The Hospice Shoppe sits at 1925 Bowen Road in Nanaimo, British Columbia, a busy commercial corridor on Vancouver Island where it operates as a social enterprise rather than a typical retail business. Every dollar of profit the shop generates supports Hospice in Nanaimo, meaning a shopper picking up a coffee table or a stack of gently used dishes here is directly funding end-of-life and grief support services in the community, a model the organization describes plainly as one hundred percent of profits supporting local hospice care.
Inventory rotates constantly, since the shop restocks daily from community donations of clothing, dishes, books, and furniture, with fresh merchandise highlighted on a weekly basis so regular shoppers have a reason to keep coming back rather than treating a single visit as enough. The shop does have limits on what it can take in, and does not accept children’s clothing, toys, appliances, electronics, magazines, or medical equipment, a policy that keeps the sorting process manageable for its volunteer base while focusing donations on the categories that move fastest on the sales floor.
What genuinely sets this shop apart is the scale of its volunteer operation. Fifty-five dedicated volunteers keep the Hospice Shoppe running, contributing more than 1,500 hours of labor every single month between customer service, sorting, pricing, and the everyday logistics of moving donated goods from the back door to the sales floor. That is a substantial, almost fully volunteer-powered retail operation, and it reflects how deeply the Nanaimo community has bought into supporting hospice care through this specific channel rather than simply writing a check.
Shopping hours run Monday through Saturday, from 9:30 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, and the shop notably added Monday hours to its schedule at some point, expanding access for shoppers who might otherwise only have a weekday-adjacent window to browse. Donations follow a slightly different schedule, accepted Saturday through Monday from 9:30 in the morning until 2:00 in the afternoon, and Tuesday through Friday from 9:30 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon, all through a back alley entrance set up specifically for drop-offs so the main retail floor is not disrupted by incoming donation traffic.
The shop accepts cash, Visa, MasterCard, and debit, keeping the checkout process as straightforward as any conventional retail store even though the underlying purpose is entirely charitable. For anyone in Nanaimo who wants an easy, no-pressure way to support hospice services locally, whether by donating gently used household goods or by simply shopping for furniture, books, or kitchenware at accessible prices, the Hospice Shoppe on Bowen Road offers a direct link between everyday secondhand shopping and real community care.
The Hospice Shoppe is, in short, a Nanaimo secondhand store on Bowen Road where every dollar of profit from donated clothing, furniture, dishes, and books goes directly toward funding hospice care for the local community.
