Tesco to the rescue!

After lockdown charities up and down the country were inundated with donations to their shops following a trend of pandemic 'clear outs'.
 
With stock room space limited across The Prince of Wales Hospice's 12 retail shops, the charity knew they had to think fast to ensure they didn't have to turn donations away. With the support of supermarket Tesco, they were able to create a 'donation centre' to help store and process donations.
 
The Hospice's busiest shop is Pontefract, which moved  to a bigger premises on Corn Market in 2017. With the former unit  empty when the Pontefract shop was due to reopen in June, the charity approached their former landlord, Tesco, to enquire if they could rent the space to use as a donation centre.
 
Tesco very kindly offered the space free of charge for three months, which was an enormous help to the Hospice. Under Covid-19 regulations donations have to be quarantined  for 72 hours before they are made available for sale.  The unit was big enough to enable this, in addition to having plenty of storage space for the record numbers of donations received.
 
Kevin Hogarth, Retail Operations Manager at the Hospice said; ' Our Pontefract shop typically takes around 40 donated bags/ boxes per day and on the first day of opening the donation centre we received over 400 bags and boxes of donated items.
 
'By the end of the week we had received over 2,000 bags and boxes from our generous donors (around 30,000 individual items!) and this volume continued for nearly 2 months.
 
Without the help from Tesco we would have struggled to have managed the volume of donations. This kind gesture has made a real difference and enabled us to generate much needed funds for our Hospice.'
 
For more information on shop donations at the Hospice visit pwh.org.uk/shopdonations