Hard to sell today because everyone's giving stuff away free?

[girlfriend44]

People have so.much stuff. Our local pages are full of sellers and people giving away stuff.
Lots of people also asking about charity shops they can donate too.

Does anyone else think it's harder to sell and more and more people are giving away free or donating?

Charities don't always accept everything all of the time.

I give stuff away for free as i cant be bothered with selling or it goes in the bin.

Stuff just doesn’t sell these days unless it’s really valuable top quality like solid wood or leather furniture, designer stuff. Lots of cheap plastic tat for sale now which wouldn’t cost much more to buy brand new. I couldn’t sell a glass tv table a few years ago even for £10 because there are too many of them for sale (it was second-hand when I bought it)

I don't really give money to charity any more. Or not very often. But I give a lot of clothes and good quality items to the charity shop of my choice. It sort of makes me feel like I'm doing my bit and it's easier than selling.

I give new/near new items to charity shops- I can't be bothered with the faff of trying to sell for a few £'s.

Even giving away things for free can be a PITA! I'm on olio and freecycle and get sick of people arranging a time to collect, then not showing up. 1 person had so many back and forth comments about collection, the time blah blah. I sent the full address (which partially on the listing) and she accused ME of wasting her time, because she lived in another city! 🙄

After several spurts of excitement while uploading photos to sell . . . I totally agree! It just needs to be gone.

Two issues

Amount of Material Goods Due to Cheap Mass production

I think part of the problem is people have too much stuff because there is a lot of mass produced crap from China/ Far East that is very cheap - especially clothes, electronics and plastic stuff. thirty years ago a plain white t-shirt would be more expensive, good quality and last ages. people looked after them better.

Now you can get a shitty white -shirt for £2 that will look ok for a few wears, maybe one wash and then be crap. So people buy another one but don't chuck out the last one thinking it will do for home lazing. Shoot forward 10 years = approximately 200 shitty white t-shirts that need disposing of. Everyone is trying to do the same so you have no chance of selling anything that isn't basically unworn or new or designer. Because if a person wants one, they too can buy a new one for next to nothing.

Cost/time benefit of selling

If you think of your time as having a cost, it doesn't even have to be your actual wage. Minimum wage is about £11.40 or so an hour.

Think of selling something and time expended. You have to photograph it nicely (time to photograph, arrange it, select photographs). List it (time taken to write what it is, set a price, upload photos). Probably spend time keeping a watch on the selling site (checking in or checking emails). Responding to queries from buyers. Pack it up. Go to post office/ drop off point to dispatch it.

That all adds up to a lot of time in most cases it will be well over half an hour and probably closer to an hour including travel, queueing time for dispatch. By the time you have discounted the postage costs,packaging costs, possible petrol to drop off point unless you are selling something for over £11.40 you have wasted your time really because you've made so little v time expended. You could have had more bang for your buck doing something nice for yourself like having a bath or playing with your children or watching your favorite show.

I think more and more people realise this - that selling tat is a fools errand and makes you no profit and is a waste of time - so end up giving stuff away for free.

That’s a good thing though, much better to help people out by giving it away for free on a local Facebook site than selling it.

Some charity shops are quite arsey about accepting donations which puts me off

Well, yes. This is why Oxfam bookshops are so bad for secondhand booksellers. They have to buy their stock, Oxfam get it for free.

That is what those large, charity shop bins in supermarkets carparks are for!

I don't mean for adding crap, but its often just easier to add a bag of clothes/toys etc to one of those, than wrangle with the charity shop person!

Yep it's chancers on Vinted who have made me not bother and just take stuff (even fairly valuable stuff) to the charity shop. I cannot be bothered with the pisstakingly low offers. It's a far nicer feeling knowing a worthy charity will earn a decent bit of cash than the exasperation with many prospective Vinted buyers.

Exactly. I never do one with the intention of making a massive profit- its more of a fun morning, get rid of bits and see a few bargains myself. Haven't done one in years though tbh

Our local charity shops are ridiculously expensive, i don't bother donating because I've been put off by the entire experience.

I use vinted and Facebook all of the time. I am quite fussy and only buy decent stuff that I know we will use. We have a toddler so most of my purchases are for him and locally people tend to ask for a small amount for toys, books and clothes that goes into their DCs money box.

Yes but we also have more stuff in homes

Ha.

This whole conundrum has been the bane of my life for three years since my DP died and I had to wind up my business and downsize from a 4 bed rented house to a 1 bed flat. During the process I tried to give away / sell so much stuff but still ended up with a storage unit that is suckong 300 ish a month from my very meagre budget.

For many complicated reasons I did not have the time or energy to "just put it on Vinted / Ebay" with all the admin and potential tax implications. I tried local auction houses for my ex shop stock and they turned their nose up.

A few alleged "friends" wanted some of my late DPs stuff, if it was free of course, but as they only made contact with me in ghoulish fashion when I posted my issues on Facebook, I didn't want them to have it as they'd paid him precious little attention in the last years of his life and me even less after he died, so I was a bit petty about that.

My elderly parents split up this last year, and now my Dad has a storage unit in the same place as me, and we are both figuring out what to do with collectibles and ephemera.

Frankly I'm already at the point where it's tempting to lob a Molotove cocktail into the whole lot and run away cackling.

If there's an answer to all this I'm really not seeing it.

I buy secondhand a lot, so I'm glad for some people it is worth the hassle to sell stuff, because it means there's stuff available for me to buy. I'm quite fussy though, and often looking for specific things/sizes/brands. The joy has gone out of a charity shop rummage because I think people tend to put decent stuff on Vinted now, so it's mostly just racks of Primark/Shein.

I also give things away for free, particularly baby/kids things to the baby bank, as that means they're more likely to go directly to people who actually need and will use them. I'd love it if we had a more circular economy, with people choosing good quality secondhand things over cheaply made new ones, and passing them on when they don't need them. Agree with posters who've pointed out we have an overconsumption crisis!

I remember seeing someone - and this is genuinely true - trying to sell a half eaten Chinese on Facebook Marketplace one Friday night about ten years ago, and decided then and there that I couldn't deal with it 😅

Where I live there's a great 'free stuff' FB page that doesn't allow selling; anything of any value we put on there, one price, collection only. Don't think is ever taken me more than a day to get rid of clothes, cookware, beds, unwanted gifts, furniture, all sorts.

For anything worth less than 20 quid or so I put it on the local selling page then don't take the money. Saves the hassle of people not turning up.

It's a joke, it's often online

Equation: How much is the stuff worth vs how much you're spending on storing it. Easy maths.

This is the problem. The technical worth is a few thousand, but has to be weighed against "the market" which isn't apparently interested, and then the costs including time, of either selling, by whatever platform, with no guaranteed buyers, or disposal, both of which would amount to more than the storage fees. Consumerist Catch 22. It should be as simple as you suggest, but it really isn't.

When my mum died we cleared/took as much as we wanted and then got house clearance in - they auctioned what they could and I don’t know what they did with the rest. All in we only made a couple of hundred quid but it got the job done and we didn’t lose money.

Nope. Way more people are selling stuff now that would have been donated in the past.

I fully admit that I have too much stuff, particularly clothes, shoes and handbags. A lot is good quality which I was going to have a go at listing on Vinted or EBay but it seems such a faff for little reward so I've packed up several bags and will take them to the charity shop tomorrow. Anything Primark/Tu etc goes in a bag which I take to H&M for their donate scheme where I get a £5 voucher to use on a later purchase.

Watched Call the Midwife last night and Jumble Sales were mentioned, Whatever happened to them?

Last time I saw one DD1 was a bay - now 19 - we found her favorite red dress.

I got guilted into lending it to Dsis and her DD by Mum and it was then sold on e-bay so DD2 never wore it.

We've end up selling some exam text books on-line as charity shops here won't take them and don't know anyone to pass them on to. It was more of a hassle and took longer to get the £20 for pile of books than stated.