4:18pm Tuesday 16th March 2010
I am a long-time aficionado of the good old charity shop. In fact there was a time when I was unable to walk past one without popping in for a rummage, hopefully to emerge with a modest bargain or two.
The Worthing area has always been graced with many fine examples of these shops.
Over the past few years I have noticed a tendency – I believe spearheaded by Oxfam shops – to employ “specialists” (presumably compensated for their time) to price stock according to whatever they perceive its market value to be. This has now crept into the wider charity-shop culture, and I believe it is destroying most of the pleasure in going into them.
This week, during very brief visits to two charity shops, I saw a pair of women’s trousers – admittedly very nice, and in good condition – for £20. Now, we’re not talking haute couture here, just a nice pair of second-hand trousers. In the other shop, there was a display of old books in not very good condition priced between £25 and £50. Again, we’re not talking the Dead Sea Scrolls – just some dusty old copies of popular novels.
If I want to pay top dollar for books, second hand clothes, records or anything else, there are specialist shops I can go to, staffed by people with specialist knowledge of what it is they are selling, rather than volunteers who, with all due respect, wouldn’t on the whole know a Vivienne Westwood from a George at Asda.
I respect the fact that charity shops need to make money and that their income is for a good cause, but I feel that I, and I’m sure many other people, will lose interest in them if they no longer offer the prospect of a bargain or two.
I think that if the shops held back whatever goodies/ financial rewards are given as incentive to the “experts” who price these goods, and gave up on these grandiose pricing structures, they would enjoy greater custom, and more donations.
I for one would not want the box of records I donated pored over greedily by a record-dealer/collector “helping out for a few freebies” and overpricing the remainder of what I had donated for nothing in the first place.
Mark Mullins
King Street, Worthing
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