Nobody in this world wants to be the person complaining about charity shop prices. It feels ungrateful. The money goes somewhere good, the volunteers are doing you a favour, and you are, at the end of it, buying someone else's old coat.
But they have gone up. A lot. And I think we should be able to say that without it being an attack on the British Heart Foundation.
Two years ago I could walk into most shops on Wilbraham Road and pick up a decent wool jumper for three or four pounds. Now the same jumper is eight, and if it has a label anyone recognises it is twelve. I bought a Marks and Spencer blouse last month for nine pounds. It is a nice blouse. It is also nine pounds for a second-hand blouse from a shop that got it for nothing.
Here is what I think is happening, and I could be wrong. The shops got wise. Somebody at head office noticed that a certain kind of shopper — me, if we are honest — will pay more for the good stuff, and that resale apps had already taught everyone what a vintage Barbour is worth. So the pricing got smarter. The genuinely good pieces get pulled, checked and priced properly, sometimes listed online instead of hitting the rail at all.
That is not a scandal. It is a charity maximising income, which is the entire point of a charity. But it does mean the thing that made thrifting work — that the person pricing the item did not know what they had — is quietly disappearing.
What I have changed
I have stopped going to the shops everyone recommends. The Didsbury and Chorlton ones get written up constantly, they get picked over by ten people like me every Saturday, and the prices reflect it. The shops that are still good are the ones in places nobody blogs about.
I have got much less precious about labels. A label is exactly the thing the pricing has learned to spot, so it is the worst value in the shop. An unbranded wool coat in a good cut is a third of the price of a branded one in a worse cut, and on you they look the same.
I check the men's rail every single time. It is still under-priced and it is still under-shopped, and an oversized men's shirt is an oversized shirt.
And I have got slower. I used to go every Saturday out of habit and buy something out of momentum. Now I go with a gap in mind — I need a proper winter coat, I need trousers that are not jeans — and if it is not there, I go home with nothing. That has done more for my wardrobe than any find.
None of which is a complaint, really. It is just a different game than it was.