Charity shops have long been a mainstay on UK high streets. In 2026, they are both more popular than ever, and being treated “as a stop on the way to the tip”, according to workers.
Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram have made charity shopping (or “thrifting”, to use the Americanised term) more popular than ever. As a result, some charities like Save the Children had a three per cent rise in retail sales last year, with young shoppers playing a significant part in the increase.
But those same shops are struggling to deal with their donations due to the sheer volume of items that fast fashion brands are putting into the market.
Harriet, a volunteer at Crisis in Dalston, says that in the two years she’s been there, “the volume of donations is increasing, so much so that we’ve had to refuse donations. There are only three people at any one time who can sort through everything and it takes a lot of time and man power”.
While the volume has gone up, the quality of what is donated has not. “The quality of donations over the last year has also diminished rapidly,” says Claire Stockman, head of retail for St Luke’s Hospice, something she attributes, in part, to the rise in resale apps like Vinted.
“If I go back a couple of years, we used to get pretty much everything that people didn’t want because most people couldn’t be bothered to try and resell them.” She says now they are primarily seeing used clothes from fast fashion brands like Primark, Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing. “These items are only £5 new and we probably can’t sell them for more than £2. We try to sell them but because of the brand and the quality, people won’t buy it.
“Sixty per cent of what comes into us is not sellable.
“It’s soiled, it’s damaged beyond repair, it’s smelly beyond belief. We have stock that comes in where the crotch has been cut out of the jeans or the pockets have been ripped off the back. I’ve been in charity retail for a while now and I have never, ever seen it this bad.”
Louise Dawtry is People and Culture Lead at Mind and speaks to charity retail workers for her podcast What’s The Chari-Tea?. She says: “I think people treat charity retailers like an alternative to just going to the tip. People don’t want to throw stuff into landfill so they’ll give it to charity and the charity can figure it out. And it’s a big problem for workers to have to wade through a lot of stuff they can’t actually sell.”
Harriet echoes this. “Our sorters have gone through used knickers, single socks, old swimwear, items that are dirty and stained – the things people wouldn’t try to sell on Vinted.” On top of that, they see plenty of tech that doesn’t work and have to safety test, and used, dirty kitchenware.
This is a theme across charity shops. Claire says: “About six months ago, I took a donation off a customer and as I was carrying it, I paused and thought, ‘What’s that dripping down my leg?’ It was an old chip pan with fat still in it.”
This is knowingly done, she says. “That donation came off a customer who ran away as quickly as they could when they gave it to me.” They call customers like these bag tie-ers. “They hand you a tied up bag and run away as quickly as they can because they know it’s full of stuff that we can’t sell”.
Of course, it is not all bad. Harriet says they still get their fair share of designer items which people will buy even if they are marked: lots of sunglasses, clothes and, on occasion, shoes. The pièce de résistance in the time she’s been there, she says, were a pair of “very sparkly, very high Louboutins”. They ended up selling for around £400.
Jane Thurnell-Read inspecting some of the suspected “high-value items” they receiveJane Thurnell-Read, who volunteers at the Oxfam General shop in Exeter, deals with items that have been pre-sorted and are suspected of being high value. As a result, she has found some amazing items that have sold highly on the Oxfam online shop.
“There was a box donated after someone’s family had passed and in it were all these medals. I researched them and the whole collection ended up going for £2,340,” she says. She’s also found half sovereigns among expired currency and valuable pocket watches.
“It feels very good to know that the money is going to a good cause. With the medals in particular, it feels great that they will be going to someone who will respect them: collectors who seek them out and know their worth.”
Unfortunately, however, the proportion of donations that are sellable vs unsellable is discouraging. “I went through a donation myself yesterday that came in, and we could only sell one item out of 11 – the rest was smelly, soiled beyond belief.”
The unsellable clothing isn’t completely wasted but is sold as rag to textile merchants who then either reuse them, recycle them, or ship them to the Global South where they are recycled, or dumped in landfill. The charities can then make a bit of money from that process, but that income has rapidly decreased in recent years thanks to the war, as well as the increased volume of clothes: the price of rag had fallen from 45p per kg to 12-16p per kg over the past three years.
But still, the charity shops have to find a way to process all these donations, which is a hard task. Volunteers are the lifeblood of these businesses and, understandably, people who are giving their time for free don’t always want to spend it dealing with soiled, smelly and often wet items. It can even be a health and safety concern – at Harriet’s shop, only staff are allowed to sort and they have to use PPE in case they come across anything dangerous like needles. Because of this, it’s not uncommon for charity shops to have to refuse donations or close for a day in order to sort – all of which impacts how much money they can raise.
Charity shops run on donations, though, and don’t want to discourage people from donating. However, they would encourage people to prioritise good donations, rather than trying to avoid going to the tip. So not just the things you think aren’t worth trying to sell on Vinted.
“A good donation is anything new with tags on, anything that hasn’t been opened, or higher quality items,” Louise says. “Items that have been well looked after are more likely to sell and generate a better price.” Harriet adds that knick knacks and wine glasses are surprise hits in her branch.
At St Luke’s Hospice, they are now encouraging donors to still bring them everything but split it into rag and sellable. “Then we can still generate money for charity from the unusable stuff and it saves us so much time and resources”.
But the ultimate message they all want to convey is to treat shopping with them like a donation, as well as a bargain. “If you can afford to pay more than what’s on the tag in a charity shop, you should do that,” Louise says.
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