Charity Shopping - New to You in '22!

Pollycat

Brie said:

Pollycat said:

And a lovely silk scarf that I think has been hand painted.
My friend loves poppies and I'll carefully wash and iron it and gift it to her for Christmas.
Slightly expensive (imho) at £5.00 but I know she'll love it and wear it.
And the answer is 'no', Brie - before you ask. 
 

No worries @Pollycat!  I'm not a huge fan of square scarves preferring the long slim ones I can wrap around my neck a few times.  That is lovely though and I think your friend is very lucky!!!  £5 is a tad above average in price perhaps but not if it's hand made.

The edges look hand-rolled (is that the right expression?) and it looks like a signature towards the bottom right (Jeanette E).

Cherryfudge

A couple of finds this morning (well, quite a lot of finds but I talked myself out of most of them).

A nice tile coaster for a gift (Herriot Hospice £1) and an unheated plant propagator (Sue Ryder, £4.75). I thought that was quite a lot to pay for the latter but it's in good condition and still cheaper than new.

cbsexec

In the same shop with the very expensive (I think) coat was a really nice per Una coat for £7.  A bargain for someone but I was being good and left it there 😀.  It may be mine if it’s still there when I visit again!

Rosa_Damascena

The Mountain Warehouse coat is just the ticket for the cold, but I would have struggled to have parted with £15 for it, purely because I have managed to buy so many nearly new coats for £3 or less. 

Floss

Rosa_Damascena said:

The Mountain Warehouse coat is just the ticket for the cold, but I would have struggled to have parted with £15 for it, purely because I have managed to buy so many nearly new coats for £3 or less. 

I think the days of £3 coats are almost behind us due to the lower number of donations & higher numbers of chazzer shoppers who have no other option. I also always measure something against its new cost when deciding whether to buy.

Nowadays if I did not need a coat then I would not buy one just because I liked it, I would leave it for someone who needs it. The faux fur jacket I bought last weekend has been sought for some time and is a decorative frippery, not to keep winter chill out.

The price also has to take account of things like the brand & type of coat - I pointed out that a Zara down puffa coat in my local Mind shop would sell for more than its £5 tag, if put in the window with a label saying "Zara, down-filled". It sold for £17.50 and at least 6 people tried it on. 

I know this all sounds a bit "holier than thou" but I really don't need many more clothes, regardless of how good a bargain they are and unlike previous years I don't have the disposable income to spend in chazzers that i did in the past. I now have a short list of things I'm looking for and rarely deviate from that. Unless it is books 🤭🙄

YoungBlueEyes

I umm'd and ahh'd over the trousers and cardi I bought the other day because of their high cost. This is gonna come out wrong but to me brown woolly trousers and a berkertex cardi make me think 'granny clothes' - not fashionable and their price used to reflect this. But those 3 items cost me nearly £30 I've been picking up cardis and trousers for years for a third of that, max!

But we are where we are. It's a different world now. But it'll sure curtail my spending.

Pollycat

Floss said:

Rosa_Damascena said:

The Mountain Warehouse coat is just the ticket for the cold, but I would have struggled to have parted with £15 for it, purely because I have managed to buy so many nearly new coats for £3 or less. 

I think the days of £3 coats are almost behind us due to the lower number of donations & higher numbers of chazzer shoppers who have no other option. I also always measure something against its new cost when deciding whether to buy.

Nowadays if I did not need a coat then I would not buy one just because I liked it, I would leave it for someone who needs it. The faux fur jacket I bought last weekend has been sought for some time and is a decorative frippery, not to keep winter chill out.

The price also has to take account of things like the brand & type of coat - I pointed out that a Zara down puffa coat in my local Mind shop would sell for more than its £5 tag, if put in the window with a label saying "Zara, down-filled". It sold for £17.50 and at least 6 people tried it on. 

I know this all sounds a bit "holier than thou" but I really don't need many more clothes, regardless of how good a bargain they are and unlike previous years I don't have the disposable income to spend in chazzers that i did in the past. I now have a short list of things I'm looking for and rarely deviate from that. Unless it is books 🤭🙄

Floss, that's exactly my take on it too - take into account how much it would have been new.
7.5% of the original cost for a very good quality and condition coat is fair, imho.

And compared with £17.50 for a Zara coat, my MW looks like the bargain I thought it was.

Not living in the South and catching lots of buses, I need warm coats in the Winter.

I'm in a one-in-one-out situation so I'll be donating a Per Una padded long line jacket in a leopard print with concealed hood and I'm sure it will attract more interest than my rather ordinary looking MW one.

I've also got a Primark pinafore dress to go to the hospice to make room for the patterned George one.
Plus a Seasalt top and some M&S leggings.

Everything I buy from a charity shop now generates an item to go to the hospice shop.
It's renewing my wardrobe but I'm not creating a requirement for new clothes and I'm not sending stuff to landfill.
Most of my clothes are good brands and in really good condition and I've seen them in the hospice shop priced much higher than I'd have expected.

YoungBlueEyes

I'll be doing one-in-one-out again in the new year. Currently it's one (or three!) in, a bagfull out.

The days of me buying anything because it's cheap and I'll get round to wearing it sometime are long gone. Now I only buy the good stuff and take care of it, so it's still fit to be re-donated a few years later.

Cherryfudge

I'm one of those people with too many clothes and not enough space, plus a genuine difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees, by which I mean I struggle to know what I'll really wear. In the New Year I need to put a tag onto every item of clothing or turn the hangers round in the wardrobe or something so I can remove tags/turn hangers right way round when an item is worn and have a better idea of what I want to keep.

It occurred to me yesterday that I have more cardigans than I wear but they are easier for work - and I have two that go with work clothes, the others are 'too good'. A colleague bought a really nice work cardi from Primark for (I think) £6 so maybe I need to learn from her.

Wednesday2000

I got out another £30 as I thought I would look for boots for my husband again, this time at the St Vincent's shop. No boots, apart from a suede brown pair and he works out in the rain so that wouldn't have worked.

I saw a Zara black medium coat in the men's section for £20, marked with the original cost of £70. I bought that instead along with two black skirts for me (I got rid of my usual black skirt after my Cardiff trip as it had gone almost grey from wearing it so much) I think that skirt was over 10 years old.

I also bought him a book for £1. It was an autobiography of Alex James from the band Blur. Two rolls of red wrapping paper too. £29.

I got home and asked him to try it on before I wrapped it. It turns out it was a woman's coat and was too small for him! I knew Zara did men's clothing so I didn't think. He went back to return it and I said there was a men's grey coat for £10 and he should try it on.

He came back with a grey coat, also a women's coat! OMG. The fact that it was labelled a size 14 and it was £7 and not £10 should have given him a clue. I tried it on and I'm keeping it. I can't be bothered to go back and explain that my husband picked up the wrong coat. Sigh. 

That means I spent £29 and then got the £20 refund and then spent £7 so I have enough to go back and buy him the correct grey coat today. If it is still there, that is. Total palaver.