A Love Letter To The High-Street
When I was a teenager, I would moan about the lack of ‘cool’ shops on my local highstreet, and even now it is mainly made up of charity shops with the odd cafe interspersed. But over the years, charity shopping has undergone a transformation to become a fashionable and sustainable way of filling your wardrobe for less (although it doesn’t come without its downsides in its role within fast fashion.
Cast your minds back to the time-now-makes-no-sense past when, as part of lockdown easing measures, pubs and non-essential retailers were allowed to open on 12 April. While most social media feeds were full of people desperate for that first cold bev in the sun, there was another set of people desperate to be back open.
Charity shops were classed as ‘non-essential retail’ in the UK’s third lockdown, with some in the industry criticising this decision. Despite growing concern about the gentrification of charity shops, they are generally still cheaper options than second hand apps such as Depop and also stock various household goods in one place. But one of the most important reasons is that they’re offline.
As charity shops reopened, people were not only looking for bargains; they were looking for genuine human connection in a confusing and upsetting time. I’ve worked in retail and hospitality throughout the pandemic, and you often see familiar faces and when you know that they don’t have much interaction outside of their weekly visits or phone calls, it’s so important to check in with them and build a relationship. Charity shop volunteers are also likely to be older because of more free time, as well as being a good source of routine and interaction, and volunteering is also a great way to get people back into employment.
Cause-specific charity shops frequently act as a point of contact for services in their local community, and when the shops shut this direct support was also taken away. The awful irony is that since the first wave and subsequent lockdowns, the support that charities provide has been needed more than ever. Samaritans have taken almost 2 million phone calls on their helpline in a nine month period.
Alongside fundraising, charity shops are a popular way for charities to raise money so that they continue to do what they do, whether that’s researching illnesses, supporting those who are experiencing domestic abuse, or funding community-based projects.
This is because shops act as a significant source of income for charities as they provide the quickest boost of money, and they also provide ‘unrestricted income’ which means it can be spent on any activity within the charity.
St Peter’s Hospice provides care and support to adults living with a progressive life-limiting illness in the Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset area. Its Head of Retail, John Broomfield, says “The retail arm is definitely the biggest element of fundraising for us. We obviously have fundraising in its pure form, we have retail, we have government support and we have legacies. It’s a relatively even mix but retail is the biggest arm.
In a normal year, we would be looking at a profit of £2.8 million and all of that money goes back to the hospice. In the last 12 months we broke even, so we didn’t make a loss, but in essence the hospice lost £2.8 million that it normally would’ve had from the retail arm. That’s a huge amount of money for us so it’s had a dramatic impact.
Mental health charity Mind predicted a loss of £1.5m in sales in one month, while Welsh children’s hospice Ty Hafen anticipated losses of at least £100,000. These are huge amounts of money in relation to the charity sizes.
Furthermore, as the number of people on furlough and benefits increased throughout the pandemic, the need for charity shops became greater:
“If you look back through previous recessions, you will see that demand for second-hand and pre-loved items increases. You generally see higher sales levels while the economy is challenged,” a spokesman from Cancer Research UK said in The Guardian.
When you shop at a charity shop, you can pick up something unique and support a cause. Since scoffing at them as a teen, I’ve bought countless books and pieces of clothing to treasure for a long time to come. Mindlessly scrolling through a never-ending page of clothes just doesn’t compare to rifling through rails with friends and picking up something special.
As John says, “The joy of charity shopping is you don’t know what you’re going to see … you can also be aware that you’re supporting a more sustainable culture but also it’s just fun. You don’t know what you’re going to get, and when you do get it there aren’t twenty mediums [of that item], there’s literally one that you’ve got. In that sense we offer so much and our customers really enjoy shopping with us. We want to build on that and try to make our stores a little bit more modern and in some of them a bit more tailored to our customer profile but we also want to be a shop for everybody. In the majority of our stores there is something for everybody.”
And is there anything that people can do now to support charity shops?
“Now more than ever we would really love the continued support of people, whether it's donating or buying or volunteering because we will have a deficit. We’ve weathered the storm from last year, but we still didn’t make what we needed to make and that will mean that the hospice will have a deficit this year.
It’s a preconceived idea that our volunteers are generally retirees and while we love having retirees, it’s also brilliant when you get a real mix of people and ages in a store volunteering, so we would always love more volunteers.”
Written by Sophie Ellis
Sophie is a twenty-something cafe assistant near Bristol and Bath. You can usually find her trying to perfect her latte art and book shopping, but ideally, she's by the beach.
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