Cancer Research UK saw profits from its charity shops fall in the year to March 2016, and has responded by moving away from the high street to out-of-town superstores, the charity said in its annual report.
The annual accounts showed that CRUK’s overall income rose to £635m, up 4 per cent on the year before, but that shops profit fell from £15.7m to £11.2m.
The charity – the UK’s third largest charity retailer – said this was a result of “intense competition on the high street” and that it was changing its approach.
“As a result of intense competition on the high street, we’ve seen a decrease in our trading profits,” the charity said in its report. “To counteract this, we trialled opening Cancer Research UK ‘superstores’ in larger out-of-town sites. The initiative has been very successful and we’re now rolling it out across the UK.”
The charity also said it had trialled contactless payments in its 588 shops, and was now planning on implementing that across its network.
The drop in shops profits in the year to March 2016 is in line with expectations for the wider sector, as predicted in last year’s Charity Shops Survey, published by Charity Finance and Fundraising Magazine, sister titles of civilsociety.co.uk.
The survey found that after ten years of rapid growth in shops profit during a period of recession, shops profits had fallen sharply as the economy returned to growth, and that this trend had been made worse by a decline in the cost of recycled clothing, or rag.
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