So these are popping up everywhere, then?
I have two within five miles of my house. They've both been there over a year, probably a bit longer. I'm in a mid-western US suburb, mostly blue-colllar/manufacturing employers around here. And there's a "Red Tag" store (similar) which is very obviously trying to pass off that they sell Target returns/over-stock. It's across the street from -- surprise -- a Target!
Of the two "bin" stores, nearby, one is much larger/newer. The bigger one starts off at $7 on Saturday at noon, dropping to a buck by the following Friday. There is a loooooong line. I think they started selling memberships or something along those lines to let you have the first spots in said line (or maybe get in a little early). They sell other, higher-dollar items, but I've walked out of there on a Saturday with a portable pump for $7 that was selling for $60 on Amazon (it was worth about $20 IMHO). There's a reason people line up.
They also sell $35 random (sealed) boxes (and I think you can buy 4 for $100 or some kind of arrangement like that). I've never seen the contents of these boxes. It looks like most of these businesses stock returns from, mostly, Amazon but also others which they buy in lots. I'm not sure the mechanics of it but I'm sure another comment has an explanation by now.
Searching "Surplus" on Google Maps surfaced the two I found (with identical models) as well as one an hour away that didn't do the "bin" arrangement, but dealt in larger items. I purchased an ultra-wide monitor for $400, there (about $350 off the best price when I bought it).
Personally, I love these spots. There is such a massive stock of returns that you can almost rely on showing up at one of these places and having a pretty good chance of finding what you need, it just takes a little more effort.
>I don’t want it, but what am I supposed to do? It will end up in the garbage one way or another. I stuff it in my bag.
This seems to be the common thread here - judging by the pictures, the stuff in these bins seems to be 95% junk. It's trash brand new in the package. Hard to believe anyone would pay any amount for it. Almost seems like you're losing money by not dumping it directly into the ocean.
Apparently, I'm wrong enough that there's hundreds of these stores in business.
Am I the only one that feels uncomfortable returning stuff? Took me years to get to get over, and yet I'd still prefer to forego buying something rather than returning it..
For anybody else who was curious about Wokaar for Waxing Your Nose Beard, it's apparently a way to use wax to remove your nose hair. (Ouch.)
https://wokaar.com/products/nose-wax-kit-100g-wax-30-applica...
Slightly related - Climate Town made a long video on the pallet-sized returns practice: https://youtu.be/WG8idKaX9KI?si=0ejDGzqT9w1zvCXN
> “The goal for all the reverse logistics stuff,” says Roberson, “is to keep things out of the landfill.”
Or rather, to make sure these things are bought and thrown out by consumers instead. Getting rid of unused products costs money unless you have a loophole that allows offloading it onto some poorer country (cf. Atacama desert clothing dump).
There was one of these in my town. I went two different times and There were tons of cheap clothes (mostly women and children sizes), replacement parts for random appliances, as seen on tv crap. It is no wonder it went out of business: They get so much crap that no one wants that they can't even sell it for a dollar so they have to figure out what to do with it.
First it was returns auction sites, I am lucky enough to be in a local regional distribution hub, so for a few years there were amazing finds; $45 FDM 3d-printer that just needed to be levelled properly, a $65 resin 3d-printer (12k) - eventually a year later a curing station for $20, a DJI active phone gimbal worth several hundred dollars for $70.
Over time though, as more and more people found out, the prices started creeping up - there is typically a "buyers fee" percentage, plus of course our overall country-wide "goods & services tax", plus a "picking fee" of about $1.50 per item. So - basically, my personal cut-off was about 25% of retail price for maximum bid, because all of the other fees would add about another 27% of retail price.
Then, the bins stores started opening about a year ago, and the auction quality dropped off dramatically. My experience browsing through bins stores 3-4 times was that is was mostly complete trash, the cheapest garbage that wouldn't even be good for resale or garage/yard sales...
Even though, I pretty much now have my "maker-space" home office kitted-out fully, I do keep monitoring the auctions for specific keywords - but, I can definitely see that both auctions and bins stores are having less and less merchandise, the overall economy must be slowing (potentially geo-political tariffs and uncertainty, layoffs, etc.) - people must be reducing overall amount of purchases and therefore returns...
Several of the local bin stores have closed-up shop in the last 6 months as well...
> products that never made it to a consumer because the season ended, or a box was a little dented, or the purchaser never picked up their order, or a retailer was just running out of room in their warehouse
I wonder how tariffs will impact this. I imagine a lot of importers will balk at the sudden fee, and decline to pick up their stuff at the port.
Article mentions this much further down:
> But economic shocks are good for the secondhand economy. Roberson thinks tariffs could, eventually, lead to another bin-store bump.
In the 80's we used to get our software from 'floppy disk warehouses' ("Softbank") that often featured "$1 / floppy" specials, well worth the hassle.
I had a lot of fun by just picking up 20 random floppies, paying my $20, and walking off with a digital surprise or two waiting for me once I got home and found out what was actually on the things. 80% of the time it was some nonsense recipe database or the other, but other times it was simply wonderful, like PC-Write (best DOS editor ever), or a "7-in-1" pack of 'shareware' games and the like. And even if it was just another recipe database, at least I'd get some extra floppies to use when needed.
I quite miss those days, and I feel like this "smorgasbord" effect is definitely an interesting way of gaining customers. I kind of wonder what it'd be like to have that effect in the modern era - $20 "random app purchase" days would be kind of interesting, and I wonder if we'd ever see this used as a way of re-invigorating the app stores, which to my eyes these days seem quite inaccessible for random browsing/shopping ...
For more detail on the returns economy, this is an excellent piece by The New Yorker from 2023:
(original) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/21/the-hidden-cos...
These Bin Stores show to me that the pricing of products doesn't really reflect their true cost to the environment, society and the world at large.
Our resources are finite and we tend to be so incredibly callous about this, I feel completely disconnected from it.
Most of these products should not exist in the first place.
The article also seem to imply that many of these Bin stores are also precarious businesses that aren't stable. Only the larger one(s) survive... (as usual).
But this place (HN) is probably the worst place to voice this out loud. The aspirational class of future the tech billionaires are already dreaming about their profoundly wastefull super yachts they're going to commission.
Does anyone save at a bin store? It would take a lot of patience and discipline. You would need to come with a list of things you'd definitely buy anyway, only buy those things and be prepared to go every week often coming home empty handed.
If you just go with $100 and no plan youll end up buying junk.
Probably a good place to get Christmas toys for kids maybe where you just need "a toy".
Empty gifts of capitalism!
This store is my idea of hell.
I am in the process of tidying up my dad's estate, and, despite the mountains of stuff he bought, there is not one single thing that I want for myself. I am done with stuff, particularly if it has bits missing!
I am sure that, if I went to any hoarders home, it would be exactly the same. There would not be a single item that I would want to walk away with.
Younger me might have thought this store to be great, but I am done.
It requires a special mindset to want stuff, to trade stuff on eBay, to collect stuff and to see it as valuable. Stuff is at the low end of what interests me, life is about people and ideas, not stuff.
You also have to believe in money if you are into stuff. But my status has nothing to do with money or how much stuff I have. I wish I could flip the switch and make it so that I wanted to hoard money and own stuff. But, once you have gone outside your basic needs, stuff starts to own you, rather than you owning stuff.
The thing is that, with the mountains of stuff that I have had to dispose of, all of it required real humans to put in the effort to design products, get them made, get them packaged and to get them sold. They did it with pride, yet, here I am, detesting the stuff.
The tech products that were hot five years ago but useless today are what amaze me the most. Take your humble TV. I can remember a time before flat screens, then there was the time when you had dead pixels. Right now I have a huge TV to dispose of. To all intents and purposes, it is perfect. Twenty five years ago, it would have been beyond anyone's dreams, jaws would have dropped. Yet now it is worth $150, if I could find a buyer.
Hence, max respect to those such as the owner of the Bin Store that can face up to the 'empty gifts of capitalism' and make a business of making sense of the stuff that mere mortals like me want to run away from.
Depressing. Seeing so much "crap" is somehow anxiety-inducing for me. Perhaps I am reflecting on it as a human on planet Earth and considering the hoards of junk we are creating. Or perhaps I see something in myself as a hoarder.
My elderly mom watches thrift shopping, dumpster diving, and roadside hauling on YT, so I might as well direct her to a bin store.[0]
My local surplus shop started a GoFundMe recently.
This is a great idea for places that can't support a proper surplus shop. but I'd be really, really sad if mine went away and this was what replaced it.
I'll bet if he changed the pricing from $10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 1 to $16, 8, 4, 2, 1, he'd make as much or more money and give himself a day off on Wednesdays to boot.
So it's like the Middle of Lidl without the Lidl?
I interned at a small company that made an app for doing Amazon arbitrage right when the FBA program was new. The founder said something I think about regularly: "everything anyone needs is already made they just have to find it." Obviously not true for consumable goods but I see this statement manifest in places like this.
For some reason, what feels particular "late stage capitalism" in this is the presentation. All kinds of stuff just dumped into a bin, not even caring to make the products identifiable to customers, let alone presenting them nicely or in any other way pretending for the things to have any kind of value.
It feels like it says "There, stuff! Buy it you shitheads, I know you want to! Because what else do you wanna do here?"
Maybe that's more honest than other stores.
I'm happy for people that they're able to make some money off of this, but god almighty it makes me sad how much garbage there is in the world. Between amazon, walmart, target, aliexpress, and whatever that new chinese one everyone talks about, there's just so much trash. I was somewhat insulated from it living in Taiwan where it feels like people don't go in for the online shopping as much, until my parents moved here too and brought the habit with them from the States. They figured out the online shops here when I never did after 4 years. Every day new boxes of crap are showing up at their house... I just don't understand how this much plastic could possibly exist on this earth!
This year I'm trying a thing where I only buy secondhand things, if I buy anything at all. Obviously excluding, like, underwear or batteries or bandaids or whatever.
It's been so fun. My e-reader broke on a backpacking trip when I fell backwards against a boulder, so I hopped on facebook marketplace and got a used-once new kobo for like 80% retail, and had a fun conversation with the guy who sold it to me, and he invited me to a mandarin-language reading group, which is something I've been looking for for years as a way to practice in a fun way. I picked up some used books from a different guy who also befriended me and invited me to a philosophy discussion group, another thing I'd been looking for for ages. I happened to spot a modded gameboy color the other day, and bought it when I shouldn't have (I don't particularly need that and I'm trying to just not buy stuff cause it's kinda cool), so that was naughty, BUT I'm now plugged into the local retro console modding scene, another passion of mine. The upsides are so cool.
On a recent trip to Japan, I found a cross street with something like 15 resale shops within the same 400 square meters. Shelves lined with phones, easily half of which are no more than 2 years old, all in of course perfect condition (Japanese secondhand market is phenomenal), many with boxes. I even saw pixel folds, the new model. I can't imagine ever buying a new phone for the rest of my life now that I've seen that. I got a pair of great IEMs that sold at retail for 400$, for 90$, perfect condition in box with all the accessories.
I think we could all stop buying new things tomorrow and feed even the most degenerate shopping addictions for at least 5 years with used goods before we ran out of stuff.
There is something very entertaining about this. I'd like to read more.
Kinda disappointed the article doesn't mention what happens with the remaining items at the end of the week...
I'm guessing most of it goes to the trash/landfill. But maybe some of it is packaged up again and distributed back into other bin stores? Maybe they keep it for a while in storage in case some week they have a haul too small to fill als the bins?
not relevant to the story, but love seeing a defector link here!
To be honest, these "Bin Stores" are really a bit strange, like treasure hunting, but also like endless consumption. I went there once last weekend, and curiosity drove me in. To be honest, the feeling of rummaging through boxes and cabinets in the hope of finding good things is really exciting, like a modern version of "scavenger". I found an almost new coffee grinder for only 5 yuan (the original price may be 50), but I also saw a lot of plastic garbage, which looked like rummaging through a garbage dump. Interestingly, some stores seem to deliberately mix some valuable things into the boxes. For example, I found a brand new mobile phone case in the pile of cables that time. It is probably this mentality of "maybe I will find treasure next time" that makes people go back again and again.
Right before Largest mall got demo'd we had one of these but they were all Amazon/Target mystery boxes with different sizes and prices. There was even an article in the local paper celebrating the opening. I imagine it was absolute trash like the stuff in this article and the only "mystery" being the missing electronics.
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The thing I'm most annoyed at are all these comments lamenting consumerism, waste, capitalism, but who will never actually do anything to stop any of this. You're on a news site for an angel investor that will most definitely be funding the exact thing you're complaining about.
> “You can buy stuff from here and then you can resell it,” Ahmed tells me. “Through eBay or Amazon. You can sell on Facebook market. You will get your money back in less than one day if you wanna resell it. Which is a good thing for everybody right now, for the public. A lot of people need to work.”
I'd guess that probably the store itself is picking out some of the more valuable items from pallets they source, to divert to eBay or Amazon.
This is one of the things that ruined a certain charity thrift store chain for me, which I'd visit often as a destination of daily walks. Although I knew how to spot some valuables (sterling silver, some electronics, some games), they'd never appear. It turns out that the chain does two things that work against brick&mortar hunters: (1) has staff trained to spot valuable items, and divert them to the chain's own eBay store; (2) the chain's distribution/sorting center lets in professional flippers there, to pick out, say, the valuable designer clothing. So the brick&mortar stores only ever get picked-over stuff that wasn't worth either professional group selling elsewhere.
If bin stores are also doing something similar, I'd guess that the smart ones are consciously sprinkling a token number of more-valuable items in the bins (even if they could make more diverted), to keep the lines of hundreds of people forming every week.