I was reading Kim’s post on her great thrift find for her Thrift Thursday post and it brought to mind an amusing incident a few years ago at my husband’s then workplace…Paddington Centre of St Vincent de Paul in Sydney.
Paddington Centre gets a lot of designer clothes and antiques donated directly to the store by well meaning patrons of the charity. My husband, once he started dealing with antiques started going to antique fairs and antique centres in his spare time and built up quite a knowledge base so that the charity would get a good price for their valuable donations.
In his time there as manager he was responsible for a lot of really valuable items fnding new homes, benefiting the customer and the charity. His main area of expertise, apart from everything that he was required to do to successfully run one of the most successful charity shops in an exclusive area of Sydney was the antigues and various bric a brac. While he pottered around with that he was able to see what was going on in the store.
One extremely quiet day he asked his staff if they would like to go up to the local Westfield [shopping mall] to get an idea of pricing for the designer clothes which they were fortunate enough to receive…often new season designer originals. The store uses various magazines like Vogue etc and also phones shops to ask prices but he thought it would be a good idea and also motivate his staff to actually go out to the centre and get a feel for what was currently in fashion and also to help motivate them in their work . One by one they refused, you could not even pay them to take a coffee break and have a few hours off window shopping! Is it any wonder that finds like my stunning Bally thong/ sandals slipped under the radar?
My husband and I popped into Bally on Wednesday to see how much their sandals actually were, they do not show the price from the outside of the store, one has to go inside and actually lift a shoe to see the sticker beneanth! The flat thongs were six hundred dollars and the strappy sandals nine hundred, the sandals I found are in between that., strappy thong sandals…exquisitely made.
The dress above by Marina Rinaldi I found at Randwick centre, I paid eight dollars each for a lot of her clothing range which was donated, more and more came in each day and I kept on snapping it up as it is plus sized and quite sort after. After about three days the Supervisor in Charge realised, as well she might as I have googled prices for Vinnies for her on many an occasion, and upped the remaining items to between twenty and sixty dollars each! A good move considering one of the new blouses had five hundred dollars on the attached label!
Kim’s story of the five dollar chest of drawers which was supposedly missing a drawer is a classic example of this kind of mentality, except in this case Kim was the winner, not the charity and certainly not the person who donated the item in good faith to the charity.
The table I have shown here is another case of the ignorance shown by some staff in charity shops, I found it early last year in Randwick Centre and paid 
eighty five dollars for it. It is a craftsman made mid twentieth century table, unusual to find here and my husband said it would have sold for around three hundred and fifty dollars in Paddington Centre. Unbeknown to me he later gave his Area Manager another seventy or so dollars for the table, which was not necessary in my mind, it was my purchase and if they wanted the right price for it they should have sent it to him to sell in the first place! So the charity gained an extra seventy dollars because of our knowledge and my husband’s honesty …..this is particularly galling to me because of the way we have been treated by this charity recently.
Anyway, it is abut time charity shop workers lifted their game, and it is up to the people who employ them to ensure that they are earning their salary. St Vincent de Paul workers in Sydney are relatively well paid for shop workers…they earn more than Myer staff and also receive tax benefits which boost their salaries even further…so come on…it is time these workers started doing the work necessary to earn their salaries and to honour the people who donate the goods which make their jobs possible!
