In Charity Shop World: An Investigation into Community, Consumption and Waste, Tansy E. Hoskins traces what happens to our belongings after we donate them.
–Katya Moorman
“I seem to just write books to destroy my favourite things. A book on the fashion industry, then a book on shoes, and now on a charity shop!” Tansy E. Hoskins told me when I interviewed her.
She was joking–but also not. After investigating the political and environmental realities behind fashion and footwear, Hoskins has turned to another source of pleasure: the charity shop. For anyone who loves the thrill of finding treasure among other people’s castoffs—or the relief of dropping off an overstuffed donation bag—Charity Shop World is an exhilarating and deeply uncomfortable read.
Charity shops—or secondhand stores, as they’re more commonly known in the US—have always been a fixture in Hoskins’s life. She grew up shopping in them, and for this book, she spent more than a year volunteering in one, turning her attention from the production side of fashion to the question of what happens once we’re finished with our stuff. “Where does stuff go when we throw it away? I wanted to use the lens of the charity shop because I wanted to write something that was localized, but told a really big picture,” she shared.
The book cleverly interweaves Hoskins’s day-to-day experience of working in a charity shop with a much wider investigation. Its argument clicked into place, she told me, when she read Saskia Sassen’s Expulsions. “That was the missing piece of the puzzle for me,” she said. She’d been writing two seemingly separate stories—one about austerity, about life expectancy dropping in the UK as museums, pools, and parks get shuttered; the other about consumption, about what happens to everything we throw away. Sassen gave her the thread connecting them: “We’re seeing the same systems replicated.” As she put it, “Of course we treat objects and clothes like this, because we’re in a system where we treat our fellow human beings like this as well.”
Hoskins uses the charity shop as a lens onto expulsion itself—of stuff and of people. “I must have put things in a bag and taken them to a charity shop a thousand times without thinking about it,” she said. “I wanted to spend some time considering that process.”
In the back room, that process becomes visible and exhausting. Donations arrive faster than volunteers can sort them, in what she compares to a never-ending losing game of Tetris—sell it, export it, or throw it away. “Charity shops are the first sorting site for the waste of capitalism,” Hoskins said, and that work falls disproportionately to women beyond retirement age, doing labor that keeps the whole system from collapsing while going largely unrecognized. “Without these people, this whole system would be in total crisis—and you’d have to deal with your own shit.”
But Charity Shop World isn’t only about waste—it’s about what these shops make possible. For some customers, an exchange at the counter can be “the only conversation they have all day.” Hoskins finds real joy in the reinvention that happens there too: “There’s this beautiful Queer world being built—and what if we applied this to everything?”
Trace the clothes beyond the charity shop, and the picture darkens. What can’t sell locally often re-enters the global secondhand trade, and Hoskins doesn’t soften her assessment: “It’s a one-way trade of extraction: money coming out of Africa and garbage going in.” You don’t need to look at deforestation to see capitalism’s brokenness, she told me—“you can look at the van outside the back of a charity shop . . . and you’ll know immediately that this is a broken, deeply harmful system that isn’t giving people what they need.”
So what would a better system look like? Hoskins is specific. “A responsible secondhand clothing market is absolutely crucial,” she said. “The genie is out of the bottle. They’ve been made now”—meaning the clothes already exist, and keeping them circulating matters more than wishing they didn’t. She wants “every single charity shop to have a laundry and repair workshop next door,” where donors and neighbors alike could learn to mend rather than discard.
She also poses a provocative question: “If you’re going to buy something, do you take responsibility for having it until the day you die?” It’s a deceptively simple test—one that has already changed my own thinking.
What stayed with me most, though, is that Hoskins refuses to let the crisis flatten into despair. “We have the resources, the time, the knowledge and the enthusiasm to build a better system,” she told me, “one that benefits people, rebuilds societies, and puts us in a position of harmony and peace with the planet. We do not have to be living like this.”
Charity Shop World is an investigation of waste and labor, but also a humane portrait of the people who donate, shop, and volunteer. For me, the book complicated the reassuring idea that donating is the opposite of throwing something away. It made me think more carefully about the labor hidden behind that gesture, while also showing why charity shops remain valuable spaces of connection and possibility. Hoskins does not ask us to abandon them. She asks us to understand what we have required them to do—and to imagine something better.
Hoskins is fluent in both the wreckage a throwaway culture leaves behind and the workarounds people build to survive it. Few writers could hold the scale of a global waste trade and the intimacy of a shop counter in the same sentence—Charity Shop World does it on every page.
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