To never buy a jigsaw from a charity shop again.

[PiperIsOrangePumpkins]

i got a 2500 piece on which I almost completed this weekend, the reason it not fully completed is that it had 1 piece missing.

Am I just unlucky or do jigsaw generally always have pieces missing from charity shops.

I hate the BHF

Mumsnet gets more fucking ridiculous by the hour.

How the hell do you "hate" a charity that raises millions for research into heart disease simply because you're pissed off that a bit of second hand jigsaw was missing?

Truly the most ridiculous thing I have read on here in years.

You could offer to check them.

at the nest, that's horrible!!

Jen I am under 30, but I shop at charity shops because I want to support the charity.

I have even be in a charity shop and offered more, because I know it's only 10% of the value 2nd hand.

Charity shops should put up a notice. I bet there are loads of people who would happily complete jigsaws and give them back to sell.

My elderly neighbour volunteers in a charity shop. She checks that all games and jigsaws have all of the pieces. She brings them home and does it in her own time. However it's for a local charity rather than a large national so I don't know if that makes a difference.

Never ever buy a jigsaw once it's been opened.

I am sure the seller/donator removes one piece before they hand it over and then piss themselves laughing

I wouldn't buy a second hand jigsaw. Unless it states it's checked, I would assume that nobody is going to spend the time to complete or count a puzzle with thousands of pieces when it is only worth a pound or two.

My dog has eaten one piece out of the last two puzzles I've done. It seems a great shame that they should just go in the recycling now. (I used to do puzzles on a coffee table as it is big & not in much use).

We gave some puzzles to a charity shop recently. Dp diligently completed each puzzle first, to check they were complete. Bless him.

yanbu, when you see the price of brand new charity shop ones are usually screaming bargains, piece missing or not.

sorry, was meant to be YABU. Oh the Shame.

My mother is a puzzler, she used to buy a lot from one local charity shop but almost all were incomplete. Being the brazen type she she took them back and told them if they couldn't be bothered to count them then they shouldn't be selling them.
She's not had any from there since.

I bought a 1000 piece in poundstretcher a BBC nature photo, brand new, cellophane etc. It had 1000 pieces but one was a duplicate, how does that even happen?!? I always assumed the picture was cut then put in the box, not that each piece was individually made and sorted into boxes.

So we finished puzzle, had one piece left and one piece missing which didn't fit. Bizarre. will teach me to buy jigsaws on the cheap

We get a few regulars, buy the puzzles, do them and bring them back, to be re-sold.

Does anyone remember in the book "Jacob Two-Two meets the Hooded Fang", the character of Master Fox who did toy shop sabotage: swapping jigsaw pieces from box to box? Also switching labels on tubes in chemistry sets.

Somewhat tangential, pondering over some maths here: is it true that when a puzzle says 1000 pieces, sometimes it's not exactly 1000, but actually something more mathematically convenient like 1024? (Sometimes the word "approx" might be in small print on the box.)

1000 is a slightly inconvenient number mathematically for a rectangular jigsaw with ordinarily shaped pieces, as it has (relatively) few factors:
1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 20, 25, 40, 50, 100, 125, 200, 250, 500, 1000. (Have I missed any?)

The only "sensible" rectangle of exactly 1000 pieces would be a 40 by 25 jigsaw. Anything else would give a jigsaw which looks rather "widescreen", or even "letter box" shaped...

I would have thought s decent set of scientific scales would help. Weigh 10 pieces - divide by 10 to give you average weight per piece, then weigh the whole lot and see how many pieces you have in total. Accuracy would be a function of the variance in weight between the pieces, but would certainly catch multiple pieces missing.

It's how they count coins ....

Jen I agree. Bhf have sold me items that did not work but refused to refund me. They are a shop like any other so why should they get away with this??? Also our local bhf prosecuted a homeless man who had asked for a pair of old shoes been refused and he then took a pair!

I bought one the other day which said 'complete' on the box. I ama guessing that they don;t do the puzzles, they just count the pieces. Mine was a thousand piece puzzle with one piece missing, but five spare pieces from an entirely different puzzle So somone has five pieces missing from their puzzle (or possibly four as they may well have my missing piece.)

I feel a FB group coming on - 'Have you got right hand side piece from 'Cats in the Garden' willing to swap for four middle pieces from 'Birds of The World' and will throw in a green edge piece (source unknown) for free