Charity retailers in competition for merchandise: examining how consumers dispose of used goods

This article confronts the challenges of charity merchandising and competition for secondhand goods by examining consumer disposal behaviour. It focuses on goods traded by charity retailers and extends existing research on disposal by reporting the multifarious strategies that characterise household disposition. Descriptive research is presented, based on a postal survey of 210 households. Descriptive statistics illustrate patterns of disposal, and a hierarchical cluster analysis using the Jaccard coefficient is performed to distinguish households in terms of goods discarded and channels used. The results show that disposal is significantly influenced by the events that prompt disposition (decorating, purchase, and bereavement), and households use a varied portfolio of disposal channels within and across categories of goods. Five types of households are differentiated with respect to the combination of channels used and the mixture of goods discarded. The conclusions suggest how charity retailers might extend and refine targeting activities to ameliorate procurement, thus facilitating pursuit of increasingly sophisticated retail strategies. (c) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.