It is no surprise that the charity shop, along with any other high street retailer, has struggled due to the pandemic and whilst valiant attempts to revive it have been made by our manager and wonderful volunteers, it is now costing us too much money just to stay open. After an ongoing review of the viability of the shop, and our Manager’s resignation this week, it has cemented our decision and we have made the sad and difficult, but unanimous decision to close the shop for usual trading immediately to prevent the £2k loss per month we are experiencing.
We will be having a series of sales over the coming weeks to try to sell as much stock as possible before having to strip the shop out and return the keys to the Landlords. We would appreciate any volunteer help to make these sales happen as we try to recoup our losses. We will post dates out as soon as they are finalised, for a big push on a closing down sale.
We regret we are unable to accept any donations to the shop with immediate effect.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has worked so hard and tirelessly over the past 4 and a half years to build the shop up, our amazing shop volunteers who have put so much blood, sweat and occasional tears into the project and our manager for trying to keep us going, our supporters who provided some fantastic donations and our lovely customers who supported us.
We realise that this will have a huge impact on you all and would welcome you to transfer your volunteer roles into others within our organisation as you have all been so amazingly supportive of our work, and have become a big part of our Pawprints family. Thank you for trying so hard to make this work. We had covered everything in preparation of opening our shop but unfortunately could not have known we would face a pandemic that would change the face of the high street forever.
Please don’t be strangers to us, the dogs still need your support.
The important thing now is to ensure the rescue keeps going, and we meet the demands on an already overwhelmed sector as animal charities have taken the worst hit of all. Please keep supporting us.
