To think the owner of this shop is a brazen cow?

[user1477282676]

I live in a tourist town in Australia. It's quite old and pretty and there are two charity shops and one overprices "vintage" shop. The vintage shop sells everything from furniture to clothing and crockery etc...as they do.

Fine.

EXCEPT!

I keep seeing things from the charity shop in the vintage shop marked up four times. I KNOW it's a case of "She knows the value of the items and they don't"

But it's so wrong! The shop she mainly gets things from is a Save the Children FFS!

Last week I saw a nice dress in the charity shop...1960s original party dress. It was priced at 8 dollars. About 4 or 5 pounds.

I didn't buy it as my arse is too fat for it. Today I spot it hanging in the window of the bloody vintage shop for 40 dollars. I go inside and there I see a china teacup and sandwich plate plus matching saucer which I had ALSO seen in the charity shop...she had this trio marked at 22 dollars...the charity shop had 3 dollars on it.

Most of her things, the vintage lady gets from auctions I know...but how can she BEAR to rob a charity shop like this?

Isn't it morally wrong?

Also I don't know how this would work in Australia, but in the U.K. The business owners costs would be a lot higher than for the charity.

Charities often have discounted rents and low business tax. They don't pay volunteers etc etc. Businesses can't compete with that.

Not as bad as the woman who bought a tie dye skirt that my sister and I had made, off a stall we had at a festival. She beat the price down, as we were young (teens) and let her bully us. Then we saw it hung outside her shop! Cheeky mare. We worked hard making all the stuff we sold.

One charity shop near me put its prices up significantly after a refit, and , clearly, a new business model. It now only sell vintage-y, designer--type clothes or good-quality high street clothes, etc - definitely no George at Asda any more. Their prices went up tenfold.

YABU

They only give their "profits" to the charity they take out their wages and expenses. Erm... yes... many small local charities work alongs similar lines to the big ones!

Some deduct expenses, they still have rent, rates, utilities, insurances etc.

Some deduct wages for managers, bookkeepers, etc.

Some take a wage themesleves, if they work within what is, after all, a business!

Very few charities are run by the wealthy who can afford to pay for all the expenses incurred. Some are run for very local concerns by local people who still need to eat and pay their own bills!

YABU.

I think it's quite common for charity shops to have a paid manager and also volunteer staff?

I agree with you OP.

It's distasteful. Let's hope she's making some generous donations to the Charity with the profit.

I have a friend who does this : buys clothes from op shops and re sells them at markets for a handsome mark up. She's as tight as a fish's, and always on the take. It's unattractive.

It would be wrong IMO if she was going in and haggling down the prices in order to buy them even more cheaply (and thus reduce the income to the charity but increase her personal profit), though nothing illegal about it. But if she is paying the asking price, then it is what it is (and the way you talk about the shop owner is really unpleasant)

Really the charity shop managers should have cottoned on to this by now and started to recognise what sort of thing Mrs Vintage buys. They could then set up their own vintage corners and make more money for the charity.

Of course they take a wage and pay bills. Just depends how large that wage is! I used to think they were saintly enterprises until the owner of the third one on our local street was crowing about how much she was personally earning. Friends Dh checked out their company records and let's say they were doing rather well out of it. No wage costs, tax breaks etc. I felt rather naive.

But if they set up to tithe to a charity then what is the problem? 10 % of the profits go to charity.

50%, 5% who really cares, if that info is available up front (as it should be by law)? Charities benefit from someone elses business, someone elses generosity. It has always been like that!

How much of your earnings do you give to charity?
How much of your leisure time supports a charity?

Sometimes charity shops give a lot, sometimes a little... but they all give!

I am a charity shop volunteer and can see both sides. I am sure that there are people who come in, snap up bargains and resell. I was chatting with one customer the other day who was buying lots of pictures - he has a side business as a picture framer so buys up prints and pictures we have in naff frames for a couple of quid, reframes them in something much nicer and sells them on at much higher prices. We just don't have the resources to do that so we are happy to move the pictures on cheaply and have space for more stock. We have so much donated stock we can't physically process it on and are tripping over it in the back shop, and regularly send vans around the country to other shops with less items to sell.

Some items though ARE expensive and we try our best to charge their worth. We have several expensive items of jewellery in a locked cabinet (£50 plus, expensive for a charity shop) and also often get things like vintage tea sets which we Google to set a realistic price. If we can get £100 for a vintage tea set which someone sells for £125 on Ebay, we're still £100 up, however frustrating it is to think we may have lost out on that extra £25. Remember too that it's dependent on the volunteer pricing the item - someone may think a Clarice Cliff teapot is a piece of tat and price it at £1.99, someone else may think Atmosphere is a top end designer brand and price a Primark dress at £20. Managers can't check the pricing on absolutely everything sold.

Most charity shops - the major chains like Oxfam, Barnardos, Shelter, Save the Children - will have one or possibly 2 members of paid staff, the rest are volunteers. Being a charity shop manager is not lucrative - full time wages around £8 per hour. I would argue that someone who is only passing profits to a charity and driving snazzy new cars isn't really running a charity shop at all, they're like the people who put the plastic bags through the door for clothing collections and give 2p per tonne to charity.