I WAS faced with a bit of dilemma last Saturday afternoon and would welcome some opinions.

Most Saturdays, I work in a town centre charity shop. It’s not one of the big charities – a north west-based but national organisation that buys bespoke wheelchairs, trikes and other equipment for disabled children.

In fact, one of the youngsters we’ve helped popped in with his grandparents that day, which was lovely.

We’re a small but hard-working Bolton fundraising committee and so we only open the shop, donated by a kind landlord, on Fridays and Saturdays.

We do, however, get good donations of quality items and, since we don’t charge much, we’re usually busy.

On Saturday afternoon, I was on the “till” with two enthusiastic but new volunteers working in the shop with a decent number of people in.

One lady caught our attention. She obviously had a bad breathing problem and wore strong glasses and spent a particularly long time browsing the racks.

She got up close to the clothes – poor soul, I thought, perhaps stupidly, she needs to get so near to be able to read the labels.

When she finally approached the counter with three items to buy I spotted that she had another, quite crammed, bag.

Just visible was a rather distinctive Next cardigan I’d put out on the rails only that morning.

I totted up the items she showed me and bagged them. She even lingered trying on jewellery at the counter and I helped with a tricky bangle.

When she asked me what she owed, I pointedly said: “It’s just six pounds for the items in THAT bag”, hoping to shame her into at least putting the others on the counter for payment.

No success. She simply paid and waltzed off, leaving me wondering whether I should have challenged her.

In my defence, she was a big lady and I’m short and she looked a bit wild and unpredictable. But the incident left me seething and feeling pretty useless.

We’ve had items stolen before, but never so blatantly. We’ve got cameras installed but they weren’t conclusive and, because you really don’t expect people to steal from a charity shop, it caught me on the hop.

So, what do you think? We’ve got protocols in place to keep staff safe, but the whole incident provided an unsatisfactory end to a busy and profitable trading day.