WHILST in Halesowen yesterday I visited a charity shop in the hope of buying some books for my elderly mother to read. What I found amazed me!

You are charging £1 for a basic paperback book and the price of the hardbacks was unreal!

Are you aware of the hardships in the real world? Or are you paid so much that you have forgotten how the rest of us are living? The elderly, unemployed and people on a low wage!

Charity shops like the one you are managing were the only way that people with little income could enjoy a reasonable standard of living (and with all the austerity cuts our section of society is getting larger each day).

There is a charity shop in Blackheath (only one of them) that charges just 10p for any book, and they sell all of the books that are donated to them!

How many do you sell, and how many do you dispose of ?

Surely its better to sell 50 books per day at 10p each (or even 20p) than to sell two or three overpriced books a week.

I used to volunteer for a charity, they used to explain to me that I was putting something back into the community! Well I ask you, what are you putting back into the community? Are you helping people by preventing the elderly reading a book because of price?

I salute your efforts to raise more funds for your charity (or for the CEO to have a bigger car!) but this must be balanced by the distress you are causing the rest of the community!

Everything you sell was given to you for free so that you can help the needy, so every penny you sell it for is profit!

Charity shops were the last refuge of the poor, please give us back some hope!

G Wolf Halesowen