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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
Selling clothing at the shop of a global charity was never just about selling clothing. Nor was it about global charity. My detour into retail was driven by equal parts personal experiment and corporate ennui. And perhaps a dash of midlife crisis.
About a year after I moved to London from Toronto in 2019 I started volunteering at a local thrift store – a “charity shop,” in the British vernacular – a decision born partly from a desire to get involved in my neighbourhood, but mostly as an antidote to the creeping sense of alienation I felt from a career spent at multinational companies e-mailing clients I would never meet, working on projects I would never see, writing reports no one would ever read. Although the work focused on important social and environmental issues, it started to feel more remote and abstract over time.
Volunteering wasn’t a distraction or an escape – I could have easily found that elsewhere. Nor was it a search for an altruistic sense of “giving back” or “being part of something larger.” To be completely honest, my motivation was selfish – a desire to feel useful in some tangible way. Working in a charity shop would be an uncomplicated, low-stakes mini-adventure. No virtual meetings. No timesheets. No PowerPoint slides. No KPIs. No jargon. Just accomplishing something through normal interactions with regular people.
The day after I expressed interest, I was contacted by the manager of the Oxfam charity shop down the street: Could I help out on Saturdays? How about this Saturday – as in, today? Could I stop by the shop to answer a few questions – right now?” My response to all three questions was ‘Yes’. After a brief introduction and completing some forms, I was shown how to use the cash register and got to work.
One thing Canadian readers should know is that charity shops in the U.K. are entirely different from thrift stores back home. Charity shops are ubiquitous institutions well integrated into the streetscape: humble, cozy affairs tucked in between a cafe and a post office or between a bank and a pharmacy. Within a 10-minute walking radius of my apartment, there are seven or eight.
The shop where I worked had a rotating cast of accents and personalities. Some, like Grace, were local Londoners. But most of the other part-time volunteers and full-time managers were immigrants, students or short-term wanderers from afar: Prash from Australia; Gretchen from the U.S.; Eleni from Greece; Justine from France; others from New Zealand, Turkey, Belgium, Hong Kong. Everyone had their reason for being there.
There were a variety of tasks to fulfill. Receiving bags of donated clothing and homewares, loading them into the small, overworked service elevator. Arranging shelves and clothes racks. Curating items for the display case in the front window. Upstairs, amidst the clutter of a continuous stream of donations, we sorted items while music played on the old desktop PC. Rumpled garments were revived with a few meditative waves of the clothes steamer. (Everyone loved using that old wheezing thing, despite its temperamental hissing.) On the shop floor, we used the price gun to mark the new packaged items for sale, from fair trade chocolate and coffee to soap and birthday cards.
I gravitated toward working the front counter. For someone who has never worked in retail before, there was the thrill of being front-and-centre – the pleasure of a brief conversation, sharing in the joy of someone who scored a cool T-shirt or hat, seeing a customer hum along to a tune from a CD I had selected from the shop’s outdated collection. Then there was the cash register. Part digital, part mechanical, this was a hulking machine from the 1990s with a till drawer that shot open with a satisfying “thwing!” and shut close with a reassuring “thwang!” The barcode scanner didn’t always work. But when everything clicked, when there was a beep, the tap of a card or some cash and coins to exchange and a receipt to staple together – there was nothing quite like it.
It was not all just delight. There were minor moments of stress, too. Like the complicated logistics for processing a return. Or a customer that asked to have six wine glasses wrapped – each one, carefully, in newspaper – while 10 people waited in the queue. Time seemed to stretch and pressure seemed to mount in moments like these.
For several years, I volunteered almost every Saturday. Lately, this has tapered off as life circumstances have changed and other priorities have taken hold. But the experience forced me to confront one undeniable truth: when it comes to work, I am a fan of short-termism and immediate gratification. You hand me a shirt, I ring it up, you pay, I say “thank you,” and we’re both happy – end of transaction.
These are not grand gestures. But they are authentic. They accumulate. They shape the world in quiet, dignified ways. An Oxfam charity shop might be the epitome of the motto “think global, act local.” But I’ve come to believe that maybe “think local, act local” is the truly radical act now.
Paradoxically, it might just do the world some good.
Mark Bessoudo lives in London.
