To disagree re: charity shop shopping

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Read an article in a student newspaper saying better off students (we are talking Cambridge here) should 'check their privilege' and not buy clothes and homeware from charity shops so that poorer students and townspeople can buy them. But honestly almost no one I know who is on a really low income wants to shop there - they prefer sales, fewer clothes or hand ons from friends and family. So is the writer right(YABU)) or am I to carry on shopping in charity shops for the odd item - which often aren't that cheap anyhow?

Charity shops aren't necessarily for the poor these days they are for people who like a bargain or want to get something but cheaper .
I've just bought some lovely dinning chairs for £40
I'm on the look out for a bed next .
I'll be honest I've never found any clothes but my dh has bought a few shirts .
A bargain from a charity shop is brilliant much better than buying a load of crap from primark .

A shop is a shop anyone can use it.

Charity shops aren’t for the poor to buy rags to wear. They are a business making as much money as they can for a cause be it cancer, mental health or whatever.

What next only the poor should be let in £Land? Or allowed to shop at Lidl?

i am very proud that my student daughters buy from charity shops, rather than Top shop

It was fairly easy to tell where it was from as they had things like Charles and Camilla memorabilia

No wonder it hadn't sold in the UK!

So what these privilege checking tossers want is for charities to lose income so that they can feel woke?

its hard to think of a clearer example of how this new 'ethic' is all about personal purity rather than actual social good.

Utter tosh, the virtue signalling is soooo tedious.

We’ve just been charity shop shopping it’s a favoured activity for teen DD & me. Lots of great clothes, cheaper than new, sustainable & benefits the charity. I used to do the same with my Grandmother 40 years ago. Who famously kitted her & my grandad out for a round the world cruise all in items gowns, suits & etc from charity shops.

This afternoon we spoke to one of the volunteers in the shop and she said footfall was down on previous years, donations are up & they need to get rid of the stuff. Shop away everyone they’re not going to runout!

Blimey, the charity shops near me are still far more expensive than Primark/Asda etc!

@unoeufisunoeuf1

Apparently only something like 10-15% of stock ever actually gets sold. The rest ends up as waste.

More people, of all different backgrounds using charity shops is a good thing imo: More cash for the charities, a good turnover of stock, and an erosion of the stigma attached to buying used goods.

Charity shop volunteer here. Those figures are way off, virtually everything sells. Shops are turning away donations at the moment because everything has to be “quarantined “ for 72 hours before being put out in the shop, and most shops do not have enough space to store the donations for that long. Also, a lot of the stuff cleared out over lockdown isn’t quite as nice as some of the donors seem to think!

I think charity shops would prefer it if people shopped there, full stop. Discouraging people from shopping there is stupid. It's not like they're rammed.

This sounds like a similar argument to not buying reduced food in the supermarket if you can afford to buy full price, and leaving it for those to whom a small saving would make a big difference.

Charity shops aren't necessarily for the poor these days they are for people who like a bargain or want to get something but cheaper

In my town charity shops seem to be aimed at the very privileged who don't mind paying sky high prices for mismatched,chipped crockery. Those of us who are trying to get a bargain or cheap stuff go to the pound shops.

From an environmental perspective, the more people using them the better, and that includes people buying stuff to sell on. It's all re-use and we should be doing as much of that as we can.

Also there's a range of pricing in charity shops - they are wise to designer items, and labels with a high resale value like Boden. That enables them to maximise income from the better off while they sell other things at a lower price. So poorer people who need very low cost stuff can still find that.

I live in an area with lots of charity shops that everyone uses – from the wealthy to the homeless. They wouldn't all be there if it wasn't for the more privileged using them too, as that brings in more money.

If I go into local small town, the places I can look at clothes is very limited - only two that sell ordinary everyday clothes, the others being posh undies and bridal. I don't like the 2 ordinary brands and charity shops offer a really good range.
I suppose I should jump in my car and drive elsewhere then

Mum is a size 8 and picks up superb clothing in charity shops.
I went to some of her local ones and found cashmere jumpers...Shop in wealthier areas... Silk, Cashmere, lovely natural fibres.
Anyone can shop in them, they are for the benefit of the charity.

Thankfully the bad old days of the stinky stale sweat smelling charity shops are long gone...but the prices are much stiffer.

Anyone can use them of course.

Mind, our local ones seem to massively overcharge, so I don't think they would be much use to low income people anyway. An example would be a jumper from primark for 10 quid last year that I saw. Jumper cost 3 quid new One of the local ones will also sell furniture, and its not unusual to see them have a sofa in the window thats clearly very used, with a 600 quid pricetag on it. Cabinets and that seem to be about the same price as new too.

I find charity shops too expensive. So ebay, primark or Sainsbury sales are my go to

There are a lot of Charity Shops in Cambridge especially behind the Grafton Centre & the reason they are positioned there is because because students buy from them - that's how they get their money to support the Charity

Do beware though of moth

Second hand woolies can have moth eggs in .... freeze newly bought items if you are at all worried. Moth is a huge problem in many parts of UK, and a Cashmere jumper is like curry to a pisshead to a moth wanting to lay her eggs and her resultant caterpillars.

Cambridge charity shops are weirdly shit though. They defy the posh places = good stuff

Totally agree with this. I came to the conclusion that wealthy people don't part with things until they are broken or unusable, but the working class regularly renew things and this is reflected in the location of the charity shop.

Where else are we to get rare vintage finds?

@CruzControl Come on - you must realise some students have loads of "extra" money provided by family and others have little or none? Oxbridge especially has loads of students from well off families, public school educated etc.

@brazenlydefying and @pointyshoes, Apologies for that. I was the poster who said I'd heard only a small proportion got sold. I think it was actually another thread on here! Some volunteers were lamenting the amount that just didn't sell. I realise that volunteers work enormously hard, move stock to other locations, recycle etc.

If the % sold is much higher at your shops, that's great and very heartening. I'm a big supporter of charity shops. But the fact remains that tons of "recycled" clothes end up being a huge problem in the countries they get shipped off to. Not the fault of charity shops, but I think my point was really that there's more than enough second hand stuff to go around!

I'd also add that I used to work in an Oxfam shop and we had a whole section for retro clothing, and some of it was pretty expensive. I remember back in the '00s when vintage was fashionable and IIRC loads of people were shopping in charity shops because they're good places to get vintage stuff.

Charity shop doesn't always equal bargains
They are more often a place to find the more unusual item
Most charity shops also list their "best" items on eBay anyway