Charity Shops getting cocky with their prices.

Happygreen

Pollycat wrote: »

I saw a lovely maxi dress in a charity shop that fitted me perfectly but the side seam very near the hem was split.

It wouldn't have been an issue to me as I would have shortened it to above the split anyway (I'm very short ).

I just happened to mention it to the assistant when I took it to the desk to pay and she said 'Oh, sorry, we can't sell it to you as it is damaged'.

Despite telling her I was willing to pay full ticket price and that she could remove the shop tag & not give me the receipt so I couldn't return it for a refund, she would not budge.

I even asked her what she was going to do with the dress and she said it would go for rags.

I told her that I would take the dress and put a donation into the collection tin but there was no way on earth she was letting me buy that dress.
So - no dress for me, no money for the charity.

I have never heard anything like this, that's plain stupid....:eek:

luvchocolate

The fact you were willing to pay full price I would have said thats very good of you thank you.
The main problem we have is people going into the fitting room and opening the seam or taking of a button etc and wanting the item reduced, then I would not sell it as they would do it every time, yes it happens all the time along with swapping price tickets and leaving their old garment on hanger when they take something that takes their fancy.
Shame but it happens

GrungeMeister

ThumbRemote wrote: »

Why?

If a charity shop is donated a load of designer clothing, should they sell it as cheaply as possible so 'ordinary folks' can afford it? How does that benefit the charity?

I'd love for donated designer clothing to be given away, free, to anyone who wanted it ... but especially poor people.

The Fitch The Homeless thing last year was wonderful, when US student Greg Karber gave away Abercrombie & Fitch kit to homeless people in cardboard boxes on skid row, to highlight the dreadful values of that company (thin is beautiful, beautiful is cool, the unattractive don't belong etc etc etc).

So hell yeah. Give the designer stuff free to poor people ! They can wipe their backsides with it for all I care. And if that means one charity corporate HQ is a little less well gilded then I'm good with that as well :beer:

trukdiver

Pollycat wrote: »

I saw a lovely maxi dress in a charity shop that fitted me perfectly but the side seam very near the hem was split.

It wouldn't have been an issue to me as I would have shortened it to above the split anyway (I'm very short ).

I just happened to mention it to the assistant when I took it to the desk to pay and she said 'Oh, sorry, we can't sell it to you as it is damaged'.

Despite telling her I was willing to pay full ticket price and that she could remove the shop tag & not give me the receipt so I couldn't return it for a refund, she would not budge.

I even asked her what she was going to do with the dress and she said it would go for rags.

I told her that I would take the dress and put a donation into the collection tin but there was no way on earth she was letting me buy that dress.
So - no dress for me, no money for the charity.

That's just being stupid.... The trouble is that some of the volunteers follow instructions blindly and don't use their common sense. When I worked in a charity shop, I would have let you buy it and written a comment on the tag. Even if you bought it and returned it because you'd changed your mind, what difference does it make? At the shop I worked in, one of the volunteers complained that somebody had messed up the window display by buying something!

ThumbRemote

GrungeMeister wrote: »

I'd love for donated designer clothing to be given away, free, to anyone who wanted it ... but especially poor people.

The Fitch The Homeless thing last year was wonderful, when US student Greg Karber gave away Abercrombie & Fitch kit to homeless people in cardboard boxes on skid row, to highlight the dreadful values of that company (thin is beautiful, beautiful is cool, the unattractive don't belong etc etc etc).

So hell yeah. Give the designer stuff free to poor people ! They can wipe their backsides with it for all I care. And if that means one charity corporate HQ is a little less well gilded then I'm good with that as well :beer:

You don't seem to understand the purpose of charity shops.

absoluteutopia

whodathunkit wrote: »

Charity shops are there to raise as much money for their charity as possible, not to help you buy goods cheaply.

Plus my local charity shop the Ethiopian Schools Project has 7 staff who get £200PW wages out of peoples donations. Id love to know what % of money actually goes to Charity.

Pollycat

absoluteutopia wrote: »

Plus my local charity shop the Ethiopian Schools Project has 7 staff who get £200PW wages out of peoples donations. Id love to know what % of money actually goes to Charity.

£1400 per week in wages? :eek: Really?

I'm pretty sure most of the staff in my local hospice shop are unpaid volunteers.

I'd never take any of my donations to a shop with that kind of structure.

Purple_monkfish

I've noticed it seems to depend on where you are and which shop it is.
For instance, my local Shooting Star sells ratty barbie dolls for £1 each, which is a fair price for naked ratty dolls.
However, take a bus 2 miles down the road to a slightly posher area and they're asking £3 for a Bratz doll with no feet and cut hair.
Uh... what?

You can still find bargains and treasures, but they're getting wise in stores to the relative "value" of things that have real value. Unfortunately the staff aren't quite educated on stuff enough to know true value of most things. Where back in the day it was just "price it low to shift it", now it's like they see "vintage" and think "this is worth megabucks" when in reality, it probably isn't.

An example of this would be a few weeks ago when I spotted some 80s Sindy items in a charity shop window. £50 they wanted for the bundle, when the actual price you'd pay in a collector group or on ebay would be about half that.
I've also seen a vintage doll worth maybe £20 at most priced up at £99 by some over eager charity shop.

Conversely though, i've managed to find similarly "valuable to the right people" items for fairly cheap. £14:99 for an unworn dress that originally sold for £120? yes please.
£1 for a doll I would have to pay £30 for on Ebay? Thank you charity shop.
£50 for a huuuge bundle of tomica with 12 fully working trains and lots of accessories? Perfect christmas present right there. (it was a pain to get home though lol. 3 bin bags full of stuff! Not sure why the heck they didn't split it into smaller bundles, they'd have sold better)

So it depends on the store and whoever's pricing stuff up.
I've found that the posher the area, the more massively overpriced their generic stuff is (like toys, wth £3 for a chewed up Barbie doll with a missing hand!? £5 for a stuffed bear with a missing eye? uh.. what?)

And clothing varies wildly. I used to buy 90% of my clothing from charity shops. 1 it was cheap and 2 I could find items that were very unusual and not whatever happened to be trendy that week.
But when you have stores like primark where I can buy a top for £3 and a skirt for less than a fiver, it's a bit odd to go into a charity shop and find fairly generic items priced up "as new" when they clearly aren't. You buy clothes from a charity shop to save money surely? and finding that once in a blue moon unique dress you simply have to have is a rare enough occurance that I seldom bother to look at clothes in charity shops nowadays. It used to be "i need a simple black tee-shirt, that'll be £2" and now it's "simple black tee £5:99? Uh.. i'll go to tesco then"

And that I think is the problem. YES designer stuff should have a fair price tag and collector items should be priced accordingly (though you still kinda hope for a bargain, they're a charity shop not an antique or vintage dealer) but your generic run of the mill stuff? When you can buy something pretty much identical for half the price charged by the charity shop, you know there's something up with their pricing arrangement.
Why would I buy a second hand shirt for the same price I could buy a brand new one? Unless it was super special, unique and/or designer labeled, why would anyone? Because we're supposed to "give to charity to feel better about ourselves"? No, that's why we have direct debit charity donations on a monthly basis.
If you want to give to charity, you give to the charity directly. if you want to buy a cheap blouse, you go to a charity shop... right? Because at the end of the day, you know full well that only a fraction of what you give the charity shop goes to the charity.

That said, 75% of my kid's toys come from charity shops lol.

Rubisco

Charity shops don't "get stuff for free", they're given stuff to sell on a donater's behalf. When I give my stuff to a charity shop, it's because I think they're in a position to get more value for it than I could get myself.

Why would I give items to a charity who would price them so low as to allow the buyer the chance of an eBay profit? Why wouldn't I just eBay it myself?

If I wanted to be generous to local people I'd sooner stick things up on Freecycle than give to one of these underpricing tat shops when everything of any value is snapped up cheap by staff members or dealers long before normal members of the public get their chance to pick at the dregs.

Pollycat

Rubisco wrote: »

Charity shops don't "get stuff for free", they're given stuff to sell on a donater's behalf. When I give my stuff to a charity shop, it's because I think they're in a position to get more value for it than I could get myself.

I have a big bag of stuff ready to go to my local Hospice shop, including an unworn Next jacket, Next/M&S trousers and a pair of sandals worn once.

They do not pay me for it so they are getting it for free.

Rubisco wrote: »

Why would I give items to a charity who would price them so low as to allow the buyer the chance of an eBay profit? Why wouldn't I just eBay it myself?

Do you mean you would eBay stuff and then donate the profit directly to a charity of your choice?
Or eBay and keep the money yourself?

Rubisco wrote: »

If I wanted to be generous to local people I'd sooner stick things up on Freecycle than give to one of these underpricing tat shops when everything of any value is snapped up cheap by staff members or dealers long before normal members of the public get their chance to pick at the dregs.

Sticking things on Freecycle wouldn't help my local Hospice.
I'm not saying that staff don't get first dibs on donations (perhaps they do, perhaps they don't), but I do know that all the charity shops I go into on a regular basis doesn't just have 'underpriced tat' or 'dregs'.