Please would you mind removing your fur coat

There are certain items that by law we are not allowed to sell (for example upholstered items without fire labels or toys without a CE label) then there are items for which a licence or age restriction may be required such as a DVD and then the last category, items we can sell but choose not to either out of respect or fear of controversy which brings me to the title “Fur”.

Personally I don’t believe in animals being killed for sport or fashion that’s why in the modern world we have faux but this is not the place to discuss my own concerns, but rather to explain the connotations associated with the endless possibilities of a donation and what should we do with them?

The first thing that springs to mind is a ...SALE! Yes...but as a responsible shop manager or even a volunteer you stop and consider the implications of that fur coat going out for sale on the shop floor (can I just take this opportunity to apologise for my incoherent grammas as I often remind myself of a French person who writes very good English but I don’t always place the word in the correct place of a sentence like just now although it all makes perfect sense)

Here is a photograph of said genuine fur coat, I can’t go into detail of what animal skin it is as I have no idea nor do I have a particular desire to find out although they are beautiful coats and I know from past experience synthetic furs that we have had donated have sold for £50 as they are always very popular.

You see lots at vintage fairs (now they are such a fun experience!) One of the older volunteers (Mary) has a saying “Fur Coat No Knickers” whatever that means I’m not entirely sure to be honest. 

So this leaves us with a problem. What do we do with it? Well there a few options we could rag it but I feel this would be a waste (we get a standard price per KG of a bag so yes even your moth eaten jumpers can be recycled and made money out of!) we could offer it to an animal shelter organisation (the animals like to sleep on them as they are real fur) or an independent campaigner and get some nice publicity or sign it over to an amateur theatre company and suggest they make a donation to us.

What would you suggest?

I have heard a story of another charity that had a fur coat for sale in one of their stores, I think it might have possibly been part of the window display which was obviously not the best move they had ever made (most probably unintentional) and an animal’s rights campaigner placed a lit cigarette in the pocket of the jacket and this resulted in the whole shop being burned down. I don’t know if anyone got hurt, I hope not but the moral of the story is to research what you can and can’t sell and what may be at risk to your reputation, charity profile, staff and ultimately yourself. This is quite an isolated incident. A potential good sale could cost a lot more down the line!

We are always trying to maximise profits and make the most of people’s donations. A charity shop isn’t just about making money (although it’s a Plus – see what I did there?) but also to serve the community for want of a better word - we have volunteers from the local community, youth work organisations, government organisations (more about these another time) and people enrolling on “back to work” courses to improve their skills and CVs. So it’s all good and all beneficial with or without fur coats!

Cat got ya Tongue? Or does Autism Plus?

I bought some nice velour blue and black fancy hangers today so we can display the stock better on our display grids, a little bit more in keeping with high street retailers. I love hangers, I’m very much a hanger on of most things and I quite like fancy hangers. It’s good to have a personal touch and individual style as long as it doesn’t detract from the charity's over all image. Who wants to go with the crowd? That will never be us, we set the pace.

You might have seen it but Autism Plus has had a new logo designed and all the shops have recently been fitted with a new sign.

It has one of my favourite features, a butterfly which has been designed very cleverly using the A (Autism) and the P (Plus) to make the wings of the butterfly. The image symbolises transformation, freedom and spreading your wings which I think is a perfect representation of Autism Plus. It is part of a whole branding change for the shops and hopefully to create a better understanding and awareness of what we do. Some good innovative thinking actually :-)

Well the real reason I’m blogging today is to make an appeal, has anyone lost a tongue? I know you probably couldn’t say but if you have I may have it.

I have a really long tongue I can touch my nose with it. Someone donated a small plastic box that said “Hazardous” when I opened it I was horrified to find a tongue. It was a wet sticky tongue; I was so shocked that I dropped it on the carpet. I literally lost my tongue!

Who would do such a thing, seriously it's the worst donation we had ever received. I realised it wasn’t real, it was a toy tongue but it looks so real, so real in fact I couldn’t resist playing a little practical joke on our deputy..at the end of each day after cashing up we remove the till draw- I decided to hide the tongue in one of the money compartments for her to find the next morning. I wish I had been there it would have been a winner :-) (Can you count how many times I said “tongue” in that paragraph!)

So if this is your tongue please get in touch and I will return it to you in your box and we may never need to say anymore on the subject. Case closed.

I do love funny items the staff had a naughty apron donated in at the beginning of this year, very rude, even I gasped but it was hilarious they decided to buy it and wrap it up and give it me for my birthday, I cook in it actually and I would upload a photo but I doubt it would be acceptable but I’ll let your minds ponder...

R2D2 is that you?

Mondays as a rule are paperwork day. Unsurprisingly I’m late this week delivering the papers to where they need to go and sometimes get into trouble and I get an unhappy face sticker L on my wage slip. But I am working on my punctuality and efficiency as we speak and I do try, but if alot is going on I struggle to concentrate.

Actually I quite like the idea of an Ikea office where I can do it peacefully [paperwork] I do enjoy going to Ikea on a Sunday and eating the Swedish meatballs and I am now sat here wondering if anyone would like to build me an office so I can put photos of my late hamster on the desk and have multiple mugs of coffee left half drank oh and a secret stash of whiskey (this could be a running theme throughout this entire blog) in my lockable filing cabinet that has supposedly “very important documents in” and yes I would like a money tree, a cactus and a fax machine so I can randomly fax people nice messages.

I once decided to fax my headmaster at my school and tell him I wasn’t coming into school that day and that I had a nice weekend but I never got a reply. I like it when you call somebody up and get a beeeeeeeeeeeep down the phone line and your like “…hello….? R2D2 is that you?”. A fax machine would be a handy addition to my proposed office.

The paperwork involved can play havoc with my sanity when things do not balance and I know a lot of people out there can relate. If someone makes a mistake no matter how minor and its on the till and nobody reports it, it can throw the rest of the figures off resulting in giving me a headache. But that is retail and I am not an accountant thank god I have my calculator.

Its funny how we rely on technology and gadgets these days one or two of the volunteers make comments like “oh back in my day you had a block of stone and a chisle we had none of these fancy thingy ma-bobs that work it all out for you” You mean a cash register? Yes the basic technology for recording your sales that although excruciatingly simple can kafuffle the minds of an academic.

But you do have to bear in mind not everybody is as technologically minded as you may presume, working on the shop floor, face to face with customers, handling money, queries and complaints can take a lot out of you and you need a cool collected head at all times to ensure accuracy but more often that not I recognise the piercing sound of the till beeping erratically whilst a volunteer is spitting feathers at the long queue of sympathetic customers.

I find a lot of people when they start working in the shop have an inherent fear of the till, they want to go on and make money but they need a little of coaching and encouragement after all we all have to start somewhere and that’s one of the best things about Autism Plus you are part of the team no matter where you want to start J

Get well soon love!

Charity shops as I have said before are usually run by a manager and an assistant manager but also interestingly by its volunteers, they are essentially the backbone of the shop. I have known other charities that rely solely on volunteers. The incredible act of giving up your time and knowledge to offer it free for a good cause. You do rely on them and this is never proved more true than when they call in sick.

Everyone gets ill at some point even I get ill, people think I’m immune/immortal and if my face is not shown they demand to know where I am. I call them my public and I love them back.
Volunteers, do as a rule phone up on the day of their sickness but sometimes I suspect an organised poorly day event when all your staff are ill together, it can feel like that sometimes and it happened to our deputy last week, you can feel let down but it’s a part of life. Because volunteers  are not paid staff you should respect them and understand although they are very generous with their time other things can take priority which is why you constantly as a manager, need a plan of action and the ability to re-shuffle and prioritise. I personally, have very rarely had to “let-go” of a volunteer but it does happen and luckily we have some great staff.

I once had to let a girl go who caused a few problems in the team I didn’t get good vibes from her. It can be destructive in a small team when success relies on working together, team being the operative word here.

I’ve taken part in team building exercises before and stand on the fence, not literally, about them although they are entertaining and a giggle.
Anyway I always wish my volunteers “get well soon love” and keep in regular contact with them so I know when to expect them back and if they need any extra support. That’s just how I roll :)

Hang on, a change will do you good!

Change is good, very good actually, change you find in your pocket is even better I love finding £2 coins at the bottom of my bag or those little beauties that have slipped through the lining of your favourite jacket and you try all day in vain to get them out and in the end, in an act of desperation you take a pair of scissors and ponder cutting a hole just to get this change.

Maybe that’s just me BUT anyway the change I’m referring to is healthy change like a wave of refreshment rushing over you, invigorating and inspirational and more often than not unexpectedly.

Today after having a long weekend (and well deserved) break from things I came into work feeling rejuvenated (I’m near enough using my entire R vocabulary here to try and impress you, recite, regress, record, revisit, redo, rewind etc etc that’s about all I know actually).

That was until I took in my surroundings fully, the backroom was piled full of donations even blocking the fire exit that was obviously my first concern and dealt with it before anything else.  The shop floor was nothing how I had left it and everything seemed so out of place and out of sorts including me. I came in a little bewildered. It was shopageddon.

It was all hands on deck from the word go, luckily I had arrived early so I could sneak off to the local bakery and grab my self a sausage butty and a latte. Funny thing is I don’t drink coffee at home its like a cosmopolitan thing it looks cool to be seen carrying coffee in a cardboard mug right? Eco friendly. I’m quite a fan (not necessarily an active campaigner) for re-using and respecting the natural environment and order of things and also consume fair-trade goods where-ever possible. I guess I feel a little less guilty for getting drawn into the world of materialism and lifestyle trends we often associate ourselves with. 

This is one of the reasons I love working in a charity shop in a way its like recycling peoples lives, whether its when they have a kitchen clearout and donate entire colour schemes of  matching accessories or their last years wardrobe. The beauty of the now is “everything goes” or so it seems so nothing is dated because there is such a love of vintage inspired goods something I am very passionate about, there is always a wave of new designers re-creating past decades so your always guaranteed to find something unique and current in a charity shop, especially ours ;-)

If a charity shop is not also representing environmentally friendly guilt free shopping I don’t know what is!

Back to change. The way I operate is if I find myself in a situation where for example I don’t know where to start I have to change it, I take sections by sections strip them and re-build. For example I’ll start with the windows, strip, clean, re-dress, use a colour scheme and update. Today with two of our longest standing volunteers (Mary and Gerry) we all mucked in and gave the shop a really good tidy and re-merchandised. We put all our best stock on wooden hangers, got some little luggage tags and hand wrote little descriptions of the items. I monitored this and we sold quite a few items just by moving and creating a type of boutique feel to some of the clothes. Which proves change is good, it fools people into thinking they are looking at something new which in turn results in them seeing it in a new way!

You sometimes find people don’t like change, they oppose it, they are threatened by it but I , I welcome it either way they notice it.