Before going back to start my new term at Leeds I decided that I needed to get a job, intending to help fund my bad habits – food and alcohol. This somehow did not quite go to plan when I found myself and my friend Bryan stood in a charity shop in Headingley on a Thursday morning, being given a thorough introduction to volunteering and the joys of health and safety. Originally seduced by the rather glamorous idea that the charity shop would be a gold mine of free vintage clothes, we quickly found out that this was not the case. Mary-Lou, the shop manager, brought us straight back to reality. She explained it is company policy that if we want an item we must pay the full price, unless it has been on the shop floor for 48 hours, in which case we can get 25% off (the staff discount). This of course dampened the mood slightly, but Bryan and I soldiered on.
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Strangely, the idea of rooting through a load of someone’s unwanted items seemed somewhat inviting. To me this concept was rather simple; you empty a bin bag full of clothes or bric a brac and sort the good from the ugly. However, we soon learnt that it was not quite so straightforward as Mary-Lou filled our otherwise clean minds full of horror stories, including finding a dead cat and its food bowl!Â
The health and safety that controls the running of the charity shop is just bewildering. For example, we found a lovely knitted blanket which, from the Gift Aid sticker, we learnt was made by an elderly lady called Christie. Me and Bryan were ecstatic when we found this, however Mary-Lou did not have quite the same reaction because “it doesn’t have a label on it and is therefore seen as a fire hazard”. She tossed it into the rag bin, which goes straight to landfill.Â
Of course, it was essential that we were formally instructed as to where we should go if there is a fire in the shop. Apparently the fire exit is the front door, so lord help us if there is a fire on the stairs. Yet we were reassured that in all of Mary-Lou’s experience as a manager, she has never had a fire in her shop, especially as we were told that in another shop someone left a top to dry on a radiator over night which caused the entire place to burn down! Any items that were left on the stairs such as bags of clothes were quickly removed, for fear of replicating another horror story where a manager had been imprisoned for two years following the injury of one of their volunteers.
Despite the overwhelming number of health and safety nightmares doled out to us in the first week, we still found time to meet 2 of the 20 other volunteers; Hansel and Mark. Hansel is Spanish and has finished his degree but is working in the shop in order to improve his English. He particularly likes playing shop behind the till and drinking a peculiarly coloured juice, and although he works the same hours as us we are mostly upstairs sorting so we see very little of him. Mark, who comes in at 12 during the last hour of our shift, gives us a lot of responsibility, and I suspect from his authoritative presence that he is a lead volunteer.
So, it seems what I thought would be a rather simple few hours working behind a till has turned into something much more interesting. I would never have
thought that when I signed up I would learn so many new things about the world of charity shops, and am even more excited for next week to tell you how it goes! Wish me luck!
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