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Comment by NotYourLawyer | Hacker News Reader

The warehouse lady has a boss presumably. And the boss might be annoyed at the diminution of value for the items going to auction.

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Warehouse lady might also have added value by turning 5 pallets of low-value junk into one pallet of slightly more value plus 4 pallets of low-value junk.

If pallets normally bring say $100 each but by letting the stroller lady consolidate the strollers into one pallet that she'll pay $250 for, everybody won.

Except for all of the customers who ended up with less valuable pallets assuming they expected more quality items to be there. If they knew exactly what quality they were getting and paid less then I agree it’s a win for all.

If you're just buying pallets of random returns, removing one category of items from that random pallet may not even devalue the pallet for that customer either. Heck, it might even make the pallets more valuable to have less variety in them (after all, the stroller-only pallets became more valuable when they are stroller-only).

Cherry picking pallets is a big deal and all the warehouses try to say they don't, but everyone does it. The only one I went to that was legit, had people line up outside when a truck arrived and everyone bid on the pallets as they were coming off the truck. Not surprisingly the value I got out of those pallets was 10-20x more than from other pallet warehouses.

All of the other places are cherry picking and reorganizing pallets to elicit higher bids and tend to run their own parallel retail / resale operations. It's probably necessary though because the guy selling directly off the truck went out of business last year.

Except next month and every month after, no one buys the pallets.

I maintain those pallets might be more valuable to other sellers with other stuff instead of strollers. If I'm running a business selling small stuff in flat rate postal boxes, and I don't want to deal with being a stroller mechanic, having broken strollers out of my pallets (and having other stuff instead) is actually a positive for me.

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