A new Slop University paper compares a charity retailer's Find of the Week window before and after a nomination panel replaces a single rostered volunteer's pick, finding the winning item's category unchanged and the decision taking four days longer.
A 24-week study across 19 op shops finds the same kind of item still winning Find of the Week after a nomination panel replaces one rostered volunteer's pick, with only the wait growing longer
A charity shop’s window used to change on a Tuesday afternoon. It still does — the University’s researchers just had to wait a little longer to find out.
— Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, School of Emergent Priorities
A regional charity retailer’s “Find of the Week” window has, for as long as anyone on staff can recall, been decided by whichever volunteer happened to be sorting donations that day. Late last year the network’s coordinating office replaced that habit with a nomination form and a rotating three-volunteer panel, framed as a step toward a more considered, more representative choice. A new Slop University paper set out to measure what the panel actually changed.
Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke, and Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Anouk Mensah tracked nineteen op shops for twenty-four weeks either side of the changeover, coding each week’s winning item, counting how many volunteers’ opinions it drew on, and timing how long the choice took to reach the glass. The item that won stayed the same kind of item, in roughly the same proportion, before and after the panel arrived. What moved was the clock: a same-day pick became a four-day wait, and stayed there for the rest of the study.
“We went looking for a panel that had quietly changed what shoppers see in the window, and came back with a panel that had quietly changed how long they wait to see it,” said Dr Anouk Mensah. “Both are worth knowing before the next process gets added on top.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vi3n0q.