Oxfam, the 67-year-old Oxford-based confederation of multinational organizations, spends more than $600 million a year around the world fighting poverty, famine, climate change and discrimination. $32 million of that budget comes from book sales at its
130 second-hand bookshops in the UK, making them the second largest retailer of second-hand books in Europe. Now, independent booksellers are beginning to speak out about the competition. On
the BBC, in the
Telegraph, the
Guardian, and the
New York Times, some British booksellers are questioning the wisdom of charities using chain stores to raise funds. Are they “destroying lives here to save them elsewhere” as they’ve been accused of by one former UK bookseller, or is this the logical economic result of “the English town with the secondhand bookshop everybody loves but most people never actually go into.” as David McCullough, director of trading for Oxfam recently speculated?
posted by Toekneesan
on Sep 9, 2009 -
40 comments
The Afterlife of American Clothes. "From 2003 to 2007 [filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi] visited rag yards in Miami, dug through archives in London and Washington, D.C., and traveled to Haiti to see the international secondhand markets for themselves. The result is the recent documentary
Secondhand (Pepe), which explores the global trade in used clothing."
posted by Knappster
on Aug 17, 2008 -
12 comments
