Charity shops enjoy another successful year

Finance | 24 Aug 2009

Charity shops have defied the recession and increased their profits by 4.1 per cent, according to the Charity Shops Survey 2009, which is sponsored by accountants BDO Stoy Hayward. While the gross income of the 69 shop chains in the sample fell by 3.1 per cent to £526.1m, their costs fell even further, by 4.9 per cent to £414.6m, leaving a collective profit of £111.5m. Charity shops have now increased their profits for the past four years, and in eight of the last 11.

Oxfam continues to make the most money from charity shops, despite a slight fall in its profits of 0.3 per cent to just over £21m. Cancer Research UK, British Heart Foundation and Salvation Army all increased their profits to close the gap in second, third and fourth places with profits of £17.1m, £15.8m and £8.4m respectively. The biggest percentage profit increase was shown by Scope which was up by 168 per cent, taking it to number 20 in the profit ranking with a surplus of £772,000.

Property costs as a proportion of total income were down with rents falling from 19.1 per cent to 18.9 per cent, despite average rent per shop rising slightly to £18,787. Staff costs as a proportion of total income also fell, from 31.9 per cent to 30.5 per cent.

With downward pressure on rents and salary costs and with the number of charity shops expected to increase as more retail premises become available due to the recession, many charity shops managers expect profits to continue to grow.

Comments

[Cancel] | Reply to:

Name *

Email *

Organisation

Job Title

Comments *

Verification *

* Please read our Community Standards

Close »

Community Standards

The civilsociety.co.uk community and comments board is intended as a platform for informed and civilised debate.

We hope to encourage a broad range of views, however, there are standards that we expect commentators to uphold. We reserve the right to delete or amend any comments that do not adhere to these standards.

We welcome:

Robust but respectful debate
Strongly held opinions
Intelligent relevant discussion
The sharing of relevant experiences
New participants

We will not publish:

Rude, threatening, offensive, obscene or abusive language, or links to such material
Links to commercial organisations or spam postings. The comments board is not an advertising platform
The posting of contact details for yourself or others
Comments intended for malicious purpose or mindless abuse
Comments purporting to be from another person or organisation under false pretences
Gratuitous criticism, commentary or self-promotion
Any material which breaches copyright or privacy laws, or could be considered libellous
The use of the comments board for the pursuit or extension of personal disputes

Be aware:

Views expressed on the comments board are left at users’ discretion and are in no way views held or supported by Civil Society Media
Comments left by others may not be accurate, do not rely on them as fact
You may be misunderstood - sarcasm and humour can easily be taken out of context, try to be clear

Please:

Enjoy the opportunity to express your opinion and respect the right of others to express theirs
Confine your remarks to issues rather than personalities

Together we can keep our community a polite, respectful and intelligent platform for discussion.