Who Screws Over A Charity Shop?!

As a student, I lived in a flat above an antique shop and volunteered at a charity shop across the road.  

One day, someone donated some rather beautiful, old-seeming china plates to the shop. Thinking they might be worth something, we asked my landlord, the antique shop owner, if he would mind having a look at them for us and letting us know what they might be worth. He appraised them and told us we’d be lucky to get £20 for the four of them. We laughed at our wishful thinking, put them up for sale at around the price advised, and carried on with our lives.

A few weeks later, I noticed while passing the antique shop that there were four very familiar-looking plates in the window, with their total cost almost ten times more than he’d told us they were worth — certainly more than a normal mark-up. A staff member who hadn’t been there at the appraisal had sold them to him a few days after he had essentially named his price for some slightly valuable plates. Sadly, he had no comeuppance for the sleazy move he pulled, but he never went back to the charity shop after that and we never asked him for any more “help.”