To ask charity shop workers what you DO and DON'T want donated

[DimityandDeNimes]

Obviously you don't want anything dirty or broken.

I'm having a massive clear out and am struggling to decide what to donate or recycle or bin.

Are you overwhelmed by stuff at the moment? My friend dropped a few bags at a huge charity shop and said their faces dropped at the sight of more stuff!

In east London there is the Magpie Project which gives donations to women and families without course to public funds- refugees etc. Women in really desperate situations. Im sure there are similar organisations throughout the country.

emmaus.org.uk/your-local-emmaus/

You could try Emmaus. The one near us sells EVERYTHING. And they can collect furniture from you afaik

H&M usually have a bin for clothing, bedding etc.* - they take anything in any condition as they sort it for reselling/donating/recycling, and you get a £5 voucher for each bag you donate.

*Disclaimer: I've not been since shops reopened so not sure whether they're offering the service atm. Might be worth contacting your local store to check.

It's been a while since I was a volunteer so things may have moved on, but in our shop the things that used to sell well were

-Puzzles, esp children's puzzles and orchard games (please check all the bits are there, nothing more time consuming as a volunteer counting the bits only to find one is missing)
-Ladies activewear sold well
-Good condition clothing (anything bobbly or stained has to be ragged as it doesn't sell, a bobbly top is a bobbly top Boden or otherwise)
-Good condition kids clothes, books and toys (barbies and matchbox cars were popular)

Things we could have done without:

Primark clothes and well worn supermarket clothes, they are so cheap to buy new so people don't want them second hand.
-underwear and nightwear, we would put nice PJs out but they just did not sell.
-old, heavy curtains and bed linens.
-toiletries, without breaking seals it's difficult to tell if they have gone off.
-videos and CDs

Check if the shop you are donating too can accept electrical items, not all can.

Obviously this was just the shop I was volunteering in, others may have different bestsellers, might be worth checking. It's lovely that you want to check, I think people often forget that a person giving thier time for free have to sort through every bag.

@bookmum08 frankly I was too outraged to bother !! Perhaps they didn't like nearly new boden, Jaeger, Joules and M&S in that particular shop - Hospice shop seemed very pleased with them though.

Where I live people have started putting boxes of books and DVDs outside their houses with ‘please take if you’re interested’ signs, because they know charity shops won’t take them. (Obviously works better on a street of terraces than it would if you live in sweeping driveways land!)

^ those days beore I had children and could afford to splurge my budget on silly things... primark and tk maxx all the way now!^^

Dirty doesn't matter so much (if not irredeemably stained) as it all gets steam washed or whatever before it goes out.

Charity shops are not tips for any old rags

They're not - apart from the charity shops that actively want rags to sell on for textile recycling, and in my experience that's actually the majority of charity shops.

H&M usually have recycling bins for old clothes. I normally do a pile for charity shop of stuff I think they will be able to sell but stuff that is worn out goes to H&M to be recycled. I hate the thought of sending anything to landfill that can be avoided

I once asked in a new to me charity shop if they accepted "bags of clean rags" and the assistant looked horrified and said no AND furthermore insisted it was not a " thing" at all. 🤔

It's crazy there is way too much stuff and we are still making more and more of it

All my donations have gone to the local hospital shop or in the donation bin outside the fire station.

I rang the local women's shelter they weren't taking donations, neither were Cancer Research or Salvation Army.

It is a bit hit and miss though, but I didn't want to throw good stuff away so I drove around for a few days with a boot full of stuff. Local charity shops are happy to take donations (eventually) but just haven't got the space they need, to accept them all the time.

listsandbudgets I still find it odd. Unless this was years ago I would contact the manager. It could have been a volunteer that couldn't be arsed to sort stuff but if the manager knew this had happened they would be horrified.
Same with the Lego set mentioned up thread. It could be the volunteer was deliberately hiding the Lego to retrieve later and sell for personal money (ie they were stealing it). Again the manager may have been horrified to discover this.

We buy very little and so do end up with rags eventually.

I am composting small amounts of old holey pure wool and cotton this year. I'll see how it goes. (I'd only admit that on an anonymous board!)

I am a charity shop volunteer. We are grateful for anything, just ask yourself first whether you'd pay money for it. That colouring book with scribbles on every page and the empty DVD boxes are really just fit for the bin.

A few pointers on other stuff:

Textiles - we will take ANY FABRIC ITEMS and those which aren't fit for sale we will send for rags. We will love you forever if you mark bags as rags. Bedding - duvet covers might sell in good condition, sheets generally don't and we'll rag them. 70s blankets, curtains and bedding flies off the shelves as people look at them in terms of the fabric content rather than the item itself. We can also recycle shoes, belts and bags.

Electricals - we can't take anything which plugs into the mains, other places can. Always ask first.

Food - we can't sell any donations which are edible. Even if it's one of those "cook Japanese" kits with a wok, chopsticks and rice. We'd have to throw the rice out, and just sell the non-edibles.

Toiletries - unused and unopened make-up, gift sets, and all other toiletries sell well. So does wrapped soap. Anything opened has to be binned.

Fur/Angora - the charity I volunteer with has a policy not to sell anything with fur or made from angora. It goes for rags. Other charities may have different policies.

Video tapes and cassettes - pretty much obsolete and impossible to shift. Unless it;s something really, really special.

Things which sell well in my experience:
craft stuff
homewares - especially retro 70s/80s
jewellery - especially clip earrings
Lego and jigsaws, board games in good condition
Books - both reference and modern paperbacks
Vinyl music (CDs not so much)
Coats, jackets, occasion wear, high end brands like Hobbs, Reiss, Toast.
Christmas decorations and baubles

@bookmum08 I don’t know why, but it was a bin that also had scraps of packaging, used plastic bottles etc in. I had donated them (3 of the small sets, not big ones), and was looking around for other stuff. This specific shop doesn’t have toys but more furniture and books, but them being part of a big chain I assumed they would just send it to the next shop which does sell toys (opposite the road, but with very limited opening hours).
They had no signs what they take/don’t take.

I once asked in a new to me charity shop if they accepted "bags of clean rags" and the assistant looked horrified and said no AND furthermore insisted it was not a " thing" at all. 🤔

It was a thing in our shop, the 'rag man' would visit once a week to collect the rags, however even then, long before Covid it took up volunteers time sorting out rags (we loved donors who bagged thier rags separately) and a lot of space, it wasn't really worth it for the few pence each bag earned. We really didn't want to chuck things as like a PP mentioned it costs the charity to dispose of waste.

I agree that small, local charity shops tend to be much more grateful for the donations. I got sick of the sarky comments when dropping off in places like British Heart Foundation or Cancer Research. Out local hospice and animal shelter shops are far more friendly.

I only donate the sort of stuff I'd want to buy. Things like old bobbled tshirts simply go in the clothing bank bins. The only thing I've had no luck with is books. Nobody will take them, even the newer hardbacks, so they went to the dump.

Oh and also agree that these are not "normal times". We have been told by the Charity Retail Assoc that donations have to be quarantined for 72 hours. Add that to the fact we have limited space and fewer volunteers since the pandemic and we are struggling to cope. We are asking people to make appointments to drop stuff off.

Hopefully this won't be forever, as soon as someone does the science to prove there's no way you're catching anything from an old Jilly Cooper paperback or a jigsaw.

I regularly donate.
Ask first, the shops local to me that are accepting donations are Scope and Cancer Research. There are another 3 but one is closed and the other two have no space.

They want clean wearable clothes. Anything clean but beyond repair can be bagged and clearly labelled as Rags.

They take bric-a-brac and usable kitchen stuff like crockery and cutlery.

@timeforanew

I just bin stuff these days. One charity shop binned (boxed, sealed) lego right in front of me. Well, I can do that without going to their shop. So it either goes on freecycle or in the bin.

That is just insanity! Lego {the real deal, branded} always has a value as so well engineered. An antiques dealer I know always goes to a local Salvation Army shop and picks up 1960's ceramics that he sells for a hell of a lot more...

It seems that charity shops let good items slip through that could earn them a lot more money.
A Beswick china horse in a rare colour way raised £4,000 for a charity shop ..Ebay Auction..but the ''common'' colour way would have been about £15.

I think it was a steel grey Shire mare.

My mum volunteered in a Cancer Research charity shop.

All clothes for sale had a date they came in on the label and were binned if they didn't sell after a month. I think that makes good sense in terms of stock turnaround, rather than having dusty old stock they're failing to shift.
That might account for people seeing bags of clothes binned outside?

I would have thought a good rule of thumb is;
-donate one large bin bag max at a time, or distribute among several shops?
-clothes or toys that you would happily gift to a friend or family member
And all clean with no damage.

We love charity shops in this household (rummaging, buying, and donating - we always make it a rule not to donate anything we wouldn't happily buy/wear ourselves and we always wash things thoroughly before we donate. Given that I've been 4 different dress sizes in the last 18 months due to health reasons, we currently have a bit of a backlog of various garments!). I know our local hospice charity, which is excellent, is overrun with donations at the moment; they're only taking donations at the central office on certain days.

I also know that our local homeless charities are looking for autumn/winter clothing and sleeping bags, so depending on what you're clearing out, that might be an option. And a friend who used to teach English to new arrivals did some work with a refugee charity, where they helped people who also literally had nothing.

I've missed having a good rummage in both of our nearest shops over Lockdown :(

Books

Give them to your local Global Education Trust shop donate.thebiggive.org.uk/charity/0011r00002HoaziAAB or put them in book banks, or if it is only a few books, give them to the charity shop.
Some CSs are books only.

As I posted previously, ask first

Some areas have book fairs. There used to be one local to me. Offer the books on Freecycle or Freegle.