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.

Well said, @JingleB

I wish you hadn’t shared this. It just gives the usual suspects yet another forum in which to make entirely unsupported claims about charities that discourage others from donating, without giving the impact of their words a second thought.

I did laugh at the poster who thought it’s wealthy people who are most likely to volunteer……she clearly hasn’t done much volunteer work!

This is all putting me off giving to charity shops to be honest. So when a nice item comes in, people who work there don’t say ‘This is nice, let’s put this in the window to attract some customers’, they would rather stick it in their own bag and put some money in the till. I don’t know how you wouldn’t think that would have a negative effect on the quality of stock available to the public.

To be fair it is mainly quite well off folk who volunteer where I live but I'm not naive enough to think that's the case everywhere.

You get a lot of retired people with time on their hands volunteering in my charity shop. There are all income brackets for this category from very low income to wealthy.

This sounds a good way of dealing with this situation

ime this is not what happens. Stock is sorted and priced by paid staff following pricing guidelines. Excellent quality items are displayed prominently and sell quickly. Most volunteers don’t see the donated items until they are displayed and priced on the shop floor.
I find the comments about volunteers quite depressing really. We are either classed as grey haired rather dim old ladies who don’t have a clue about brands or unscrupulous individuals who volunteer for their own gain.

I am certainly not "skimming the cream" when I buy books from the shop I volunteer in, and I'm not doing so to sell on Ebay either. I'm buying the books because I want to read them.

I also don't see how it qualifies skimming when we are paying for the items - at the exact same price as other people would. Again - volunteers are customers as well, not just the other members of the public who do not work there.

@SorcererGaheris Mamy people buy clothes though. Your shop is a specialist one and you have paid staff. When Mary Portass did her programmes about (I think) Age Concern, the employed staff just visited. The volunteers did what they wanted and, to be fair, would not have known Prada from Primark. These days volunteers might well know what’s worth money - who actually can value something accurately who has no idea of fashion? Just one volunteer who knows can do quite well!

The shop I volunteer in gets LOTS of donations, and there is plenty of stock for sale that other customers want. We've even had to temporarily put a halt on additional donations at the moment, as we have had so much unsorted/unprocessed stock downstairs that it was beginning to become a health and safety issue.

If you read my posts, you will see that what you describe does NOT happen where I volunteer.

Staff do not under-price for themselves or other staff members. I know when I've rung sales through the till for other volunteers who have been buying paperback novels, I have put them through as £2.99 or £3.99, because that it usually the standard shops price for paperback novels. The shop is getting exactly the same amount of money as they would if anyone else were to buy it.

I volunteered one afternoon a week , about 4 hours . The chance of having something I liked and it being my size as well was practically 0 .
If it was on the rack or shelf in the shop when we paid the price on the ticket .

@TizerorFizz I think many shops try to match a volunteer’s skill set to the role. I price the books in my shop as I’m an avid reader. I also go unto WH Smith (across the road from the charity shop) and look at their offers and best sellers and promote our donated books accordingly.

If you read my posts, you will see that what you describe is NOT what is happening (at least where I volunteer.)

Staff are not saying to themselves 'This nice nice, I'll put it aside and put some money in the till'. The items that we buy are priced at the same value as they would be for other customers and they are RUNG THROUGH the till as a sale just like any other. All staff purchases also have to be publically recorded, presumably so that it can be checked that they are paying the standard price for items - which we are.

The last purchase I made in the charity shop cost me FORTY POUNDS. It was a book I recognised and knew it might be a bit pricier than much of our stock. I gave it to our manager to look up online, so she could see what it was selling for secondhand elsewhere, and she priced it accordingly. I then went upstairs and bought it at the till, where it was rung through as a sale just like any other.

I get a volunteer discount at the charity shop I volunteer at but even if I didn't. My husband works within the charity itself and he gets 25% off

I don’t understand this. I couldn’t get worked up by a MW employee having a discount.

In Oxfam bookshops (at least in the one I volunteer in; I'm assuming this applies across the board to all of them) - there is a standard set of prices for "simpler" stock, for want of a better word. So most paperback fiction that we sell is around £2.99 or £3.99. If something is rather slim and a little more tatty than other books (we often find that people are prepared to buy rather tatty classic crime and sci-fi, for instance) I've sometimes put them on the shelves at £1.99. However, there's now an official rule that all our donated stock has to be sold at a minimum of £2.99.

If an item looks like it might potentially be a higher value book, then, volunteers are advised to research the titles online (on websites such as Abe Books, Amazon, Ebay, etc) to see what they are selling for second-hand elsewhere, and they are then priced in accordance with that.

This is absolutely a perk of the job AFAIC, especially when you're there volunteering. As long as someone buys the stuff i don't care who it is. The idea that you're decreasing sales by buying some random Icelandic book I bet no one on here has ever heard of is ludicrous! Everyone's idea of what the 'cream' is is likely to be quite different.

When I give stuff to a charity shop it's to get rid of stuff that I no longer need but someone else might want - it's not some act of service to the poor. To make me feel like a great person for giving the poor some sort of cheap second hand 'treat'. What a bizarre idea.

Last year I was in a Charity shop when someone handed on a Kenwood type mixer and the volunteer announced loudly to her colleagues that she was going to keep it. TBH it put me off. I've used charity shops for years - usually buying nearly my whole summer holiday wardrobe from them - but I've noticed a marked decline in the quality of items. I usually still go in the shops when I'm in town but I'm not going to buy used, bobbly Shein & Primark whilst the better quality items are getting picked through before they even get onto the shop floor.

Exactly, different people have VERY different ideas of what qualifies as the best or the nicest stuff. I have bought more "conventional" - for want of a better term - items in the past, such as novels, but for me personally, I'd say the best stuff that the shop sells is when we get books donated on occultism/paganism/witchcraft, as those are things I'm involved in/keenly interested in. (I do price that category myself, as well as Religion and Philosophy.)

Did you miss the word potentially?

Your post kind of makes it sound as though the staff are like vultures. In my experience, that's not what happens. If staff, whilst sorting, happen to spot an item they'd like to have, they get it priced (at the exact SAME price it would go for on the shelf) and they buy it, simple as that. Most of the time, it's simply a chance/happenstance thing.

Perhaps there are some staff who do squirrel away items for themselves without purchasing it, but it would be unfair to assume that this is standard or official practice.

No - I'm just making the point that that "potential" scenario is not actually playing out where I work.

You don't seem to understand what potentially means.

We used to do this with new stock when I worked in a department store. If we saw something we liked we put it in the cupboard where we put all the items customers reserved. We also knew what was going in the sale so would put anything we wanted there too. We would then buy it on our break/pay day.