'Inconspicuous consumption' – charity shop research
Howard Lake | 5 December 1999 | News
Research has just been completed on charity shops as part of the wider picture of exchanging second-hand goods.
An Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project has just been completed which looks at retailing and consumption in Britain in the 1990s. In particular it looks at charity shops, their function as retailing spaces and their changing geography; the motivations behind, and the practices of, charity shop consumption; and the potential for the further development of both ethical and sustainable forms of consumption through the second hand market.
The research has been carried out by Nicky Gregson, Kate Brooks and Louise Crewe. They spent several months undertaking fieldwork in a range of towns and cities across England, investigating where such shops were, what the particular area was like, the appearance of the shop itself, and the stock and layout of each shops’ interiors. Their fieldwork included working as volunteers in two shops chosen as case studies.
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The report concludes that the expansion of charity shops as witnessed during the 1990s looks set to continue into the next century, albeit at somewhat reduced rates.
The report indentified a number of key developments. “Modelling themselves on existing retailers, charities are restructuring their retail operations through branding, new images, and strategies of display and sale which are all taken directly from ‘conventional’ retailing. As a consequence, the link to the charity has frequently become opaque, and the visual difference between charity shops and other retailers hard to define.”
However, professionalism was proceeding at a different pace throughout the sector. The report quotes another charity shop which “presents itself as a ‘professional’ shop, with window displays, promotions and so on, [but] its work culture is based around the more traditional, and informal, charity shop notions of ‘doing good’, ‘helping out’ and ‘mucking in’.”
The report also looked at why people shopped in charity shops. Any notion of “doing good” was far from most people’s minds. They were after a bargain. In addition they were seldom aware of the particular charity that a shop was benefiting. “Tthis absence of charity is compounded by the way individual charity shoppers talk about specific charity shops – again characteristically vague: “The Cancer Shop”; “the something to do with animals shop”.” The report adds: “thrift and the celebration of the bargain are primary motivations within the second hand arena,” and that includes the charity shop.
The report ends by asking some fundamental questions that arise from this analysis. “Just what will be the effect for charity shops of collapsing their visual distinctiveness from conventional retail spaces? In the longer term, will their lack of distinction/iveness count against them? Isn’t the charitable dimension, and its explicit visualisation, in a sense their critical difference?”
The rest of the research looked at ‘retro’ retail, the trade of goods from previous eras which are currently fashionable but not yet considered ‘antique’ or vintage, such as the current trend for 70s styles.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.