Charity Shops in Buxton

Buxton has a great selection of charity shops including British Heart Foundation, Scope, Cancer Research and Help the Aged, the Oxfam charity shop and High Peak Hospice Care.

Charity shops everywhere have come a long way over the years and Buxton is no exception. 20-odd years ago they were very dim and dingy places and it was a brave soul indeed who ventured over the threshold to rummage amongst the dire cast-offs of a dubious, unwashed population. Items bought were quickly popped into a plain brown paper bag and uppermost in the mind was the noble thought that you were doing it for charity. Not any more.

The savvy Buxton bargain hunter now knows that charity shops are places where designer labels often rub shoulders with good high street names and where you can often pick up a brand new, labels-on garment for a small fraction of the original retail selling price.

The shops themselves are brightly lit, usually well kitted out with modern shop fittings, and the stock is arranged professionally and categorised properly. The jumble sale approach has long gone from Buxton, and there's no need any more to rummage through piles of rubbish you'd rather not touch just to get at one item that might be okay if it's given a good wash first.

Buxton charity shops present themselves with pride and offer good value, good quality, good variety and a good shopping experience.

You'll often find a good selection of new items on sale in Buxton charity shops, and Oxfam in particular has a fine range of Fair Trade stock. Most others offer new jewellery and fancy items such as mobile phone charms or hair accessories, unusual ornaments for the home, or giftware that's just a little bit different from other high street shops. Clothing items such as hats and scarves, gloves or bags are also often brand new, bought-in lines that are exclusive to the organisation in particular. For instance, Buxton British Heart Foundation did a popular range of sparkly evening scarves over the winter months.

Although charity shops are often still thought of as the poor relation to other high street shops, more and more people are waking up to the fact that they have much to offer to the discerning buyer who likes a bargain.

Like the proverbial swimming duck, while all appears serene and calm on the surface, there is frantic paddling going on underneath.

Buxton Charity Shops rely on donations. Without people like you and me choosing to donate our unwanted items they would all shut down within a week. The notices you see in all charity shops that plead for your unwanted gifts, clothes, videos and books are not there for decoration. They really do need a constant supply of good quality stuff to sell.

These days the emphasis is very much on 'good quality'. If you give a jumper that's covered in bobbles or full of holes it'll end up in the rag bag, and whilst the shop does make a bit on rags, they all eat into the overall profit margin and therefore into the amount of money that could otherwise go towards funding the charity work.

Give a jumper that you've only worn a few times, is perfectly clean and wearable, and even better that you've carried to the shop yourself (no cut from the profits for the van driver), and you'll have unending gratitude.

Our hypothetical jumper is carried through the door and handed to the volunteer assistant on the shop floor, who will take it from you with relish and express thanks. She (or he) will take it through to the back room where it will probably be noted on a chart that keeps a daily record of all the donated bags.

From there it will go into the sort room. This is where all of the items donated in Buxton start their charitable lives and it's usually piled floor to ceiling with bags waiting to be sorted. Many of the contents will be unusable – maybe they're too worn, too old, need a wash, need repairing, have buttons missing, or any number of other faults – so it takes a lot of bags to find items that eventually appear on the hangers in the shops.

It's not just a question of sorting for saleable items. These items are then further categorised into quality – whether they are designer labels, how much wear they've had, which end of the high street they come from (price-wise when new) and how they arrived in the shop. They are put into colour-coded tubs. Our good quality jumper, carried by hand into the shop, that is a designer item with very little or no wear, goes into the top-of-the-range tub. It won't languish there for long.

Next, the jumper is ticketed. It is fitted with its colour-coded ticket, marked with its PLU (so the till knows what sort of item it is and can calculate what's selling best), sized and put on the correct kind of hanger complete with its size cube. It is then hung on a rail and waits to be priced.

Pricing in charity shops is a tricky business. Too high and people are put off by the comparison with the same garment when it was new, too low and people think it must have something wrong. Get it wrong either way and the shop loses the sale.

The organisation behind the charity shop will have a pricing guide for the many categories of clothing and their state of wear, quality etc. Discretion is allowed for items of exceptional quality, but most will fall within the given guidelines. It takes skill and a practised eye to get it right, and most new volunteers will have to work their way up to pricing. But having been correctly priced, our jumper how has its complete ticket and is passed to a different rail to await the next stage.

Steaming. There is neither the time nor the facility in a charity shop to wash garments or other items that are donated, but all items of clothing are steamed before being offered for sale. This is done with a purpose built, industrial steamer and is surprisingly good fun. It makes home ironing seem like a real chore when you see how fast a steamer, in practised hands, can make the fanciest of blouses look pristine.

It needs to be fast. There is not a moment to lose behind the scenes in a charity shop. As fast as clothes get sorted, ticketed and steamed, the bags are piling up again to repeat the process. It's a never-ending, work-never-finished, fast-paced environment. Because of the current popularity of charity shops there is a high turnover of stock. As soon as our jumper is steamed it will be taken downstairs and hung on the sales floor. Because it's a great item, it will probably be sold quickly, and hopefully the sorters, ticketers and steamers haven't been slacking and there is another ready to take its place.

Unsold items don't necessarily get recycled as rags. Charity shops operate what is known as 'rotation', and work in partnership with one or two other shops in the area. For instance, the Buxton British Heart Foundation shop works with the Matlock branch for rotation purposes. If our jumper doesn't get sold, it will be put into the rotation system and will then be offered for sale again in a different shop. Only if it fails to sell on its second attempt will it be withdrawn from sale and recycled. Nothing is wasted.

Rotation is a daily task in the charity shop. Back at the ticketing stage, a code which is actually a date is put on the ticket. This is the date that the item was first put on sale. Our jumper will probably stay in its original shop for two weeks. After two weeks it will be found, thanks to its date, by the volunteer who is doing rotation for that day. It's a task that involves looking at every single item on the sales floor and checking the date on the ticket. Any item with a date that is two weeks old is removed from sale. If it's an item that has come from another shop it will be ragged as the other shop won't want it back. If it hasn't been rotated before, it will travel to the other shop and go on sale again.

Thanks to rotation, charity shops have a constantly evolving stock that is refreshed on a daily basis, and will have been completely changed every two weeks.

If the clothing stock sounds complicated, add to that everything else in your local charity shop. Someone has to sort all the books into categories; fiction, non-fiction, authors and genre, price them up and put them, alphabetically, on the shelves.

Someone has to understand jewellery and its value; know the difference between paste and peridot and recognise grandma's heirloom when it comes in. Music, too, has its own following and needs someone who knows what's hot and what's not.

Likewise, there's a world of difference between a Doulton figurine and a mass produced ornament of a lady in a long frock. Some expertise is needed to recognise the good stuff from the merely pretty, the kitsch from the collectable.

What about merchandising and window dressing? Like any other retail store, the charity shop needs to display its wares attractively, keep everything dusted and clean, and arrange eye-catching displays in the windows. All this expertise is usually provided by volunteers.

Buxton charity shops echo the need across the country for volunteer staff members. There may be two paid members of staff in the manager and assistant manager, or sometimes two job-share managers, and they would never cope with the volume of work on their own.

Many people may shy from volunteering their time because they don't want to operate the till or deal with customers and they think that's all there is to do. Hopefully you've seen how many varied jobs there are behind the scenes in a charity shop, and maybe you'll think again about giving an hour or two. Yes, really, just an hour or two can make a difference.

It's fun. Volunteering is not like working a 'proper job'. Within reason you can choose your hours and what jobs you do. No one is going to tell you off for being a couple of minutes late or look at you sideways for stopping for a chat. In a charity shop there is a real team spirit which, in itself, can be a tonic in this dog-eat-dog world.

People volunteer for all sorts of reasons; to get out and make new friends, to build confidence after a spell out of work, to give something back after needing the charity themselves or for a family member, to learn new skills (you can get qualifications through charity shop work) or brush up on old ones, or even just to have a bit of fun.

The reasons are as varied as the volunteers themselves, and all ages get involved from young mums and dads, students, retired people and all in-between.

Next time you're in Buxton and pass a charity shop, or pop in for a browse, look at it with a fresh eye. There's far more going on inside than you may have realised.