Seven Days at the Bin Store

There is a surplus and salvage chain in Maine called Mardens. It's been in business for 60 years and basically purchases pallets or shipping containers full of products that were written off by retailers for some reason or another and re-sells. They take the highest price they can find online and discount the product 20-40%. Sometimes you'll go in and run across really high end products that could easily be sold at full price but they don't really seem to care. Think a Moccamaster coffee maker or Arcteryx jackets. Most of the time it's junk. In any case it seems like they buy at some percentage on the dollar (20, 30?) and resell at 60%, regardless of how expensive it is. Seems like it makes more sense to make a consistent profit in volume rather than optimize profit on individual items.

Fun store to stop by and check in on in every few weeks.

Goodwill does that and they don't even use eBay for a bunch of their stuff - they run their own auction site: https://shopgoodwill.com/home

Makes sense for them, they're maximizing the money they get (and you can still get bargains, look for expensive and heavy things near you so you can pickup and save shipping).

The article doesn't hint at that though. The store's owners seem to have their hands full at just running the store. Besides, they seem to want those bargain hunters in there. Not just for the guaranteed $10 sales, but also to keep up the hype that gems are to be found there.

There's certainly bin stores that sort through for the best stuff and either offload to friends that'll pay up or price it higher in "vip" section like the article says. The bigger issue is the bin stores that sell mystery boxes which is just the trash that doesn't sell at dollar day.

Unless it is something really really good I don't think they do. The one that was in my town a couple years ago would post pictures on facebook of all the best things they had in order to entice people to come in.

> charity thrift store chain

Many people see a thrift store on the corner, or a collection bin, and they automatically assume that the thrift business is a non-profit, a charity that is run by a church or a social services agency. But really, a lot of thrift stores are for-profit retail operations that aren't charities at all. So it's interesting that you make the distinction, without needing to name names.

My cousin is an artist, and it was about 20 years ago when she lamented the degradation of thrift stores and yard sales. She said that shows such as Antiques Roadshow and American Pickers had whipped Americans into a frenzy of hunting through inventories and sniping ordinary human mortals. And she lamented that eBay and marketplaces were enabling that sort of buying-up stuff to stick it in a personal garage, and sell it online at leisure.

It was nearly that long ago when I was able to find useful stuff at thrift stores in my neighborhood. I went down one day and came home with a working WiFi router and a matching AC adapter, and that WiFi router ran my home LAN for the next 10 years.

It is with some embarrassment that I may admit to never cleaning my PC keyboard; why bother when a like-new, cleaned-up USB keyboard was $1 at the thrift store on the corner? They were stacking them like cordwood! You could plunder the tangles of cables and find any old obsolete thing, and I'm a guy who enjoys obsolete commodity stuff.

I found some enjoyable cassettes and other fun things at the Catholic thrift store. But in general, the charity thrift store scene has dried up here in the metropolitan area. There's one in the heart of the city that is megachurch-run, and anchors a residential community. But 2-3 others have pulled up stakes and shuttered operations. And there are prominent NO DUMPING signs posted there.

I'm guessing you don't read /r/goodwill.

We've had The Goodwill Outlet store (aka "The Bins" ) in the Portland area for about 25 years now. Maybe a bit different, they sell all of the stuff that doesn't sell in the other area Goodwill stores by the pound. It's all dumped in large bins. During the Tech Wreck when I was unemployed I'd go to The Bins when they opened and go through the book bins grabbing what I thought I could sell used on Amazon... Goodwill got wise to that after about 6 months and stared pulling books out that they could sell online. But for about 6 months there we paid the bills by selling books I bought by the pound at the bins.

Anyway, The Bins has a unique culture. There's The Changing of The Bins - that happens when they take out the most picked over bins and replace them with fresh bins full of stuff. People line up around the perimeter where the new bins will appear and then there's a bit of a frenzy when the new bins are rolled in.

>Apparently, I'm wrong enough that there's hundreds of these stores in business.

The stuff in the bins is from amazon returns. Its not a business of its own supply choices. The people that run the stores go to amazon pallet auctions where they buy the stuff unseen and hope to turn a profit on the arbitrage of what they pay vs the worth of the pallet.

If you don't want it, don't buy it. The problem is that things are too cheap, so people don't hesitate to ask themselves if they really want it. It's just too cheap to not try it. It's also one of those things where the picture doesn't match the actual item similar to fast food advertising. If the shopper was looking at the item in person, most things would not be purchased.

Dumping it directly in the ocean is just skipping a few steps as much of it does end up there. It would be better to just dump it into a landfill instead of the ocean though

It's basically scavenging. My parents are sort of hoarder-ish and love to go buy random things that show promise on $0.25 day. I don't stop them because at least it was already going to be trash and keeps them from buying more expensive trash at the regular store.

You are not alone in being wrong, count myself and many others also...

"I laughed at the Lorax, You poor stupid guy! You never can tell what some people will buy." - The Lorax By Dr. Seuss

You're not wrong. This store is not good.

I'll toss in a counter-anecdote in that I am an enthusiastic returner.

Was it misrepresented? Return it - penalize misleading practices.

Was it junk? Return it - penalize hiding that something is junk. (is it priced like junk and not shy about it? great! you know what you're getting! junk can be useful!)

Was it just a bad fit for you and nothing is wrong with it and it might work for someone else[1]? Return it - encourage more thorough descriptions. E.g. "one size fits all" is an extremely lazy lie that just cost you money, measure it and tell me the measurements - they are perfectly capable of that and almost certainly did it multiple times already while creating the thing. (though for some I do feel bad about the cost it imposes, and don't always return here. depends on the details.)

It's not a 100% "I just don't want it" thing, there's plenty of regret-purchases that I just hang onto and give to someone else or sell at a rummage sale. But I definitely don't feel bad about using returns as a "stop being hostile towards your customers" tool.

It's also roughly the only way consumers as a whole can provide feedback to a seller that won't be ignored. Communicate your opinion clearly.

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[1]: Headphones are a pretty good example here. They like to claim sky-high perfection and durability and features, and then ship buggy crap with no support or wildly misrepresent sound quality (e.g. frequency response is quantitatively measurable so measure it, leaving it up to niche reviewers is worse for everyone). Lots of luxury-adjacent products do stuff like this, and I do not feel the least bit bad about calling them out on it - this stuff gets measured during development, used to select materials and tune the final product, and then hidden from you to sell it. And then they often change it after the initial launch, and do not tell anyone. It's blatant hostility, and it deserves to be treated as such.

One of the main draws of Amazon for me is that I can buy a piece of hardware, try to install it on my house/bike/project/whatever, and if it's physically incompatible in some unpredictable way I can return it. This enables certain things that are just not possible with the selection available in local stores. I realize this probably does not account for a large portion of Amazon returns though.

I almost never returned stuff I bought with full research until prices started to increase significantly from 2020 to now. At some point the inflation of product prices flipped a switch for me. I won't return products I've used meaningfully but if I am not happy with the quality of the product or the initial experience I have no qualms, especially if purchased from larger retailers. Mostly what I'm talking about are outdoors/recreation products or purchases from Home Depot or Best Buy.

Still some kind of sense of personal responsibility for the decisions I made changed for me in the last five years. I still don't buy 5 pairs of shoes and return 4 or anything like that, but maybe that's more out of laziness.

I feel bad about returning things, and only buy with the assumption that I'll be keeping the item.

(For example, in my cart is a few different ~$100 sandals of one brand. I've hesitated to purchase one, since I don't know whether I can risk a 9 non-wide in my preferred style&color. I won't be able to tell whether it fits me well enough until I wear it outside awhile, at which point it's obviously been used on someone's foot, so I'm not going to return it.)

(I also contort my Amazon and Walmart orders, to try to keep them from shipping together items that I know are likely to get damaged that way.)

Yet, the rate of defective and damaged items that arrive from online purchases is high enough, that I've gotten past much of the discomfort for those returns.

(For example, this week, I returned some supposedly brand-name diningware, which the brand's customer service themselves suggested was counterfeit because they simply don't sell it in that branded retail packaging. I'd contacted the brand because the product didn't look quite like the previous one I bought of that brand, in a toxically-tainted-materials kind of way. Guilt-free, annoyed return.)

So I figured I have a normal level of return, as a result of returning obviously defective/damaged items... until I saw this article claim the online return rate is "almost 30 percent".

If I had a retail business with someone doing 30% returns (outside some program for trying on clothing at home for sizing), I would want to fire that customer.

(And for the official clothing try-on-for-sizing program, I't try to throw innovations at that, to get the returns down.)

I know a guy that owns a cell phone repair chain who ostentatiously touts that he never returns anything out of a magical belief that everything is "owned" by "small business people". Sorry, but that's a self-defeating hipster boundary that only the very rich can afford and doesn't really reflect the reality of mega no-name overseas brands or megacorp brands.

In my view, anything advertised doesn't work, arrives broken through negligence, or misrepresents their specifications is going right back to where it came from.

You are not the only one - I almost never return things, if they are unwanted and functional I give them to friends/family, or donate them.

However - I have been a Costco member for 25+ years - today, for the first time ever, I returned something far after the original purchase. In January 2021, I bought a 2-pack of CO2/Smoke alarms from a major brand at Costco - they were supposed to have a 10-year internal battery. Well, both of them failed about 2-months ago - constant low-battery chirp, no amount of executing the "test function" would fix them.

Costco, being the absolute best "retail" corporation on the planet took them back and refunded the original purchase price - the service staff laughed as the chirping started driving them nuts when they accepted the items. We did our normal shopping, and as we were leaving - chirp, chirp, etc...

I've never been uncomfortable about returning stuff that is broken or defective. However the proportion of that has been steadily increasing. Recently I went through 9 sets of casters just to get 4 working sets. Churned through 15 Dell monitors just to get 3 without dead pixels (half of the ones I returned would have qualified for warranty replacement 3 years out!). Fifteen gas cans all returned because they were shipped bare without boxes, arriving in beat up salvage condition.

And furthermore now that I'm doing so many returns, I've become completely fine with returning new unopened things that I decide I don't want, effectively delaying the actual purchase decision 30-90 days. Parts that I want to have on hand while doing a project, limited time deals from pricing games, extra copies I order preemptively to quicken the above self-QC song and dance, etc. If I already have to go to a store to drop off returns, my marginal cost of returning additional things is very low.

If returns were really affecting bottom lines, companies could do a lot to tamp down on these dynamics. At this point I suspect it's more profitable for them not to. I think the manufacturing costs of stuff has just gotten so low that the physical items themselves just don't end up mattering compared to the overall margins.

When I return something, I feel I'm contributing to the tragedy of the commons - I know I'm still paying for this return, it's just baked into the price. I wish I could get 8% off or something if I promised I wouldn't return it just because I didn't want it.

Thank you! That was the most memorable part of the article for me. Can’t get the phrase “Nose Beard” out of my head.

It costs money to landfill it. You can watch the same progression on shows like Storage Wars where the early episodes have nice stuff in the units and people making good money on DVDs and furniture and then in later seasons they’re getting 10% of what they used to get because the market is flooded with brand new junk and nobody wants the quality used stuff anymore.

Well, ideally bought - and used for awhile - before being thrown directly into the garbage.

Almost everything we buy is going to end up in the trash, sooner or later.

> Getting rid of unused products costs money

Storing unsold product also costs money. A brick-and-mortar storefront is extremely conscious of what's allowed on their shelves, because if the product isn't moving, it's not only an overhead cost that they are paying rent, keeping the lights on, doing maintenance, but also an opportunity cost of something else that could be put on the shelf and sold and taken away by a customer.

So if you toss 30 cubic meters of junk in a storage locker, and it doesn't appreciate in value, and you pay rent on the storage locker for 3 years, but you still can't use your junk, and it costs you $$$ to sort it and transport it away, you should stop holding your junk so tightly.