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Pricing up & Haggling Down: Value Negotiations in the UK Charity Shop

Fitton, Triona (2022) Pricing up & Haggling Down: Value Negotiations in the UK Charity Shop. JOMEC journal, 17 . ISSN 2049-2340. (doi:10.18573/jomec.231) (KAR id:99863)

Abstract

This article uses a micro-ethnographic approach to investigate the shop-floor presence of ‘professionalisation’ in the UK charity shop sector. Previous literature on charity retail has described how business-like, professionalising practices have invaded their operations (Gregson and Crewe 2003, p. 75). However, these arguments focus upon top-down processes, without observing how these are played out by actors within the physical space of the charity shop itself. A key component of second-hand culture is the variable nature of value within it – and value is all the more unpredictable in a time of global flux. Using the examples of price negotiation and haggling behaviours on the charity shop floor, this study concludes that professionalisation of charity retail is tempered by customer/worker interaction and social imperatives. Thus, charity shops house a hybrid of professionalised and non-professionalised actions and behaviours that demonstrate the value systems and humanity of shop actors. These ‘participant-driven experiences’ of value negotiation enable those on the shop floor to challenge the ‘iron cage’-like characteristics (Weber, 1977) that have infiltrated the 21st century second-hand world: bureaucracy, rationality and impersonality.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.18573/jomec.231
Additional information: For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
Uncontrolled keywords: Charity shop, shopping, bureaucracy, haggling, price, secondhand, value
Subjects: H Social Sciences
Divisions: Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > Kent Law School
Funders: Economic and Social Research Council (https://ror.org/03n0ht308)
Depositing User: George Austin-Coskry
Date Deposited: 02 Feb 2023 15:18 UTC
Last Modified: 05 Nov 2024 13:05 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/99863 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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