40 years' experience here from the person who bought a 1200 dollar Tod's bag for 15 pounds last weekend.
Key rule is location, location, location. Shops sell what they get from local residents: they're local shops.... for local people.
Second key rule: go by shop name because they dish out pricing guides from Head Office now that apply to all brands. Some charities eg cancer get more and better donations because we all know someone who's had it (sorry to bring tone down).
Third - vital if you care about charity or your money : some shops give much more of your money to their charity than others. To put it politely. IMHO, if you care about good causes and/or your bank balance Beware the Boutique 'Charity' Shop.
Math: For every pound you pay, most charities will actually get 18p or so. Not great, is it. It gets worse. Some hand over even less - in London, some chains that fancy themselves as boutiques sometimes barely hand 5 or 10 p in the pound over. These shops aren't just pretentious, they're gobbling the money you think you're giving to charity.
If you're scared to go in because it's so dark and murky, you'll be in luck.
London charity shops in order of bargainousness, best first:
- Any shop that isn't in a chain and is still run by a decent hippy-type human being. Like animal shelter shops, you know the ones.
- The Salvation Army. Most things under a fiver.
- Small charity chains eg YMCA, Geranium for the Blind and Homeless Centres shops, AIDS shops, Oasis shops, independent hospice shops, shops attached to churches.
- Scope
- Cancer research UK; also good for donations
- FARA, Save the Children
- Oxfam; was expensive, now cheaper.
- BHF; notoriously the most expensive charity chain nationally, but crucially, good value because they, like CRUK, do well from donations.
- Trinity Hospice shops; the chalk-painted ones that sell dead HM vests for a tenner. Each. Mary Portas' STC ones similarly shameful.
10. Dedicated retro boutiques run by charities in the West End. They auction anything decent, you're just being offered with sweat stains from the 1970s.