This week, both of us here — JD Shadel and Amy Miles — went on charity shop crawls and found ourselves in conversations about the state of such British high street institutions, as one chain announced major closures and cited consumer shifts as a cause.
Today we bring you a Behind the Seams briefing, where we connect the dots between what’s happening in the news and where it sits in the broader fashion and cultural landscape. Below, we look into the crisis secondhand and charity shops are facing.
Will charity and thrift shops succumb to the threat of online resale? Not necessarily, but, as Amy explores, a fundamental change in the way they operate is crucial to beating fashion’s race to the bottom.
What’s happening?
Charity shops appear to be closing left, right, and centre. Earlier this year UK chain Scope announced broad closures. And last month, Cancer Research said it’d shut nearly 200 stores in the next two years due to “rising costs, inflationary pressures and changing consumer habits — including reduced footfall, higher national insurance contributions and growing competition from online resale platforms,” it claimed in a press release. None of those challenges are unique to secondhand retail — except for resale platforms, that is.
Charity shop managers suggest that today, more people are buying and selling their best wares on Vinted, Depop, eBay, and the like instead of browsing in or donating to their local thrift or charity shops. For instance, one independent charity shop that closed recently said the newfound popularity of re-commerce had caused declining quality of donations.
As the online resale market continues to grow (it expanded by 15% in 2024 alone) charity shops are increasingly left only with the stuff people can’t sell online: the SHEIN dress that ripped on a night out, the Boohoo sweater that went bobbly after one wear.
How can a non-profit price items fairly to fund its work if their original selling price was as low as £1?
Ascendent resale platforms are easy to blame: one could see them as tech companies disrupting yet another corner of society. But that’s not exactly what’s going on here.
Rather, it’s yet another sign of the gluttonous fashion system of our times. In the 30 years that fast fashion’s overproduction took hold, charity shops in Geneva saw a 1,200% increase in donations (between 1990 and 2021), according to one report. This left many overwhelmed before re-commerce surged in popularity.
This drastic increase in clothing production and waste is so huge that, as we previously reported in the Good On You journal, it’s hard to put a number on. But it’s likely way higher than the 92 million tonnes of annual textile waste widely referenced from an old Global Fashion Agenda report. With this, clothing has been devalued. Consumer attitudes to quality, cost, and speed have been transformed, and how can we expect charity shops to keep up? How can a non-profit price items fairly to fund its work if their original selling price was as low as £1, and they could be resold online for even less? The root problem is the fast fashion model, the reason why people have so many cheap, toxic clothes.
TikTokers have claimed charity shops are just too expensive now, but charity shop workers say they now have to wade through more cheap clothes than they could ever sell.
What are people saying?
Charity shops are a staple in UK towns and retail areas, so people have thoughts on this.
The right-leaning media, for example, has widely reported on the closures and framed the situation as just another example of national decline — putting the blame more on minimum wage increases while largely avoiding the underlying issues of overconsumption, waste colonialism, and the shift in how clothing is valued. (GBNews called it “another fresh blow to the high street”.)
Ironically, overwhelmed charity shops then in turn dump those ‘dead white man’s clothes’ in countries across Africa, Asia, and beyond.
TikTokers have been unpacking the closures and concluded it’s hardly surprising since charity shops are just too expensive, with some fast fashion items selling for more than their original price — a point echoed in reporting by The Telegraph. Charity shop-focused TikToker Danielle pointed out that “If [charity shops] weren’t trying to sell items for the same price that people could buy them for online [and] delivered to their door for way less effort, I think they’d get much more customers in the door buying things.”
But the reality is shops have overheads and staff to pay that Depopers don’t.
From the charity sector’s point of view, times are indeed tough, but the story isn’t universally bleak, according to the Charity Retail Association, which told the BBC in July that nearly two-thirds of its members were considering opening new stores.
Though even where stores do well, the quality of donations is a problem. Reporters spoke to staff at 50 charity shops, with almost all saying their shops were increasingly used as a bin. Ironically, overwhelmed charity shops then in turn dump those “dead white man’s clothes” in countries across Africa, Asia, and beyond.
A common site outside UK charity shops: donations dumped by the door, as captured here by Roger A. Smith in 2017. Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
What to keep an eye on
Charity shops are getting creative to dispel the sentiment that there’s nothing of value to be found in them anymore. The Brandon Trust, for instance, told the BBC that volunteers with crafting skills are creatively repairing and upcycling garments — imagine a pair of cargo shorts turned into a skirt.
Similarly, textile recycling consultant Dawn Dungate told The Guardian that a younger workforce in charity shops is driving more creative approaches to selling like curating mystery bags aligned with current microtrends and initiating designer collaborations. The same generation driving the shift to re-commerce could, in fact, be the answer to saving charity shops, too.
There’s also a clear path for collaboration between charity shops and re-commerce.
Reimagining the shopping experience is perhaps best shown by Sweden’s ReTuna, the world’s first recycling shopping mall that houses preloved and upcycled items in an environment prioritizing human connection through a cafe, workshops, lectures and education programmer. Oxfam, meanwhile, is refurbishing its UK retail spaces to align with key elements of sustainable lifestyle, like more environmentally friendly fixtures, intentional product curation, and a community focus – rather than just shifting clothes and books.
There’s also a clear path for collaboration between charity shops and re-commerce: Oxfam also has its own shop on Vinted and, in partnership with the platform, hosted a secondhand runway show at London Fashion Week in September.
Charity shops are closing for myriad reasons, but one fact remains: there’s enough clothing on the planet to sustain both re-commerce and charity shops, and both can play a distinct role in shaping a more circular industry, keeping items that’ve already been produced in circulation for longer, and out of landfill.