To think I've done nothing wrong by making money on a charity

[Thealarmhasgoneoffagain]

I bought a dress for £60 in a charity shop. I didn't think many people would recognise the brand as it's locally made but it would have cost about £300 I think and would probably be a ooak. I'm asuming the charity shop knew this though because of the high price.

I bought the dress for me but it doesn't fit. I didn't want to get a refund from a charity shop but at that price I can't redonate it either. So I put it on my local FB page askimg for offers. I said it was from the charity shop but I didn't put how much I paid. If anyone asked I would have told them.

Someone offered me £100 and I accepted. They collected it and messaged me afterwards to say how happy they were.

Before I could remove the post someone commented that they worked in the shop and it cost £50. Now I'm getting lots of abuse about being greedy and ripping off the charity. The lady who bought it has put angry faces on it. I also have a couple of things on there for free and people have made nasty comments on those. I've removed all my posts now.

I don't feel bad about making money on the dress as that was never my intention. £60 was much, much more than I would normally spend in a charity shop and tbh I don't want to donate the £40. It was a proper charity shop, not one run by little old ladies who price everything at 50p because they don't know any better.

The lady who bought it, offered £100 and never asked how much I paid and was happy until she found out I paid less. I do feel bad that she won't enjoy the dress though as it's a beautiful dress.

AIBU for keeping the £40?

The shop claims the gift aid - to is offset against the donor's tax by the govt. That's why you can only gift aid items if you are a taxpayer.

But either way, if an item is gift-aided the shop gets an extra 25%.

Of course YANBU. Charity shops these days know exactly what they’re selling, and how much things are worth. Their error if they under priced the dress.

Yes - I've seen adverts in charity shops for volunteers to do eBay listings for them.

Your critics are bonkers. Once you have purchased something, from any source, you are free to do with it as you see fit.

The charity shop employee is WAY out of line, and I'd complain to the shop manager.

Yes - worth knowing if you are part of a couple where one doesn't earn enough to pay tax - make sure the donations are in the taxpayer's name!

Why?

If someone buys an item from a car boot for £5, and then sells it on eBay for £15, should they track down the car boot seller and give them the £10 difference?

Do you give all the money you earn to charity?

Threads like these demonstrate that people could get angry at an empty room. It really doesn't matter at all.

The only person I would have a negative opinion on after this is the busybody charity shop worker who burst her piss to be in the comments with incorrect information and leading the charge in bullying you and harassing you online. Not very charitable behaviour acting like some social media "heavy" in the name of a charity. I'd be complaining to the head office.

No you were not wrong.

The shop worker OTOH was very wrong.

FB is a shit fest.

Seconded @BatshitBanshee - it was a mean and spiteful thing to do.

It has caused distress to OP who got piled on, it seems, and it has taken the gloss off the dress for the other woman. She was thrilled with her purchase, but now feels (wrongly) that she has been cheated.

This. Charities are money making entities.

Partly true.

Every charity does things differently. Oxfam has its own online shop and managers/volunteers list things on it. They are not "collected", this all happens in the store.

But it is dependent on having volunteers to photograph stuff from every conceivable angle, write the listing, package it up, take it to the post office. It's time consuming and when there is only one computer for the whole shop, often not possible. So often we'll try to sell stuff in the store. In the situation the OP describes we'd have chosen to put a £60 dress out for sale in the store rather than sell online too, I know we have customers prepared to pay that much, we've sold items for that much in the past.

To get a wee bit extra we'd have to go through the whole listing thing - say 30 minutes to 45 minutes including packaging and posting. In that time I could have priced three black bags of donations for 10 times the extra i'd have made putting the item online.

If you resold a BNWT New Look dress for an extra fiver on top of what you paid for it, what would you do with the money?

Thanks @FamilyTreeBuilder - I thought I'd seen stuff advertised online from Oxfam, but didn't realise the logistics. I made the assumption that evrything was taken away to some sort of Alladin's cave of 2nd hand goods.

I'm actually doubly impressed with volunteers who will go to all this trouble.

Other charities perhaps do send stuff off to be listed centrally but it would depend on volume of stuff. moving stuff around costs money and it's cheaper to list locally.

How many times have we seen on TV items bought in a charity shop or car boot sale for very little being valued at a much greater amount. Don't see the owner being questioned about are they going to give the difference back to the charity no they are congratulated on their find.

The only thing you did wrong was to mention that you'd originally bought it from a charity shop.

The charity shop shouldn’t have posted on your advert anyway, they got what they asked so that’s the end of it for them

You've done nothing wrong, other than provide a back story in the advert, if you'd just stated it wasn't new, that would have sufficed.

When all is said and done, the charity got what they were asking for it, you got a few extra quid in your pocket, and another woman got a dress at a price she was happy to pay.

The charity shop worker definitely shouldn't have waded in and stirred the pot. Incredibly unprofessional.

Ignore and block the trolls on FB. Hope you buy something nice with your £40. :)

You don't go into charity shops looking to spend £100 on one item. They're known for cheap spends. And they don't have the resources to hold an online auction to reach a wider audience. They price it at what they think they will get from local footfall. They don't have warehouses full of identical goods, they have lots of one offs and the best way they can make a profit is to shift it fast so they can keep restocking with new goods.
You're failing to understand that a) goods don't fetch the same price on all platforms and in all places and b) the business model isn't based on squeezing every last penny out, but on keeping stock moving fast

I've worked in a charity shop for 10+ years, first as a volunteer and then as paid staff. The above is exactly correct.

Also worked in charity, some of the chains train staff to cream off the more valuable stock and it goes to the ebay department but that depends on 70 year old Joan whos on donation duty knowing the difference between high end and low end brands which as you can imagine can be patchy.

You haven't done anything wrong.

I would be sending in a complaint about the "worker" who posted an incorrect price and incited hate against you along with examples of the nastiness you got online and the results of that

I do agree with this - highly unprofessional behaviour from them.

The charity shop worker is way out of line to comment.
You bought the dress. Its your dress.
At that point its none of her business what you do with it, whether you sell it or set it on fire.