The Premise:

1) Vinyl is now bought purely by collectors, obsessives, DJs and people with too much time and/or money on their hands. (Which is all the same thing anyway).

2) Therefore – vinyl is now a tip top commodity (cf: ebay)

3) People take old vinyl to charity shops.

4) Other people buy them (see (1) above).

5) Because of (2) some of (4) may be inclined to pay more. Or to buy vinyl from Charity Shops to re-sell (see (2) above).

6) Therefore, charities are losing out on revenue.

The Solution:

1) Find a volunteer who knows a lot about contemporary beat music.

2) Encourage him (or her, but let’s not kid ourselves, eh?) to organise charity shop vinyl stock – pricing accordingly.

3) Purchase “dividers” to categorise stock.

4) Purchase clear plastic wrappers for 12″ LPs and singles.

5) Sit back and wait for eager punters to bring in huge amounts of cash.

There’s only one difficulty with this plan:

Most records in charity shops are unspeakable dross.

I occasionally get to travel about for work, sneaking into the odd charidee shop when I get the chance (I don’t normally like to talk about though of course). A couple of years back you could wade though boxes of vinyl and pick out the odd gem for a quid or so. It was worth it for the thrill of the chase and the knowledge that something good would turn up eventually at a reasonable price. Plus, it was a good nostalgia trip seeing record covers from ye good olde days.

What seems to be happening now is that characters out of Nick Hornby’s “Hi Fidelity” have started working in charity shops and have attached their value system to the stock.

To all of the stock, whether realistic or not. So the burgeoning and newly-labelled “80s Rock” sections are overflowing with cack from yesteryear, at prices which are astonishing. Is anyone going to pay 4 quid for a Judy Tzuke LP? Or £2.50 for a Curiousity Killed The Cat 12″? Something tells me “no”.

Flipping through one box like that and you’re out the door – even if you find something vaguely passable, your time would probably be better spent on ebay, at a carboot sale, or in proper 2nd hand record shops in London which have decent stock.

In both of the towns I’ve visited over the last few days it was a better bet checking out Virgin and HMV, with their permanent “sales” to see what CDs they were chucking out at 3 or 4 quid a pop, than the local charity shops.

And that’s just not right, is it?