Fleur Britten with a pair of torn black trousers donated to St Raphael's Hospice charity shop in Cheam, Sutton. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Fleur Britten with a pair of torn black trousers donated to St Raphael's Hospice charity shop in Cheam, Sutton. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian Guardian journalism is independent. We earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more .
Swamped with ‘daily avalanches’ of soiled items and poor-quality fast fashion, secondhand stores are in crisis. What went wrong with people’s good intentions? And is it possible to donate more effectively?
Prefer the Guardian on Google The small stockroom of St Raphael’s Hospice charity shop in Cheam, south London, is rammed with donations. “On average, we get 30 to 50 bags a day,” says Caroline Worley, the commercial manager, “but it’s not unusual to receive over 100.” This might sound like a good problem to have, but the sheer volume of stuff is the shop’s biggest challenge. “Sometimes, there’s only [enough] floor space to tiptoe,” says 48-year-old store manager, Colin French.
Rummaging through the donations, it’s clear that much is unsaleable: a smelly, soiled bathrobe, tatty trainers, heavily bobbled jumpers, old socks, an empty Swarovski jewellery case. “Absolutely typical,” says Worley. They’re also overwhelmed with deluges of low-quality fashion – a shift in donation habits that accelerated during Covid, because, says Worley, all that time at home enabled people to sell their best stuff on Vinted.
The experience here echoes that of author Tansy Hoskins, whose latest book, Charity Shop World , paints a picture of a charity retail sector in crisis. She spent 16 months working in a London charity shop, sorting through “daily avalanches” of clothing, which swamped “all the other categories put together”.
View image in fullscreen St Raphael’s Hospice charity shop in Cheam, Sutton gets rammed with donations. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian Everyone Hoskins interviewed said similar: “quality is the big change marker – it’s gone through the floor. You’re just fighting against the waste.” The problem is nationwide. Since the book came out, she’s “been contacted by managers of charity shops around the country – for example, Nottingham, Accrington, Newcastle – all saying that most of what they’re getting is waste.”
It is, of course, our waste. According to Jose Baladron of Traid, which has 12 shops across London, shopping for new clothes is “through the roof – the UK is the highest consumer of clothing in Europe by far ”. “That obviously translates to more donations, which is far too much to process in small shops.” Hoskins routinely found that ultra-fast-fashion donations would “still have tags on – it was clear people had received their online purchases and gone, ‘What the hell is this?’ It wasn’t even wearable so they’d just donate it.”
On average, charity shops only manage to sell about 25% of clothing donations, according to Baladron (a figure replicated by a University of Southampton study ). “So they rely heavily on the ragman” to shift the rest. Yet the price of rag has “plummeted”, according to Merryn Haines-Gadd of the environmental action charity Wrap, “due to the saturation of low-quality fast fashion”. Ten years ago, a charity might have been paid 50-60p per kilo. “Now you’re lucky to get 10p,” says Baladron. Plus there’s only so much the ragman can take.
View image in fullscreen Britten…