If, like me, your tailor of choice is the British Heart Foundation or Save the Children, it is beginning to feel like the end of days. Old people are still dying, their wardrobes still being emptied into bin bags – but we vultures are being starved of their corduroy carrion.
Charity shops are in crisis. Scope has shut more than 50 stores this year already. Two more – in Beverley and Fleet – are closing this week. Taunton, Portsmouth, Skipton and Bangor are all completely Scopeless. The Charity Retail Association (CRA) is gloomy, explaining that the British Heart Foundation, Barnardo’s, Oxfam and Cancer Research UK – the big four – have all been struggling to maintain healthy sales.
‘There appears to be a bit of a perfect storm at the moment, with income being relatively flat and cost pressures being almost unprecedented,’ the CRA has warned. ‘These two factors are combining to hit profitability in a way that most charity retailers have rarely seen before.’
For cost pressures, you can read Labour’s hike in employers’ national insurance. Before the rise took effect in April, Andrew Vale, of the mental health charity Mind, told the Telegraph: ‘We are deeply concerned about the impact that the increase will have on our retail network.’ Barnardo’s managing director Mark Gregory explained, somewhat euphemistically: ‘Where stores are not generating a positive contribution that we can invest in our work to change childhoods and change lives, then we have to make the difficult decision to close.’
Who cares, you might ask. Will our high streets really be any worse off without these emporiums of the discarded and unloved? I think they will be. Charity shopping, though an economic necessity for many, is not just about cheap clothes and chipped crockery. Rummaging in baskets of ties or rifling through piles of shirts is a pleasure all of its own. And there are stories here, in the notes scrawled on the inside of dust jackets – ‘Dear Joan, love you always’ – or the still-sealed board game, hinting at a Christmas gone wrong. They are perhaps the only shops you enter without having any idea what it is you’re looking for.
Geography plays its part, too. In Kensington, you might find a pair of Gucci loafers; in Shaftesbury, near to where I grew up, you won’t. I have often travelled the length of London to browse the charity shops in Highgate, where celebrities and the north London set drop off last season’s wardrobe. February is the best time to go, when people are cold and bored and clearing out. This summer, Nick Cave donated 2,000 books to an Oxfam in Hove. A lucky few discovered old plane tickets and Post-it notes inside paperbacks.
Rummaging in baskets of ties or rifling through piles of shirts is a pleasure all of its own
The joys are endless. So why, in a cost-of-living crisis when belts are being tightened and shoppers are hunting for bargains, are so many charity shops closing? The internet marketplace Vinted surely has a lot to answer for. Anyone, even my mother, can now upload and sell their old clothes online. Handing over a bag of shirts to Cancer Research once felt like a relief; now you’re left wondering whether you might have earned some money instead.
And have you heard of World of Books? It’s an app that allows you to scan the barcodes of old books, pays you for them and then even sends a nice man to pick them up. Totally brilliant – but perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when the CRA says ‘this is the worst time for trading we [charity shops] have ever encountered’.
It’s all very sad. But my sympathy for charity shops only stretches so far. Too many seem to have forgotten who they are meant to serve; a sort of ‘vintagification’ has taken place and some now look more like boutiques than charity shops. Save the Children has Mary’s Living and Giving shops, set up with Mary Portas. There is a Boutique by Shelter in Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross. Royal Trinity Hospice shop branches look more like Oliver Bonas from the outside.
The prices reflect this move upmarket, too. I recently bought a shirt from Cancer Research in High Street Kensington for £18. And I remember being in the Clapham branch of Save the Children when a man who appeared to be homeless muttered to himself: ‘It’s all just too expensive.’ Anecdotally, I have heard that some charity shops are using sites such as eBay to decide how to price their donations. Sensible, perhaps, but self-defeating: people visit charity shops to try to find a bargain or because they can’t afford to use sites like eBay.
I fear that charity shops, in their drive to stay relevant or to beef up their profits, have misunderstood what people actually like about them. We don’t want elegantly dressed mannequins and heavy wooden coat hangers. We want mountains of clothes at pound-shop prices.
The CRA signs off its dispiriting report with cautious optimism: ‘It would be easy to conclude… that the heyday of charity shops is well and truly over… But an alternative view, one to which we would subscribe, is that the creativity and resilience of the sector will kick in again.’
Let’s hope so. Our high streets would be a far less interesting place without charity shops. And you can never have enough slightly greasy ties.
What hidden gems can be found in charity shops? Rupert joins the Edition podcast alongside the Spectator’s editor Michael Gove:
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