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I don't care if people sell clean, safe, reasonable things that are gleaned from a dumpster. That's waste reduction and a net good.

Years ago, I lived in a city that decided to offer a "garbage collection amnesty week". For one week (with your regular pickup day, Monday-Friday), you could put out as much garbage as you wanted at the curb, and it would be collected for no extra charge.

The city apparently vastly underestimated how much garbage was going to go out. It was not all collected that week. There was junk sitting out on the curb, all over the city, for 1-2 months.

There were also people driving around, searching for cool stuff. For example, one of my items out on the curb was an old bird cage. One morning, the bird cage was gone, and there was someone else's old doll house in its place. A friend of mine found a complete metal suit of armor; not really functional, but a nice decorative piece.

There can definitely be value left in someone else's trash. But if ordering on Amazon, as a paying customer, I would at least want to know up front if I'm buying something that came out of the trash, and make my own decision on if I wanted to buy it or not.

I don't know if that a French thing or not, but in France, in many cities there is a day designated as "encombrants" (~ bulky). Basically for when you want to throw out large objects.

There are people roaming out the streets on that day and hoping to find something worth reselling before it gets picked up by the city.

As far as I know, we haven't encountered the issue of too much stuff being thrown out that day, but maybe this is because this happens regularly.

When I lived in Germany it was the same. But rather than people looking to sell item it was people looking to furnish their homes. A great system really.

Good thing there are not many bed bugs in Germany and thrown away furniture

> not many bed bugs in Germany

As a German, it took me until adulthood to figure out that when Americans talk of "bed bugs", it's not a metaphor.

In California you get only one day a year of free pickup for bulky items. Its restricted to appliances, furniture, and mattress. Furthermore, you have to schedule in advance with the company handling your garbage pickup.

Recology SF and San Mateo allots two bulky item pickups per (single family) household per year. Up in Novato/Sonoma it's 4x annually.

This depends entirely on your city government and who they contract with.

I've seen on-call pickup of large items (2 or 3x per year), bulk trash day once per year for everything on the curb, free appointments at a central location, and "haul it to the dump yourself then pay a fee".

I’m pretty sure the San Jose green team offers unlimited free curbside pickup of bulky items. You do need to call to schedule it, but that’s fairly reasonable in my opinion.

I live in Los Angeles, and I can schedule as many free bulky item pickups as I want, at any time.

Yes, I'm French and, on "jour des encombrants", when I put out something which is usable, I always make sure it is obvious, clean and visible... It is usually picked up within the hour by either some student or a junk trader. Conversely, I've found surprisingly useful things to use in my home. I like the spirit of ultralocal reuse !

I've been leaving notes on my interesting stuff when I set it at the curb. Figure I can save someone some time and help them decide if it's a problem they want to tackle, _before_ they get it home and diagnose it.

On a washing machine, I put a note like "Transmission bad, motor and controls probably fine, no leaks."

I don't know if that a French thing or not, but in France, in many cities there is a day designated as "encombrants" (~ bulky). Basically for when you want to throw out large objects.

I had this when I lived in Nevada. It was every other Tuesday and called "bulk trash day." You could put out pretty much anything that wasn't commercial construction waste or hazardous waste.

There were also scavengers who knew when bulk trash day was for each neighborhood, and would drive around the neighborhoods in trucks taking things off the curb to sell at flea markets.

Interesting, that sounds like "encumbrance" which is a good word to describe the burden of owning too much "stuff"! :)

In my area, people make a living driving around and picking up discarded items to fix up and resell.

Yeah, this. The problem is not that it's trash, the problem is that its provenance is not being disclosed.

Boston has "Allston Christmas" on Sept 1st each year. Tons of people move. There's lots of nifty stuff on the sidewalks waiting to be discovered.

Madison WI has this around that time from when college students move. I feel like that might be a University-town thing.

If you live in a university town, find out which dorms the international students live in, and locate the nearest trash bins. At the end of spring semester, during finals week, check in and around those bins daily.

The graduating international students who are returning to their home countries frequently discard things that they bought locally, as it may be too expensive to ship larger items in either direction. Those who will be returning in the fall might put their dorm stuff into storage, or they might just toss it, and re-buy if/when they return.

The cheaper it is to ship, store, or sell, the lower the quality of the items discarded. That's why you focus on those who will be flying home.

But if ordering on Amazon, as a paying customer, I would at least want to know up front if I'm buying something that came out of the trash, and make my own decision on if I wanted to buy it or not.

I agree, but let me play Devil's advocate a moment.

I went to a gin distillery on vacation a couple months ago. It was well known, well respected, sold internationally, etc. I'm not really into gin, but I thought what they gave us tasted pretty great. It was well packaged, their physical location was in a nice spot and had a well decorated, cool little area where they went over the history, their employees all seemed well educated and happy to be there, etc.

When we got to look at the distillation process, we went into a very small, narrow looking hallway with all the equipment and got to see the gin coming out into a big, pretty unceremonious looking plastic bucket.

Their distillation equipment was expensive, everything was very clean, and it seemed like this was just their process. I didn't really see anything wrong with it.

But, if at the point of sale, someone had a picture of the gin going into that plastic bucket and let everyone know that this was a part of their process, I think fewer people would buy it. And for no good reason. The gin was great, everything was clean, and I'm sure cleaning and maintaining that setup would be easier to deal with than some sort of automatic bottling machinery.

Although most people think knowing where a product came from is good information (and it is if you have a good understanding of the context/what to compare it to), people have a tendency to be irrationally averted by things that don't really have any bearing on the product. I'd argue a product being "new" vs "warehoused" vs "trashed" is one of them. If the product is in the same shape, it shouldn't really matter if it was on the front and center shelf, in the back of a warehouse, or in a dumpster. It's the same product. Emphasizing where it comes from can cause people to irrationally avoid it and have it go to waste when it's perfectly fine.

Great points. Related note: studies show (citation needed, sorry), people consistently perceive wine as better-tasting if they believe it's more expensive.

Wasn't there also a study that showed people perceived wine to taste better when it was poured by an Italian waiter compared to an Asian waiter?

I tried tasting really old, really expensive wine a little while ago. I can't say I find it very different from new and cheap wine (certainly not better-tasting)...

Many years ago I had a 1997 Lafite, which was an excellent year from an excellent vintner, one of the premier grand crus. It wasn't quite as trendy yet and I paid about $500 for the bottle at a restaurant. I reckon it tasted better than a $30 bottle, but certainly not >15 times better.

On the other hand, the Château d'Yquem sauterne I spent $750 on (for the little baby sauterne bottle) made me feel like I was getting my full money's worth. But that's not something I'd want to drink regularly.

And no I'm not a high roller who drinks these wines all the time, in fact I haven't in well over a decade. It was a fairly transparent, but successful, status play. Now I stick to highly rated $15-30 a bottle table wines because, in the USA, that's the sweet spot and I'm not interested in spending 10 times as much for a wine that's 20% better.

That's exactly it,gourmet foods in general hold a very nonlinear price premium for that small marginal taste increment. Those increments never match the dollar increments.

Those plastic buckets are ubiquitous in the food industry, but are rarely shown. One company showing the buckets would doubtlessly impact their sales, but what if all companies showed their buckets? Buckets would probably then be perceived by consumers in a more accurate light and probably would not suppress sales nearly as much.

And hence the overall education level, which is what all this is about, would go up. Which is always the answer to the problem. What we have here is a lack of education.

Tours of farms and food factories are great field trips for school kids, but unfortunately I think that possibility is probably regional.

Haha. You and I have a different view of education.

I'm not sure what regions you are thinking about. Most of the US population lives in a place where visits to either farms or food factories are quite tenable. Agricultural extension agencies like 4-H (https://4-h.org/) remain quite willing to take poor kids from inner city New York on field trips out to farms in Connecticut, New Jersey, and the like.

Aside: Contract consumable manufacturing is how most packaged food is made in the US. Essentially, things like packaged cookies, that new craft beer, or frozen enchiladas are all made in the exact same place with the exact same equipment, even brand name, just a different recipe. These places tend to be very tightly controlled in terms of sterility, tastes, particulate matter, mold, ingredient source, etc. Most of those boxes from those central shelves in your Safeway are all from the same handful of places.

They say about brewing beer it's 90% cleaning and 10% record keeping.

I'd wager it's even more extreme with a distillery, since, in addition to a bad tasting batch of gin, people may actually be killed if the output is a faulty product, containing too much methanol.

You would have to royally fuck up for that to happen. Even if you didn't cut the heads and tails, the amount of methanol produced by distilling is relatively low.

Plus it tastes horrible.

> There can definitely be value left in someone else's trash.

Many many years ago I put a piece of scrap butcher block on top of the yard waste pile near the street in front of my home. Later that day a Mercedes drove past, stopped, a woman in a suit got out, examined the butcher block, put it in her trunk, and drove off.

I hope it's still serving as a really nice cutting board or some such in someone's home in Miami.

In Sydney, Australia, there is an annual "council cleanup" day. It rotates around to different areas each week. If I recall correctly, you can put your junk out up to a week early, and people definitely go around looking for good stuff, including professional junk dealers who are looking to fix things up for sale. We got some good things that way. Whatever is left at the end is hauled away by the council.

annoyingly, people would come out and strip wires (for the copper) off appliances. But they tend to do it messily, and leave a big gaping mess everywhere (e.g., smashing up TVs and leave broken shards of glass everywhere).

Heck yeah man, we used to have that around here as well and I found tons of amazing old computer equipment that people had discarded. Every single thing I grabbed still worked. Unfortunately I don't think any municipality around me does this program anymore :(

  I lived in a city that decided to offer a "garbage collection amnesty week"

Santa Clara does this once a year.

I've seen people coming from wherever and dumping their trash on Santa Clara sidewalks (in a neighborhood for whom it's their free pickup week) to save dump costs... including hazardous waste like paint and chemicals.

They have craigslist for this stuff nowadays. In college neighborhoods you can just dump it on the street it will get picked up by some student who needs it.

Craigslist is fine for getting rid of single items. But what if I sort through my drawers and end up with a pile of 100 small things that I want to get rid of? I ain't putting 100 posts on Craigslist (or rather, the local equivalent).

> A friend of mine found a complete metal suit of armor; not really functional

... so you fired arrows at it from a longbow ? And he got injured, then had to explain at the hospital why his friend shot him with an antique weapon ? S'pretty great.

Walmart seems to be heading in that direction... though I do hope they keep the reigns in on third party sellers. On Amazon, I generally only buy if it's sold by Amazon, I could still get a counterfeit or bad item, but at least it's easy enough to return... third party sellers, it's a crap-shoot.

The sad story of Sears is unfortunately the story of private equity stripping away all value and quality until nothing but a husk remains.

Ok, how do you know if something is clean, safe, and resonable if it comes out of a dumpster? A kids toy could have biohazard material on it, that is disgusting.

It could have that coming out of the factory. How would you know? Do you personally conduct inspections?

Not every dumpster is filled with expired vegetables or used heroin needles. Some are just full of discarded products.

Presumably the factory's reputation would suffer, their manufacturing dries up and folds. Any consequences from a one-off sale by a third party are borne by the official source and Amazon. Which is the confusing part for me: why does Amazon not care about their reputation hit from enabling fraudulent third parties?

Third parties have been selling junk (figuratively and literally) on Amazon for years. Yet people still buy it in vast quantities. Why would Amazon change?

> Do you personally conduct inspections?

What a dishonest argument. Pointlessly contrarian.

The whole point of having vetted suppliers is that they've been vetted, so that their output's QA is authorized by a regulatory body. Sure it's possible to sneak past that but it's very hard to do so. Dumpsters don't have QA.

Amazon is performing a negligible vetting process in a race to the bottom.

> Amazon is performing a negligible vetting process in a race to the bottom.

I suspect this is exactly astrodust's point. Amazon ain't doing any meaningful vetting, so unless you're doing your own inspections, you have effectively zero reliable way to know whether or not your brand-new toy is going to give your child radiation sickness.

Nothing dishonest about that argument at all.

The problem with their argument is they are implying its the fault of the consumer, not amazon.

That's a rather uncharitable reading of that comment, and not at all how I read it.

Yeah technically that is true but using the same logic you could say, "since no one is doing QA on swimming pool water I can fill my pool with used toilet water and not tell anyone."

Yep, that's about right, except that Amazon is filling your swimming pool.

No. Used toilet water is definitely dirty and unsafe.

Something from a dumpster may be perfectly clean, and a lot of people take stuff from the trash, and as long as it's not been in contact with gross stuff that's not a problem.

Nobody reuses toilet water.

Actually, here in the USA we reuse our toilet water. We have water treatments. It's a wonderful thing. https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/public/water_treat...

More like "I can fill my pool with water that was at one point toilet water and has since been filtered and not tell anyone", and this (on that note) would be the reality in the case of virtually (if not literally) every single swimming pool.

That is: your pool water is statistically near-certain to have had animal (human or otherwise) excrement or heavy metals or soap/disinfectants or some other contaminant in it at some point in its existence at at least some proportion, and you're trusting your municipal water utility (or your septic field, if you live out in the boonies) to filter that out before it's delivered to be your pool/drinking water.

In this analogy, Amazon is the municipal water utility, and you live in Flint, MI.

The whole reason of buying a product from a company you "trust" is that they aren't giving you dumpster trash.

As long as it is sold as used it as wouldn’t be any different really to the potential contaminates that could be on anything second hand.

Eh I’d expect a used item to be sitting in some secondhand store or someone’s basement but not literally next to a pile of trash covered in cockroaches and rat poop.

That's one of the things Costco does. They should've already capitalized on it with online ordering. Another really cool company that does "best of" and unique items is Hammacher Schlemmer:

https://www.hammacher.com/home

You can order online at costco.com.

As far as I can tell, Costco.com doesn’t give you the same price as in warehouse, even if you’re a member.

Why would they have an obligation to provide the same price?

It's the same store/chain?

What does that imply? What if it costs more to ship items than to sell them in their stores?

You expect people who shop in stores to subsidize those who shop online? Much of Costco’s value proposition is they don’t waste time with packaging and so everything is designed to be taken off the pallet by the customer.

If they now have to package and ship bulky items, it’s plausible it costs more to do that. Or maybe they’re just price discriminating. Either way, they have no obligation to provide the same prices online and offline, or even between their stores in HCOL vs LCOL areas.

> What if it costs more to ship items

That's why online you usually pay for shipping...

Never said they did, but it makes shopping Costco online not really worth it.

Back in the preinternet days, a catalog company called Service Merchandise had a business model similar to this. Catalog company with retail stores that had a subset of the popular items.

I used to love to go to Service Merchandise as a kid and watch the boxes/items come out on the belt/wheels. I was oddly fascinated by it and excitedly waited for whatever Mum/Nana bought.

I also remember they had a really fun audio room with boom boxes and very nice stereo systems, along with keyboards and the like. Lots of fun while others were out shopping!

If I remember correctly there was a "Scratch & Dent" section in those stores.

There were also Best Products and Consumers Distributing with similar business models ("catalog showrooms"). We had all three in SV.

"I don't care if people sell clean, safe, reasonable things that are gleaned from a dumpster. That's waste reduction and a net good."

I could agree with that but I am worried about foot items. Do you know why a Pharmacy NEVER takes back any medicine for resale? Too much risk that the product has been tampered with.

The same is true for food items.

Walmart seems like a possible competitor.

> The closest Amazon has come to addressing this is making their own house brand

People are starting to figure out how to even post counterfeit “AmazonBasics” items — at least, this item [1] that I came across recently seems very suspicious. So even those can’t be trusted anymore.

Edit: maybe this isn’t counterfeit, but the fact that I’m not confident says a lot.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2PGH2T

The worst thing about amazon is that it doesn't charge everyone the same price

I think Wal-Mart is doing it. They allow 3rd party sellers but it says if it is sold by the third party or by Wal-Mart. As far as I know everything that says Wal-Mart is the same as they sell in their stores.

The worst thing about amazon is that it doesn't charge everyone the same price... someone connected on my home network was able to pay 15% less then me and I try to block tracking

If only sears didn’t charge 3rd party merchants way more than amazon to list items. RIP

That is Costco's game, and I play it with them every year.

So you are not happy with the low quality and fraudulent items, but you are OK with items literally pulled out of a dumpster? I personally don't really want either.

This seems so easy to me to fix... just have a decently-sized QA department and add in reputation score variations for sellers... if a seller gets caught selling anything counterfeit, their reputation takes a huge hit for 6 months or so and they barely show up on search results.

Trusted sellers would be folks who have managed to go several years without this happening..

I swear I could implement a whole solution for around ~$2M + $1M a year for ongoing QA staff / call center employees... basically nothing for a retailer the size of Amazon.

It makes me think they've done the CBA on it and somehow determined they would rather have all retailers selling on Amazon for some reason, even the shady ones, despite some damage to their reputation. I don't understand why though.

Who has the last word on if something is fake?

Facebook.

Your decently-sized QA department would investigate, case-by-case.

Some examples would probably be controversial and you'd need to escalate to a higher tier of analysis.

The issue here is that, like YouTube, it's so simple to create a new account that you'd just be chasing an endless stream of nothingness. I mean, just look at Amazon's review system. That's a system that they actually do investigate and have a department for and yet there are hundreds of thousands of sellers that have fake reviews and paid reviews for lots of different products and brands.

  Your decently-sized QA department would investigate, case-by-case

This describes The Real Real's business model perfectly... but turns out a lot of their "curated" stuff... wasn't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21477730

Wow, very cool. That's a $1.6B company I've never even heard of.

The stock hasn't gone down at all since that article was published either. They must be doing something right..

Your CBA might be accurate. If that's the case, they're digging their own coffin. Maybe Bezos should dump .com and go all in on AWS.

  go all in on AWS

Amazon Waste Services?

seller reputation wouldn't be a terrible idea, but the devil is in the details. Items certainly have their own quality, but people's opinions are fickle. Who gets to say what is counterfeit, unless you have a trusted authenticator looking at every item? If someone is unhappy with an item it could be for any number of reasons, and no seller is perfect, even ones with good intentions and operations.

So from amazon's perspective, they have to spend a ton of time, effort, and money to risk alienating their sellers. So I think you're right - they've thought about it and decided that the risks were not worth the gains.

>but people's opinions are fickle. Who gets to say what is counterfeit, unless you have a trusted authenticator looking at every item?

Correct, that's what I mean by a decently-sized QA department. I would never base the score directly on end-users opinions, although the opinions of end-users could certainly be used to initiate the verification process:

Customers say something is fake --> raises ticket to QA department --> a few automatic orders are placed to different "fake" addresses over a period of weeks and months --> these delivered items are authenticated --> Reputation score modified --> customers are followed up with by the call center agents.