Are Charity Shops Becoming Greedy

[BettiG]

I love shopping in charity shops, well I did years ago. However why have they become so greedy and overpricing?

I went into one charity shop last weekend and they were selling all summer dresses for £2. I bought 5 dresses and spent £10. I saw that as an absolute bargain as I am going on holiday abroad in Sept and don’t want to spend too much on clothes that I will be putting away once I’m back off holiday.

I then went to another charity shop whose clothes were so overpriced for example a dress I picked up to look at from Primark was £7. I left empty handed from that charity shop so really I see that as that particular shop losing out.

So my question is are charity shops becoming greedy and taking the fun away from people shopping in them? I personally think before long they are going to fall flat on their faces as people will stop shopping with them which I think is so sad.

Charity shops are there to raise money for the charity - not to provide you with fun.

Yes, many are overpriced.

Also I don't understand why they do it: the stock is staying on the shelves and it will just end up in landfills.

Better to charge reasonable prices and sell.

Once of my local charity shops is selling a small table for £50 and flower pot for £25. That's ridiculous.

But if they don’t provide people with fun then they will lose business.

Costs they have to cover

Rent
Rates
1-2 paid employees
Electricity
Heating
Insurance
Cleaning
Purchasing stock (due to Vinted etc less donations)

Overall charity shops are booming. Sector press reports 20% increase income this year and the last 2 years have seen significant rises.

Customers are motivated by different reasons

• supporting the cause
• want a bargain
• ethical shopping
• environment shopping
• can't afford high street
• seeking something unusual eg vintage

People have rather odd ideas about charity shops as evidenced in the very many charity bashing threads on here.

@Bohomovies

But if they don’t provide people with fun then they will lose business.

Do you expect M&S or Primark to provide you with fun?

Definitely

Cheeky fuckers, who do they think they are, trying to raise money for a good cause? Outrageous. Quite clearly they should be selling stuff dirt cheap so people can shop for fun and get a bargain. 🙄

This has been done to death so many times on here and the long and short of it is that there are good managers and bad managers in the charity shop sector as there are in any other walk of life. Shops which don't make a profit will be closed.

I agree.

In the Red Cross charity shop I was looking at two Zara long summer dresses the other day and one was priced at £20 and the other at £30! They wouldn’t be much more to buy brand new. They were very flimsy, beach-style dresses.

I have two local charity shops, one huge one that sells furniture and clothes. They charge a higher price for goods. Lots of stock hangs around for weeks and they only accept donations on a Thursday and Friday due to the amount of stuff they can store. It confuses me why they have this restriction as I see cars pulling up daily with bags to donate - why not sell it cheaper and get a bigger turnover of stock?
So when people turn up at this charity shop and can't donate as its not a thurs/Fri, they then walk up to the second smaller charity shop up the road who accept goods every day. The smaller shop has more volunteers and sells cheaper. So as donations come in sometimes they are put straight out, they have a volunteer out the back putting expensive collectable on Ebay (ceramics etc). This shop is so busy, it's a bit cluttered but people love sorting through stuff to get a bargain. The tills are always ringing.
I don't understand why there are two different 'business models' , surely the aim is to sell as much as possible and get money through the tills?

No it won't. They will bag it all up and it is sold by the kilo to firms that buy that sort of thing, either for rags to be recycled or for export.

I think it depends, a few charity ships round my way have gone with a vintage vibe and with some labels I think the price is fair enough.

My dd got some Abercrombie jeans a couple of weeks ago which were £15 which feels like good value.

Clothes that are not vintage and were cheap to start with it would be taking the piss to charge more than a few quid for.

I spent two years out of my normal career running 18 charity shops. I loved my job but the stealing both by customers (stealing from the dying) and staff was horrendous. We had charts for prices and if we placed higher prices on genuine designer unworn items we would be abused by people shouting we had got it for nothing, blah blah . Our flagship shop was in a prestigious market town and resellers would come in daily. Brands cheaper than marks and spencer went to a clearance shop. I left after the CEO pinched a antique clock (taken back to her office for safe keeping and never paid for) and a woman clicked her fingers at me. Staff were paid minium wage and the leadership team huge money. The famous organ foundation charity I went to after I left had cameras in the loos. I left after a week.
I still shop in charity shops occasionally but after the no donation policy of some I've given up on donating. I use the textile bins at the supermarkets.

Everything is overpriced now. I keep thinking this every time i go out to ear.

Used to go out 1-4 times a week. Now it's more like once a month. Surely they're better off charging less and having more customers?!

Eat. Not ear. Obvs.

The issue with large charities is they have often have a National pricing policy. The one I volunteer in does. My manager would 100% reduce prices, she has done a few special offers but risks getting in serious trouble if found out. She however knows the local market. Another charity shop also a national charity in the same row only has guidelines for pricing and the manger has great flexibility. Needless to say they do far better than us. It is incredibly short sighted but hey ho I guess that London based central office loves making decisions and not thinking them through. I am thinking of trying to get involved with this charity further to stick my two pennies in.

They’re unlikely to be sent to landfill. There are places that buy used clothing by weight in bin bags. They will be sent there.

Several in my local city (which is a run down one) sell stuff online. All the good stuff goes online and the shelves are left with junk.

They have a bench full of stuff that is waiting to go online and with the price tag they are starting it at. You can buy it for that price if you wish but we are talking £40 for a pair of Levi's with worn out crutch and fabric gone very thin (as opposed to the deliberately stressed look jeans are often given).

The joy has gone out of charity shops for me.

The shop I volunteer at goes through stock regularly and reduces items that have been on sale for 3 weeks and reduces it. Pricing is difficult but I’ve seen stuff I thought was overpriced bought by a customer who buys to resell.

Yes, they’ve definitely gone up and you’re right, £7 for a Primark dress is far too much. I bet it wasn’t much more brand new. The British Heart Foundation shop near me is terrible for this sort of thing, and stuff is often poor quality/stained/has holes too. Their quality control is rubbish. However, the cancer research shop is much better and I do still pop in there for a look.

@AgileGreenSeal I can confirm that it goes to the rag man who pays per kilo. The managers of the shops in my town all know each other and I know they all get rid of stuff this way. Or it’s sent to other branches, depending on what it is. I have to say some people send some absolute shit to charity shops. Broken or stuff with questionable staining. We can’t give to the rag man so we have to pay for that stuff thats disposed of. The local drug addicts and alcoholics go through all the bins looking for stuff to use or sell. We ask them to just not leave a mess thanks and they are good about it.

The same laws of economics apply to charity shops as any other clothes shop, just with an even lower cost of goods sold than for-profit shops. (I worked briefly with a clothes retailer's HQ and they had a policy that staff could buy anything in their own size at the buy-in cost price. People were very, very well dressed. A £50 skirt in a chain shop probably costs the company £6 to source.)

If a charity shop charges £2 for a dress that costs £0 and they sell 5, they've made £10. If they charge £7 and sell 2, they've made £14, and Oxfam or Mind get £4 more (even if the other 3 dresses get thrown away).

If they charge £7 and sell none, they have a choice. They could sit there and go "Sigh, there's nothing we can do, we've tried one price and that's all we have". Or they could (this is the clever bit) reduce the price until people start buying. Maybe they could sell 3 of the dresses at £5, or 4 at £4.

I'm often surprised at the attitude that seems to be implied by the OP, which is that retail prices somehow come down from on high on stone tablets, and nobody is able to do anything about them. Modern yield management is quite sophisticated, sure, but retailers have been making profit-v-turnover tradeoffs since the Babylonians.

On pricing we use to go for a quarter of RRP on the designer stuff to allow for sale prices etc. It had to be perfect.
Shoes were tricky, only the best were put out. Posh bags usually went to eBay. School uniform was £1 a piece.
Some shops I worked in had washing machines and sewing staff for buttons etc. I hate buying new clothes as they are badly made and poor quality fabrics. I buy off ebay but only a specific brand that fits me. If I buy secondhand and don't wear it, it gets donated back. I have far too much stuff, I think lots of us do. People do need to be able to afford charity shops. The one we had on a big council estate was so well supported. Beautifully kept and absolutely no stealing. People looked out for each other and I loved working there.

I think there are far less willing volunteers to staff charity shops than there used to be. Covid put off a lot of people and they are not coming back. It’s quite labour intensive to sort through stock, steam it, price, label and hang it in a sales account rail. I get the idea that if you sell a t shirt for £10 then you only need 10% of the labour than if you were selling t shirts for £1. I bought my last bunch of t shirts out of Aldi for £2 each (would recommend, nice thick cotton, good amount of elastane and are washing well).

I suppose it’s where you place yourself in the market if you are selling a £10 t shirt that was £40 to someone who likes / knows that brand then it’s a bargain. To someone like me it’s overpriced and it was massively overpriced originally.

I do think it’s cyclical though. The people who used to volunteer in charity shops in my family were previous shoppers/ donators who left a legacy too. If you have less shoppers does that mean less volunteers and less legacies?

The amount bhf gets from shops is tiny compared to what is left in wills. However it’s often a soft introduction to a charity that can forge a life long connection. It’ll be interesting from a financial perspective to see if the books in the medium to long term.

I also think it's incorrect to say that stock costs nothing. This is true in that it is donated but there is a still a lot of cost involved in running the shop and dealing with donations. We don't have any paid staff at all, it's entirely volunteer run with oversight from a regional manager based a long way away. But we have bills for rent, heating, lighting, internet connection, card processing fees, rubbish collection, etc etc. So it's not a zero cost situation.

We are in an affluent area and still get good quality stuff. People on these threads are always fixated on women's clothing but our weekly sales show we make the most money on toys/games, followed by bric a brac and books. Yes charity shops are a small part of funds for many people but are a very visible reminder of the charities concerned.

You don’t go in a charity shop to have fun you go to grab a bargain and support the charity, you can’t do that if they are raising their prices too high.