Glass Mall > Glass Market Place

Help required with valuation of a couple of paperweights

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chopin-liszt:
As someone who has also done a good stint in Oxfam shops, I do know what you mean about expensive stuff "disappearing" into a void when sent elsewhere.
I also ended up taking the dear things to sell elsewhere - at the time our shop had a £5 upper limit on anything.
The area manager was supposed to deal with good stuff but she was lazy and more than happy for me to sell stuff to local dealers I knew who were decent folk and gave good prices.
I researched the things for independant valuations, I kept records of everything, valuations and money paid, signed it all out of the shop, with counter signatures from another volunteer, etc. etc.

The rest of the staff were quite happy with this, mostly because the actual cash was credited to OUR shop, rather than elsewere.

Then the area manager left, a new one appointed. The shop was also appointed a new manager and the woman who did the bric-a-brac before me, a crony of the new manager, came back.
She didn't like working with me, thought she should be in charge of it all again.
(She was a dealer herself, in a local flea market.)

She accused me of cheating the shop and giving stuff cheaply to other dealers.
It all turned very nasty indeed.
I left, and went to work in another Oxfam shop elsewhere.


As for mentioning the GMB, it's only right to reference your source of information properly.
It also means if your buyer has any quibbbles about the information, they can come here and discuss it.

We're in the "business" of getting glass properly identified and it's makers credited for their work.

Apologies if we upset you, but there are a lot of sharks out there and we don't know you!

I think you should be very careful of doing good in an unofficial way like this, but I do understand why you're doing it.

What charity is it?

gemstars:
Hi,

Glad you can relate to my story, given your previous experience of charity shop work. I can relate to yours, we have one or two individuals who are very protective over their 'departments'. People tend to think that charity shops are full of honest, hard working people who want nothing in return, unfortunately that is not always the case.

Fortunately for me, the manager at our store is fantastic- it's her who decides what is worth going on ebay, I'm afraid I'm not very knowledgable on antiques and collectables, my department is jewellery and doing the window mostly. She's always the first one and and the last one out and does double the work of anyone else which is why I'm sure you'll understand why I do not want to risk getting her into trouble by naming the charity.

I see your point about keeping records, I'll think about this for the future. And I'll remeber to give credit to my sources of information.  :)

chopin-liszt:
Given we don't know where on the planet you are, I don't really understand why you won't name the charity, but that's up to you. Could you not at least tell us what sort of thing it supports?

I have a tendency myself to blurt out the truth because I'm never ashamed of it, but it does get me into trouble.

Despite my having the records, and the (large) amount of cash I raised all properly documented, and all the staff supporting me before the new shop manager and area manager and the dealer woman came back, sadly, nobody would stick their neck out to support me afterwards. They were too scared of the bullying dealer woman.

I could not track down the original area manager to get her to say she'd given me the go-ahead to do this. I believe now it was likely to be because she was in the wrong to do it in the first place and she simply refused to respond to my request for support for fear of incrimminating herself.

The bottom line being that you really should stick to the rules. They're there for a GOOD reason.

Loads of other folk could also be breaking the rules in a similar way and the cash siphoned off.

After what happened to me, I will never, ever do anything like that again.  It was a whole load of extra work on top of my volunteer time and I simply got a load of stress and grief for it in the end.

Anne:

--- Quote from: Lustrousstone on October 26, 2010, 10:20:07 AM ---And no mention that you are selling them for charity, or so you said.  :o :o

There is an option to create charity listings on ebay.

--- End quote ---

Just to clarify as the charity sale option is a bit confusing at times.  I have recently sold several items for a local charity here in the village where I live, and could not use the charity listing option on eBay as it's not one of those charities on their "list." So all I could do was to state the details in the listing, which I did. It also means I pay full eBay fees for those sales, which come out of my pocket as an extra donation to the said charity. So selling for charity on eBay isn't quite as clear cut as eBay make it sound at times. Perhaps we should split off the discussion about the ethics, pitfalls, and other observations on selling for charities out of this MP topic and pop it over into Cafe.

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