Do you think charity shops will become unviable?

[thedevilinablackdress]

Reflecting on my own experience of 35+ years charity shopping, reading threads on here, and speaking to friends who work in them. Will the overwhelming amount of low quality donations and competition from online second hand markets eventually lead to fewer customers, lower profits and the shrinking of the charity shop sector?

It’s all done by scanning barcodes. When I donate a couple of bags of stuff, I also give my donation number. Then when they process them for sale, the donation number is used to produce barcodes for each price tag, which links each item to my donation. Once each has sold the shop can claim gift aid on each through a mostly automated process. That’s how you get an annual statement saying the total sold amount.

I think they will just have to pivot and focus more on other types of products. Children's toys, books, ornaments etc. Most fast fashion is of such appalling quality these days, most of it won't have a long enough shelf life to be worth reselling.

Sad. I remember living in charity shops in my student days. I used to love rummaging for oversize 100% cotton Grandad shirts, jackets, denim etc. My local shop is just full of crappy polyester and it's all Primark, ASOS etc.

If you pay tax they'll list your stuff with a bar code so that they can claim gift aid ..

I was thinking just the opposite the other day!
Whatever I am looking for I can usually fine in our towns charity shops but we do have seven general ones, a children’s one, the oxfam book shop and 2 private preloved shops.

I agree that the quality of garments on offer has gone significantly downhill in the last few years. I think Vinted has finished what EBay started, in that many people are listing rather than donating. I do sometimes sell online but also take a bag to my local hospice shop several times a year.

I like buying odd bits of china and glassware, but rarely find anything by way of clothing these days.

I have always liked the ability to search Ebay, but recently stumbled upon a complete treasure trove of someone selling clothing in aid of a church fund somewhere in the shires. Think vintage cotton nineties blouses photographed on a wooden table, set on a flagstone floor. Amazing stuff!

No, I think there will always be a market for Charity shops.

We've had e-bay for years and years before Vinted was born, but many, many people like to walk into a shop and see things and touch the material and try things on.

Like a pp, the busiest of several charity shops on my High Street is the one that sells a lot of stuff for £1. Really, really high turn over.

My local charity shop sell the good stuff in their shop and do a £10 per kilo sale of the lower quality stuff at the end of each season.

I agree to an extent, there will always be a market @CarpetKnees But at the same level we've seen over the last few years? We have fewer new-clothing stores in the high street because not enough people want or need the in-store experience.

I’m not really sure. I’ve charity shopped for years and there is a noticeable increase in the number of shoppers nowadays.

I’m hoping that it will become fashionable to have fewer better quality items again. I work with a couple of girls in their twenties and they seem to have wardrobes bursting with cheap polyester tat. Both of them have done car boots in the last few weeks which I thought had become very unfashionable.

Car boots used to be good if you had lots of toys to get rid of, we used to regularly do one in the 90s when DS was young DH would go early then me and DS would pop along later. I don't think people do this nowadays.

Our local car boot stopped when Covid came along and never came back - I don't know if it was a general thing that Covid killed them off.

Car boot sales are great and a bit like the wild west of retail, but why do they have to be so flipping early? 😂

All the talk of getting there at 6am, when a perfectly civilised sale could be held from 10am onwards.

My local charity shop recently put up their prices from £3 to £5. Used to have lots of nice brands but now mostly Zara, Shein, Primark etc.

does anyone know if they have to pay full rent, utilities etc or do they normally get a discount?

There's so many charity shops now which doesn’t help. Growing up , in the leafy suburban that I grew up in, there were two, and ‘taking it to Oxfam’ was a standard phrase. Now there’s shops dedicated to cancer, heart, dogs, cats, hospices, etc.

Not too sure, but one in our town is closing due to increasing rent and other costs.

There’s lots of popular car boots in our area!

I never sell anything online as I cant be bothered so the local charity shop has had hugely expensive things donated by me, usually with the label still on

In return, I have picked up stuff from all over the country, various charity shops I pop into, some are things like Zara which I would never buy new and some are Primark. They're all in good condition. In fact I have a pair of my charity trousers with me on holiday, just a cheap pair of black stretchy cotton things but they're nice for cycling, they're also a nice shape and hang well so we can stop off in a pub and I look ok

Thats the sort of thing I look for, I dont care what shop its from, its the shape.

I also dont really understand the term 'fast fashion' as my things will be kept for years.

Where I live, many charity shops have already closed down, meaning there's no opportunity to donate

I've bought stuff from Facebook Marketplace and when I've gone to collect it, it was explained that I was buying from a charity volunteer from.one of the closed down shops

I found a pair of Joe Brown capri pants this weekend - they wanted exactly the same for them as I would pay to just buy brand new!

I used to get lots from charity shops, but it’s all just low quality or massively overpriced now.

@OxfordInkling they will end up losing money because people won't bother going. Charity shops have always been a bargain buy.....most of the time

I think they'll still be there. They'll be more expensive and perhaps fussier over what they accept. Two of my local ones frequently refuse donations without even looking at them as they say they have too much stuff.
Poor quality clothes simply reflect what is in the shops and will probably end up in a heap somewhere, but there will always be high quality items too. I take all my Levi's etc to a charity shop, I can't be bothered with online selling unless it is for something expensive.

I am registered with our local CS, giving them the additional tax.

I have a card from them, with a number. I copy this and stick it into each bag donated. They print this out as a barcode and add it as a gift aid’ sticker to each item.

Quarterly, I receive a letter showing what the donations have earned. Sometimes over a hundred and when clearing a relatives property recently, £427!

In my local charity shop they have a ledger in store and they write down everything sold and for how much and a number on the label. I think it’s how they match up items for claiming gift aid/ stock checking. It does take a while.

Thanks for all the responses on how they track gift aid. I do have a couple of cards for charity shops, but didn't understand the mechanism of how they kept track of it. I've never noticed barcodes on items I buy, though to be fair I don't buy an awful lot in charity shops.

Though @Lovelysummerdays the process at your one sounds like hard work!

I'm a volunteer in one of the large charity chains everyone will have heard of.

It's definitely true that although the volume of donations is unchanged, the quality is definitely on the slide. Second hand shitty clothing from Shein/Temu, Primark and brands like Asos, Boohoo, Pretty Little Thing, Cider - just not worth selling as it's wrecked when we get it. Only if it's BNWT. Our shop is in an affluent suburban area and we still get lots of clothing from people who don't want to sell on vinted or similar because they aren't interested, or don't need the money, so come into our shop and you'll still find Phase Eight, Mint Velvet, Hobbs, Reiss etc.

What I would say though is that clothing is not always the biggest money maker for a charity shop. We get weekly figures broken down by department and we take just as much in bric-a-brac and toys/games as we do in women's clothing.