To think people are quite petty to object to charity shop staff getting "first dibs" when they are BUYING the items?

[SorcererGaheris]

For context, I am a volunteer in a charity shop myself, and if I see something that I want, I will purchase it. The shop doesn't give staff discounts, either; staff pay full price - the last item I bought, a book, cost me £40.

Anyway, I COMPLETELY understand people objecting if volunteers were to just take donated items for themselves, but I've seen some online discussions in which people complain about the staff getting first pick of donations when they are paying for them. I really don't see the problem in this case, and think people who object are rather out of line. Other retail workers surely sometime purchase items from the shops they work in, so I don't see why volunteers should be begrudged that. A volunteer is a customer as much as any other.

I did a shift at the food waste fridge yesterday. The 'best stuff' for me was some papayas, some pomegranates, avocadoes and fennel. But there were still some of those left at the end of my shift along with some asparagus. The stuff that I had no interest in, went more quickly. Likewise there were some chicken breasts and some family sized trifles that I thought would go in the first five minutes. It took an hour for the chicken to go, and the trifle was still there two hours later.

So there is no such thing as generalised 'best stuff'. This was all free of charge, yet still my 'best stuff' wasn't snapped up. For other people, the carrots, bananas, yoghurt and pears were 'the best stuff'

So no, I didn't feel bad having put some avocadoes and a papaya aside for my own use (and I took about 20% of my allowance)

As an ex volunteer I agree with this. At the charity shop I worked in a couple of staff (including the manager) creamed off the best stuff every Wednesday when they did the sorting. Much more stuff than I believed they had a home for, I suspect they were selling on EBay. It was one of the reasons I stopped volunteering.
Charity shops do better if they have some exciting items on display, it doesn't make sense to let staff take all the best before it reaches the shop floor.

May I ask where this perception that ALL the good/best items are being bought by shop staff is coming from?

I said that staff sometimes buy items if it's something they'd like to have. Nowhere does this equate to ALL the good items being bought by the staff.

If some people are under the impression that there is never any good stuff for other customers to buy, then - when it comes to my shop, they are mistaken about that.

@DrZaraCarmichael i wonder if your DS worked in the same shop as me when I was a student. The high road? Full of hippies and nutters.
We had to stop putting the bibles out!

When I worked the hospice shops we use to offer the rag to staff for a pound. The items were unsaleable due to holes, bobbles or stains. If they wanted to try to renovate, good luck to them. A new director stopped it. No idea why.
Charity is given in good faith even if it is for the companionship of others. Some of my ladies had no one else close by.
I'd go back tomorrow but my health prevents the standing.

Of course they're mistaken.

I think it's two fold. People who have never set foot behind the scenes in a charity shop and just don't understand how snowed under we get with donations, or like to believe the worst of people and buy into the tropes about all volunteers being grabby and thieving, just out for themselves.

But also especially with clothing the quality of manufacture has really gone downhill and items from Shein or other similar chinese tat-merchants just aren't worth selling. So it's maybe a general perception that because charity shops are filled with cheap Chinese tat, supermarket clothes or similar, that is because the volunteers are "stealing all the good stuff". When in reality, the percentage of high-end clothing donated has decreased as people either stop buying it in the first place, or sell it on VInted instead.

i wonder if your DS worked in the same shop as me when I was a student. The high road? Full of hippies and nutters. We had to stop putting the bibles out!

No, this was very suburban Glasgow! We do have a hard-core of fundamentalist protestant types around here, the sort who object to yoga being taught to children in schools and won't watch the telly on a Sunday.

You're relating many posts back to your shop, an Oxfam Bookshop, but your OP said I've seen some online discussions in which people complain about the staff getting first pick of donations when they are paying for them. It's likely these discussions relate to the full breadth of charity shops, not just the bookshops (which are relatively few compared to clothes/bric a brac shops).

I concede that there are some differences between bookshops and general shops because people do tend to look for specific books or categories of book rather than browsing the whole shop; but the point still stands that if people don't find bargains, they won't go back or recommend the shop.

I am a food waste hero for olio
I use my time and petrol to collect, sort, store and distribute items
I get to keep 10% of anything I collect and get first dibs of items
That is my perk

If no one else is going to buy it there's no point in it taking up shelf space in the shop when OP is there and willing to buy it at the asking price.

It's not a unicorn shop, it's a bookshop. (Although it also sells some vinyl, CDs and DVDs, as well as the standard New Product range.)

But OP doesn't know no one else is going to buy it (unless her interest in the occult extends to 100% accurate clairvoyance.)

theres the similar argument with reduced or yellow label items if eg 10 items of the same thing some people are like leave some for others which i can understand and agre with but if your trying to save ££ and who is to say the next person is not going to get the others etc

to loop back to the ops post as long as th itm is sold then why does it matter who buys it, as a sale is a sale

I genuinely think it was unlikely that anyone else would have been interested in buying that particular book.

But on the off-chance that someone might have come in who was interested in buying that book...why should I, as a paying customer, care?

Our other customers don't refrain from buying items they want in case someone else might come along who would like to get them. Quite naturally (and rightly, too, IMO) when they are buying something, they are thinking only of their own personal desire to have the item .

When I buy a book from the shop, I am operating as a CUSTOMER. I am purely interested in buying the book for my own desire and pleasure. Other customers do not have a greater right to purchase the book than I do, so I don't see that I need to give unlikely potential other buyers any consideration at all.

Nothing to see? I think that's an unfair exaggeration. It's not as though I buy every single one of the occult books that gets donated. (Books on occultism are of course a rather small fraction of what we sell, but they do get donated.) Right now, our occult shelf has books out about mediumship, Tarot, mythology, a book that was dictated by Ascended Masters in the spirit world (the author channelled them.)

I appreciate that most responses are going to correspond to charity shops as a whole, rather than the specific one that I volunteer in.

And I wouldn't go as far as to deny that some charity shops are perhaps lacking, at times, in good-quality goods on the shelves. But I still think it can be a bit of a stretch to assume that that's down to the staff buying ALL the good-quality items themselves.

There can be a host of reasons. Some shops experience a bit of a dry spell when it comes to new donations generally, so sometimes it's customers from the general public who have a largely bought the "better" items and there's a bit of a lag before more nicer stuff comes in. Sometimes you get donations which are full of stuff that's not saleable (I've had to throw out a bag of books once, in which the books had got seriously wet and were ruined.)

You know what, @FancyAReallyLongUsernameJustForAChange , if you are so disgruntled about volunteers buying stuff, you could volunteer too?

In fact, I think everyoner who bangs on about "all the good stuff" would really benefit from a couple of shifts in the sorting room.

@DrZaraCarmichael
yes, sorting through the rusty saucepans, grey underwear, broken toys, jigsaws with missing pieces, used make up, bobbly jumpers, cardigans with used tissues in the pocket….- do come and help, but don’t forget your gloves.

Never heard anyone moan about this. I wouldn't even object to them taking the items and not paying, the value in charity shops is things being reused and not wasted. Would be a perk of the job and they are already giving their time to the charity

They don't want anyone round here. DH is retired and has filled in forms for all the shops round our way as he has plenty of time to give - he has retail experience, clean DBS check, could do absolutely any shifts - not even the courtesy of a 'no thanks'. If they don't want my flexible, retail-experienced, clean-driving-licenced DH, they won't want inflexible, full-time-worker me, without retail experience and unable to drive due to disability.

In actual fact, charity shops benefit hugely from volunteers buying their stuff. In the charity shop I volunteer at, volunteers buy loads and then often donate the same items back at a later date (obviously only things in good condition). The charity shop therefore benefits twice!
As for taking all the good stuff, I often see what other volunteers are buying and think why are you buying that shite? One man's trash is another man (or woman's) treasure and all that.

Why is OP less worthy of owning that book, then anyone else who walks through the door of the shop?

She's not. But if a charity shop only stocks picked over goods, it won't thrive.

When I purchased my design haus candelabra it was the talk of the town. People were up in arms - everyone wanted one. It’s the thin end of the wedge for sure.

The stock isn't literally "picked over" and much of the time, there is plenty of (good) items that we staff have no interest in buying.

The scenario you speak of perhaps does happen at particular charity shops. But there are many where it doesn't apply.

And in any case, when I'm in the role of customer, there is no reason for me to give any thought to the potential well-being of others. When people go out shopping for themselves, they are in the mindset of "I will buy what I want when I want it." That's exactly my frame of mind when I shop in the place I volunteer in.

It depends on how the first dibs thing works - if the items never make it to the sales floor because a volunteer has set it aside in the back room, then it's not really true that donated stuff is for anyone to buy, unless everyone has access to the sorting room and an equal opportunity to buy items before they get to the shop floor. The general public gets to buy whatever is left over after the volunteers have picked over it.