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Britain's charity shops are suffering in the recession as donations dry up. Emine Saner helps out at one Cancer Research shop where staff have received the unlikeliest cast-offs - from unworn designer clothes to vintage vibrators
Upstairs, in a little room above a Cancer Research UK shop, volunteers are sorting and steaming clothes, and chatting away happily. The place is piled high with bags full of cast-offs, racks of bric-a-brac and rails of clothes, all waiting to be priced up and sold downstairs.
There have recently been reports that charity shop donations have almost dried up. But Sue Leng, assistant manager in this shop on Loughton High Street, in Essex, says she hasn't noticed a decrease - around 350 bags are dropped off every week. Maybe, she says, it's because people feel especially benevolent to cancer charities, "because everyone knows someone who has been affected".
Across the country, though, charity shops are suffering. "People are buying fewer new goods so they are less likely to donate what they have," says David Moir, from the Association for Charity Shops. "We are taking every opportunity to encourage people to donate. There are millions of garments sitting in wardrobes not being used, and we can turn them into vital funds for charities." Does he think people are selling their unwanted items online, rather than donating them? "Possibly."
Across the country, charity shops make around £600m a year. In this shop, people are known to spend more than £100 in one go; it takes around £2,500 a week, sometimes more - incredible really, when you consider that few items cost more than £6 or £7. The most expensive item that Sue remembers selling was an antique doll for £120, but that's a rare occurrence (they have a local antiques dealer who advises on anything that might be valuable).
Charity shops are thrilling places: a vintage dress found for mere pence; the smell of a hundred other people's washing detergents; a single item of junk that can spark a rush of memories. For a snoop like me, even the most banal cast-offs are fascinating, a window into another world. Upstairs, I'm put to work sorting through the donations. The items that get dropped off in crinkly old plastic bags hint at life stages passed - the baby who grew out of its babygrows, the man who lost weight and grew out of his trousers, the huge array of belongings handed in after the death of a parent or friend; a person's whole life in a bag.
I start pulling out items. There's a heavy brown ashtray - a strange thing to give to a cancer charity shop. Someone must have given up smoking. There's a bag of darling baby clothes ... I could do this all day. Not everyone is so beguiled. "I refuse to do the sorting," says Tina, who volunteers here every Tuesday morning. "Ever since I opened a bag and there was this dressing gown and it was covered in ..." She mumbles the word. What? "Poo. POO!" She grimaces. "Ever since then, no more." Everyone has their own stories about finding unsavoury items. Tessa wins. "There was a black bin bag, so I opened it up and inside was another bag," she says. "I opened that up and inside were a load of used condoms."
Sue remembers several bags that had come from an elderly woman's house. "I think someone must have just gone through and emptied her drawers without really looking. There were two vibrators in their original boxes. They were very old." Sue threw them away - used sex toys, even those in original packaging, are not a particularly big seller - but now she says, with a laugh, that she should have given them to a museum.
Some people donate clothes that are so dirty, stained and decrepit they go straight for recycling, but I'm surprised that so many clean items in almost pristine condition aren't sellable - anything from Primark, for instance, or one of the supermarkets, and especially children's clothes.
"They're so cheap to begin with that we can't sell them," says Sue. They would take up valuable space in the small shop. Instead these clothes go in the "rag" pile - they are bought by "the rag man", who comes every week to collect the bags and pays around £100 for a load: the good clothes are sent to developing countries, the unusable ones are recycled. There is also a "cull" pile - unsold clothes that have been in the shop for more than two weeks which are sent to another branch, to see if they have a better chance there.
What is surprising, in the era of eBay, is how many really good-quality belongings people donate. One night, just as Sue and Tessa were shutting the shop, two young women brought five black bags in. "They said, 'It's all new stuff,' and, well, I hear that a lot and it often isn't," says Sue. "I said thanks very much and off they went. When we opened up one of the bags, it was full of designer clothes, all brand new with their price tags still on - they had come from Harvey Nichols. There must have been about £5,000 worth of stuff in there. That was brilliant. We sold it all really quickly." Any designer clothes will have gone within a day, she says. Every volunteer can reel off the labels that always sell well here: Juicy Couture, D&G, Prada, Gucci. "We're Essex," says Sue. "People love their labels."
While I go around the shop tidying rails, I spot a pair of checked trousers by Emanuel Ungaro (£8) and a black chiffon Gharani Strok dress (£12). A woman has noticed a beautifully cut black wool jacket in the window (from the Italian label Cerruti, £22). "I'll always stop by if I'm passing," she says, plucking crisp notes out of a Louis Vuitton purse. "I always find a bargain."
At 3pm on a Tuesday, the shop is remarkably busy, a sure sign of recession shopping. "Actually, this is quite steady," says Jean on the till. "We've been much busier than this." By 5pm, they have taken £500 and there has been no shoplifting as far as anyone can tell (occasionally people walk into the changing rooms with items off the rails, then walk out of the shop leaving their old clothes in a pile on the floor). It has been a good day. My only regret is losing out to someone else on an old Fortnum & Mason picnic basket for £2.50.
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