Charity Shop Volunteers

Disclaimer ©Institute for Retail Studies. All rights reserved. 1 The views and opinions expressed in this Working Paper are strictly the responsibility of the authors. 3 INTRODUCTION Charity retailing has grown over the last five years into a thriving and expanding sector and can no longer be ignored by academic researchers. Corporate Intelligence Group (1992) report that there are now over 5,000 charity shops in the UK and the largest network of 850 shops, run by Oxfam is equivalent in terms of number of outlets to a major retail company such as Dixons. Expansion was particularly rapid in the 1980s and the Corporate Intelligence Group estimate that an additional 1,000 outlets are likely to appear by the mid 1990s. The rapid growth in the number of charity shops raises a number of issues for the future, one of which is employment and utilisation of volunteers. Although employment issues in the charity sector of retailing have been overlooked by academic researchers, employment patterns in other sectors of retailing have received much Employment in the distributive trades is large and economically crucial to Great Britain. One in ten employees in Great Britain work in retailing. Women account for nearly two thirds of the total retail distribution workforce, two thirds of whom work on a part-time basis (Employment Department 1993). Analysis of the Census data suggests that women occupy the less skilled positions such as shop assistants rather than managerial positions and this is supported by a number of other commentators Investigation into charity volunteering has been the focus of much UK research but specific reference to those working in charity shops is negligible There has been a general lack of knowledge of the numbers of people volunteering in charity shops. St Leger (1993) tentatively estimated that charity shops are staffed by approximately 50,000 volunteers and 2,000 paid employees, although her investigation showed that some charities had little knowledge of how many volunteers were used in the shops. Corporate Intelligence (1989) suggested each charity shop has on average between 30 to 40 volunteers, which implies that there are approximately 150,000 to 200,000 volunteers in the UK (5,000 ©Institute for Retail Studies. All rights reserved. 4 shops). The findings of the present survey are in agreement with those data reported in Corporate Intelligence (1989), with the charity under investigation relying on a large number of voluntary staff to operate its shops-ranging from 20 to …