted it so I checked it over and saw some dodgy stitching round the hood -easily sortable

checked the lable inside and it was marked as a second from ASDA so hood obviously always been like that

and it was £10!!!!

strangely I didn't buy it

took her to primark instead

I volunteer in one of my local charity shops. We do our best to price dependant on quality of the items. However our head office have sent orders that the only stuff we can sell for under £1 is habicraft items (i.e. buttons, knitting patterns etc or some bits of media). We get a lot of toys in that we can't reasonable sell for £1 so we have a table top sale each school holiday in our local indoor market so that we can get the most money possible.

We get 60p per kg for rags and plastic plus council credits for recycling paper metal and electrics.

In the charity I work for the stock has to go out on shop floor for a minimum of 24 hrs before we can buy it to give customers a chance to buy it first. We get some new goods to sell and unfortunately we cannot set the prices of this and we do get remarks about the prices being high to which all we are allowed to do is apologise.

We do get some stuff which is returns and seconds from some name brand stores and these tend to be on different hangers. We are told that we must price this stock higher than normal donated stock, even when there are faults. We are not allowed to rag this stock either.

We tend to price up any specialist pieces using internet including ebay but we do reduce the price to what it sells for on the net.

What a lot of people don't tend to realise is that most charity shops tend to have high targets to reach and the amount of stress that is placed on the shop manager is horrific especially if the targets are not reached

maxybrown that is , I would definitely boycott that one, I hate good things going to waste!

Whilst I understand littledragon that its not up to you, and that it is what a lot of people do not realise, however they are doing themselves no favors at all. Whilst people do want to give to charity, they are not stupid, they will not be ripped off and will go elsewhere! Like for example workshy and others.

The charity shops are pricing themselves out tbh. If they charge less do they not realise that people will buy more.

I can't believe some of the prices people are saying charity shops near them charge!

I was in a BHF shop a few weeks ago and another customer was having an enormous rant about how expensive they were compared to other charity shops. The shop assistant's defence was that they were there to raise money for the charity rather than provide cheap clothes.

I love, love, love my local PDSA though, I've found some gems in there. They nearly always run 2 or 3 tops for a fiver promotions on a Saturday.

I can't complain. The charity shop around here( S.Wales) aren't bad at all. In fact I have sometimes told staff that they've vastly UNDERpriced stuff.

I don't bother now.

Oh, DH bought a pair of unworn G Star Raws for £3.50 last week.

I used to volunteer for Oxfam, and I wasn't allowed to buy anything unless it was already on the shop floor, and I'd have to pay the ticket price for it. It was very well run by a manager who was clued-up on brands.

Maybe things have changed though, because this was before Primarni.

Our local charity shop is pretty decent, and I've picked up some clothes for the children for a couple of quid, and books for me for 99p, so luckily no complaints here. :)