Bursting with customers one afternoon the week before Christmas, a second-hand charity shop in London’s Marylebone High Street looked even busier than the upscale retailers surrounding it.
One man grabbed two puzzle sets and a giant soft toy as a present for friends, another picked out a notebook for his wife.
“Since the end of September, we’ve seen a huge uplift in people coming to our shops and shopping preloved,” says Ollie Mead, who oversees the shop displays for Oxfam charity stores around London.
At the chain of second-hand stores run by the British charity, shoppers can find used, or “preloved”, toys, books, bric-a-brac and clothes for a fraction of the price of new items.
Popular in Britain for personal shopping, charity stores and online second-hand retailers are seeing an unlikely surge in interest for Christmas gifts, a time of year often criticised for promoting consumerism and generating waste.