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Charity Shop as Fund-Raiser

The coincidence between the project of charity retailing and particular tendencies within ‘first hand’ retail geographies has meant that it has become both desirable and possible for certain elements of the charity-shop sector to constitute the high street as an appropriate space of second-hand exchange. Following a period of stasis, evaluation and consolidation consequent upon difficulties in sourcing, staffing and uncertainties over the business context for second-hand trading, it is likely that the future for the charity shop sector will be ‘leaner’ and ‘meaner’. Correspondingly, many charity-shop organizations have been recast as chains, staffed by former retail employees (from executive level down to individual shop managers), and subjected to comprehensive retail ‘makeovers’ (with lighting, display strategies and pricing all coming in for attention). At the same time, this recasting has entailed major changes in the geographies of location. So, while certain charity shops continue to be sited in off-the-beaten-track marginal retail spaces, others particularly those within the major charities’ chains are to be found increasingly in the high street or even city center locations.

Charity Shop’s Goods

Here it is the degree of presence of previous owner/s, their traces in the clothing and their in/eradicability which matters. Volunteering in charity shops then, particularly the hours spent sorting through bags of donated goods, is fundamentally about discourses of the body and their negotiation. It requires, for example, one to cope with the associations which surround other people’s discarded clothing; notably the tacit knowledge that frequently the clothes donated to charity shops are not just ‘chuck-outs’ but the discarded effects of the dead. These are the goods which are no longer needed by their owners and no longer wanted by those who donate them. Symbolic of loss, sadness, bereavement, unwanted memories, these garments enter the charity shop, whereupon one chapter of their biography closes and another (potentially) opens up. Yet it is the volunteer who makes these critical decisions, who decides just which of these effects are still usable, wearable, re-enchantable, and which are not. Who negotiates in short the taboo of dead people’s clothing. And then there is a range of issues about bodily dirt. Sorting through discarded clothing forces one to acknowledge the constructedness of one’s own body boundaries and surfaces, as well as one’s own personal hygiene/bodily dirt thresholds and their day-to-day variability, compared with those one works with and those who donate. It also emphasizes the importance of the absence of previous bodily traces visible and olfactory in selling second-hand clothing, for what is all the subsequent steaming and cleaning about but the erasure of bodily presences stains, smells, fluids.

Refreshing Charity Shops

Charity retail chains have thus seen the introduction of both new logos and new color schemes, in transparent attempts at branding and increasing visibility on the high street. Correspondingly, stock display has become increasingly standardized, with goods differentiated on the shop floor by category and price and by color-blocking. Not only are these practices ones that facilitate the accurate monitoring of sales figures (and targets), but they have rapidly become part of normative display conventions across the sector. In short, they have played an integral part in the professionalization project, and are widely seen to legitimate claims to being ‘proper shops’. At the same time however, these standardized interiors are productive of particular regimes of representation. Here goods are presented in a manner that is highly regulated. Sorted by volunteers through particular criteria imposed from Head Offices that elevate price bands, the general stock category (women’s-differentiated, men’s and children’s clothing, books, vinyl, etc.) and color, this regime is constituted around and striated by the mass market and mass consumption. Moreover, it is intrinsically about ‘easy’, quick, value-based looking (and buying), where the core motivations of the customer are assumed to be ‘the bargain’ and time. The parallel to the ‘easy’ retro-shopping instance, the importance of this regime lies in the way that it removes the work of looking: here those who enter into these spaces are encouraged to follow what is mapped out for them by the constitution of the interior – to look methodically and select (or not) from the ‘choice’ provided by pre-sorted categories. It is, then, an intensely regulated constitution of retail space, and one that appears to regulate customer possibilities entirely. But, what it also encodes is some of the core premises shaping this particular version of second-hand exchange: that (first-cycle) retailing provides stocks of knowledge/s and practices relating to selling that can be transplanted into the second-hand arena; that second hand goods can be sold in ways that are identical to these; and that the first/second-hand distinction can be erased through representational strategies.

The Volunteers

When working as volunteers in charity shops the importance of the bodily in relation to second-hand clothing is never far away. Spatially, for example, charity shops exemplify Goffman’s ‘front’ and ‘back’ zones, with their distinctively different bodily associations (Goffman 1959). So, whilst some of the work of the volunteer is that of the shop sales assistant (working on the till, restocking and tidying display areas etc.), much, much more occurs in the back shop zone, a space characterized for us by the distinctive smell of collections of second-hand clothing; a crusty, musty, fuggy, distinctive bodily aroma. And it is here, to the back shop zone, that bags of ‘donations’ come in, to be stacked up in the sorting area. Typically, they are black binliners, of the type usually reserved for household rubbish and refuse tips. And, for us, just as for those volunteers we worked with, there was a never failing hesitancy about opening them up. For one, there is the all-pervasive smell on opening. So, when we look at the production of charity shop space through the practices of charity shop managers and volunteers, the bodily is an ever-present trace. Inscribed in and defining of second-hand clothing, narratives of the body are used to assess, reject and accept donations; to repackage and sell them on. Too much bodily presence, be this conveyed through signs of leaky, messy bodies, just too much general wear or smell, spells rejection. By contrast, that which displays little trace of ownership, which looks as new or which can be rejuvenated through cleansing, purifying, freshening rituals, is to be valued; a garment which can realize further value precisely because of what it lacks. Turning now to charity shoppers, we find much the same set of bodily narratives and practices at work in the purchase and consumption of second-hand clothing. As many high investor charity shoppers said, rummaging is seen to be an important part of the pleasures of charity shopping. There can then be too much order, too much regularity in charity shop spaces; an order and a discipline which destroys the critical differences between charity shops and first-cycle shops. Yet, as these extracts make plain, the body remains a necessary discipline; a presence which can push certain charity shops beyond being attractive spaces for a rummage to ones where few wish to rummage.

References

Goffman, E. (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday.

Goodall, R (2001) ‘Charity shops back on target’, Charity Finance(July), pp 42 – 57

Gregson, N., Brooks, K. and Crewe, L. (2000) ‘Narratives of consumption and the body in the space of the charity shop’, in P. Jackson, M. Lowe, D. Miller and F. Mort (eds.) Commercial Cultures: Economies, Practices, Spaces, Oxford: Berg, pp 101 – 22

Porter-Benson, S. (1986), Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.