there are easily enough plus points to working in a charity shop to outweigh the "but i don't get paid" negatives. other than getting first dibs on shit, getting to root through the epic piles of shit in the back and the conversations, two other rad ones are.
1) proximity to other charity shops.
the street my chazza is on houses 5 others aswell. meaning that just on the walk back to the bus stop i can nip in and see if theres anything new. today after work i was in oxfam looking through the tapes. other than a heavy d album nothing looked any good but the guy saw me looking and brought me out another bag of tapes from the back. he poured them out onto the carpet and it was like he'd seen me, knew me, and had been keeping them for me. it was a beautiful thing. i scored all these for 25p each.
2) ability to liberate bin-bound items.
before i was on the inside i was regularly hunting through the bins outside. chazzas have such a high turnaround that stuff can't just be left on the shelves. as a result, i have to put about a hundred books a week into a box to be taken off by a dude who gives us 2p per book. last week i saved a perfectly fine Salinger paperback from the dreaded 'rag man'. this week i got an old medical book called 'Clinical Methods', which has this absolutely perfect page contained within:
