Charity shops have got the usual commercial pressure to respond to their customers’ needs. But they also have the pressure to respond to their obligations to their donors, to try to raise the most money possible from donated items, hence the pricing policy that has them tagged as ‘expensive’ (yet still criticised for undercutting rival private secondhand stores). Charities, especially high-profile ones like Oxfam, also have to be seen to be following many procedures that private businesses can often pay lip service to, such as health and safety and auditing, knowing that disgruntled people often take their ‘greedy/dangerous/cost heavy charity’ stories to the media or even the law.

So there are disadvantages as well as advantages to being a major charity.

But the undeniable fact is that many ‘proper’ secondhand bookshops are bloody awful and deserve to close, just as many of the independent bookshops that have gone to the wall in the wake of the Net Book Agreement’s demise and the rise of the chains/Amazon were bloody awful too. Yes there are good new/secondhand bookshops, and yes good ones have closed down, but there were/are still plenty of secondhand booksellers who sneer at mass market sellers/buyers, offer desultory sums to sellers, and generally act like antisocial gits rather than retailers desperate for a sale. I discussed this article with several people today and half of them had had poor service from secondhand book shops.

There is nothing to stop secondhand dealers using their book knowledge to stock new stock sourced on a sale or return basis from a wholesaler, run customer ordering services of new books as well as the usual secondhand service, and even sell coffee and cake and fair trade chocolate, and put on events etc etc. I’m sure some do already, but I’m equally sure that some others just moan that Oxfam are closing them down even as they continue to run their secondhand book businesses much as they did 20 years ago.