Part 1 of my dissection lies here :

and this retort is made with reference to the following comments made in relation to my original post:

nina jo rees Says:
January 11th, 2010 at 9:48 am e
I understand your point and you make it well. However, the object of charity shops is to make money for their charity. Anything that can be done to enable the shops make more money is to be welcomed. I don’t think regular charity shop shoppers would miss out if the shops were more professionally run. In fact we all might benefit.
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Money, I dont think is the only objective of charitys ? the object of charity shops is not just to make money and money alone, that is the realm of our rather over commercial business sector, hence the difference in categorisation and status between ‘charitable organisations’ and ‘business’s’, Charitys and Charity shops should have multiple objectives, such as behaving morally in their activity’s generally, noting the worth of free unpaid volunteer labour, and putting that time and energy to good use, without being insulting and treating those people as though they were being paid, when they quite clearly are not. I think charity, is also as much about being clever in the use of resources received, whether money or labour to ultimately acheive best result for all the people involved in their activity and those they are trying to aid.

Often throwing money at a situation where charity is concerned, does nothing but breed a false sense of entitlement and reliance on charity and that reliance on charitable culture, is often their to sustain a greater injustice elsewhere in the makeup and structure society and culture itself. I can also see plenty of arena’s, where lots of charitable money has been spent and very little lasting result has occured. this to me would indicate that too tight a focus on money, can easily lead to a scenario whereby it is wasted. Money has not and will not solve all the problems of the world today, it is a false god and those that perceive it as the total solution to all things are idiots, it is just a transactional token, which enables us to distribute goods and services, more of it in circulation does not automatically imply that those goods and services are more equally or fairly distributed. It is our will and desire to make a better world, that is of greater value.

Politics also has done nothing but deaden the belief in the idea of the cause and purpose of british life, we live in a country with no common bond of identity, of isolation and disenfranchisement, overt commercial consumerism and the undending thrust of private interest over common interests. There is little faith in the concept of britain that 60 years ago, united us as a whole.

Money being the only objective, maybe the perception perhaps of new wave managers ? but that view would be an oversight which ignored the true nature of the network of beneficial inter-relationships, that have been demonstratably occuring within charity shops in the last 40 years. Middle class to upper class people have been donating, And most often low income people in this country have in all practical memory purchased things from these shops, it is these poor people who have been donating this charitable money, which is then used for charitable works aimed at a further set of people, who suffer dis-enfranchisement elsewhere. Its descent is almost feudal, in the sense the rich give up something they no longer need nor use, the poor get an item they otherwise could not afford, and then those poorer still whether here or abroad then receive the proceeds from these sales, this if any were needed, is proof of a beneficial cycle. A proof of an even more charitable version of this might be say freecycle, which attempts to truly give away for free., though this method obviously doesnt tax the poor and benefit another set of poor elsewhere.

If you increase the price of the goods, then you are pushing the charity shop purchaser further up the wealth class matrix, appealing to people to purchase from charity shops, who can afford to buy the same items new elsewhere, this might eventually lead to a point, whereby your asking the people to purchase who are also the donators, and in this process you would enable the middle class to use the shops as a kind of swapmeet if they can bring themselves to visit the shops, and further disenfranchise the poor purchaser, in this process, perhaps at some point breaking the beneficial cycle completely.

You point in your comment, about wanting better quality goods in the charity shops, less tat is meritorious, and with this I agree, there is no harm in increasing the quality of items, but to then want to increase the price structure overall is to wish to shift your purchasing market target group, and this will lead to disenfranchisement, which is not the objective of charity shops ? Less tat and more recycling is also a wise move, so that less junk clutters the shop.

But Certainly charity shops should not be fashion houses ? which Mary in her 60’s reminisence of her own youth, was probably trying to unconsciously and egotistically re-create the luxury charity shops of her ‘chelsea look’ london . Wherein such areas she purchased, from quite high quality charity shops and developed her fashion sense, career and ideas ? But in reality the people who have traditionally purchased from charity shops, there prime objective has not always been dressing up, but many other practical requirements as well.

Charity shops should not be competing with commercial shops, in the sense that the value in a charity shop is that it is a ‘charity shop’ and not a ‘shop’, it is that subtle diference which is theyre own quality which makes them interesting to their audience, it is the possibility of a real bargain, which attracts people in the first place. Also it is the Jumbly Nature of charity shops that enable the people who purchase from them to enter such shops without fear of being judged, whereas perhaps they would fearingly not enter a high end fashion boutique in central london, precisely because of the opposite feeling of unwelcomeness. It is probably the jumbly nature of charity shops that in turn repulses Mary, and makes her feel uncomfortable, you could often see her squirm and be-little the stock, and touch like it was filth, she’s a horse from a different course, in the sense that she probably feels at home in the high end fashion boutiques previously mentioned. As such of course she will unconsciously and naturally attempt to mould the environment of the charity shop toward something that her class and social group would be happy in attending, in other words unconsciously or not the average person would generally mould the shop, to closer match theyre own ego’s desires, and Mary is no different in her approach to this situation.

One of the things that spoils Mary’s ability to manage this scenario is to put a fundamenttally rich person in charge of a poor persons shop, this is a mismarriage intellectually, in the sense that she cannot probably conceive monetarily of the difference between an item being 50p or £2.00, whereas to the purchaser this might be very prevalent. ie Mary’s is not in the target purchaser group, so all she will do, is unconsciously shift the focus of the shop to better fit toward to people of her own class, ie upmarket it. And this is because people with large ego’s who become famous and rich, have usually got there but cultivating a distinct blindness to everything except their own situation and beliefs. which is what enables them to be so focussed in the first place. She could therefore easily disenfranchise allot of people who are not similar to her own group socially, and do not align closely to her own personal take on things.

If Mary’s objectives were purely to get better quality items into the charity shops and to declutter the shops of unsellable tat (tat being very subjective term !), and recycle it … then fair enough.

The problem was, she was trying to raise the class profile of the purchasing group, and convert them into normal retail shops, which is what her ego understands. And she appeared to the viewer, to undertake this task, by bullying and manipulation of old unpaid volunteers, in what appeared to be quite an agressive manner, which betrayed her ego investment in doing this task.

And no doubt the program makers had their ill thought agenda too, as most idiots of today, are preprogrammed to expect it to be, some kind of radical & transformative makeover style program, and the directors more than happy to oblige, so they can use their crappy cutaway wipes of before and after, simplifying the ethos of transformation into a form the ignorant can recognise.

The whole show would have been better with a little more tempering, perhaps “Mary Portas tweaks charity shops” perhaps even better still if it wasn’t directed by a woman (3 women in fact) who were no doubt in awe of Mary, the likelyness of being commisioned by a woman at the now over feminised, multi-ethno-centrically-polysexual obsessed guardian reading beeb is probably also, highly likely, though I can’t find evidence of it ? Anyways perhaps it might have been better if it was say “Alan Davies tweaks Charity Shops” or some other celebrity who has wears a duffel coat. Whichever way is wasn’t done with enough humility or gentility. It was as though the media and celebrity concerned, thought it was their job to take charity shops by the scruff of the neck, and turn them into £2000 a week target obsessed business entity’s, as though in this society today, we are so enslaved by the concept of money, we see it as a necessity to drag every fucker’s face in the land who isn’t likewise obsessed, kicking and screaming upto the grindstone of monetary obsession, whether they like it or not, this appeared distateful. Most of the experiences we truly appreciate and enjoy in life, are those do not involve paying an amount of money up front, equal in value to the experience received, and experiences that cannot be categorised as such, are often dependant on the gifting and decency of nature of those people and behind those parts of culture where money and selfishness is not the obsession, it is this nature that makes life worth living.

But things done with subtlety in the UK, are less and less propogandised/demonstrated to the masses as they way things should be, as the crass brashness and short termist view of american cultural beliefs overtake and are exemplified above and beyond that of home grown and time aged sensible ideology’s, what at first appears overt and bright and shiny may lose pallor and use, very quickly like a firework.

With all these transformative programs on tv, they should go back 3 years later and see what happened to all the people affected by the media maelstrom, including finding those who it affected badly, and haven’t recovered.