Seven Days at the Bin Store
defector.com
defector.com
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.
Fun store to stop by and check in on in every few weeks.
They will also magic-marker over the original retailers labels, but you can usually see where the product came from. For about a year they had inventory from the Texas sporting goods chain Academy, including apparel from various regional schools in Texas. Mostly Houston and San Antonio. My guess was all that inventory came from stores that were partially flooded by a hurricane.
Isn't the comment you are replying to supposing that those were not pictures "of all the best things they had"?
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).
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 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.
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.
(Logan's Run reference.)
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.
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.
... i perceive the proliferation of so much junk more of a result of zirp, low interest rates/inflation/central banking devaluing the past over future "growth" and china and the west playing the goodhart game with GDP and juicing production/consumption, than something necessarily a part of "capitalism" for one definition of capitalism.
Then the purchaser gets home and realizes that no, in fact they do not need a frog-themed toaster whose mouth is too small to fit a normal slice of bread, and they throw it out.
You could look at this as an abitrage opportunity where a business throwing out bulk waste has to pay for it, but if you distribute it to individual citizens whose trash bin still has a bit of room in it, you can throw it out for free.
Yeah, that’s what I figured was going on here. Reminds me of pizza delivery (in the US anyhow), which relies on pizza delivery guys not paying attention to the cost of vehicle wear-and-tear and proper insurance so your pizza is cheaper than if every pizza place owned properly maintained and insured vehicles.
Some things are just made to cheaply, to hit a price point people will pay. When people then buy the item and realise that it's garbage, it gets tossed. Just maybe you can't make a good air-fryer for $50, but people will see it and think "For $50 I can give it a go". They then conclude that it's rubbish and take it to the junk yard.
No, most of this stuff should never have been made in the first place. We need to stop making products that has to hit a price point, regardless of quality. We need to stop making one-time-use novelty items.
Then you have the secondary effect: Some clever business people sees this trend and starts ordering junk in bulk on Wish, AliExpress or Temu, dumps it in big boxes with a few good items (maybe) and starts their own "fake" Bin Store.
But I'm confused by the first part of your comment because first you said
> It's still mostly junk.
But then you go on to say
> do you really want to spend time returning a $5 junk purchase? For most people the answer is no. This is just the stuff that was returned or didn't sell
so basically you're saying that the stuff in the bins is not garbage after all if I understand correctly?
Similar to lower quality made-for-outlet products produced by major brands. With the bins it seems to approach gambling on some level. Like raffle tickets, except when you lose you also have to dispose of some trash.
Oh well, we can dream.
I’m not sure that’s what’s going on. The Temu-industrial complex seems to be driven by producing garbage as cheaply as possible, meme-ing the heck out of it, and pricing it so low people can’t believe what a deal they’re getting. That is, they’re always going to produce the cheapest possible item that resembles something of value. Pricing follows from that, and then you make it up on volume.
I mean you basically just described Hacker News right here
The one near me amuses me because they always list everything at half list price - $50 doodad from Target is set at $25. But sometimes you can still see the $5 clearance sticker from Target on it!
Target likes it because they turn a pallet of returned crap and other crush into some cash, and the stores like it because they buy a pallet for $1000 and sell it for $2000 over a few weeks.
Bin stores have just sped that up - but Goodwill outlets have been doing "by the pound" for ages. Go there and buy books, clothes, microwaves, all at a set price per pound.
The key is you don't have to pay anyone to think about pricing. (And of course, you skim any of the really great stuff off before it hits the floor.)
Employing 1.5M people to operate hundreds and thousands of warehouses, trucks, and planes is not easy money.
If it is, you are welcome to throw your hat in the ring.
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
"I laughed at the Lorax, You poor stupid guy! You never can tell what some people will buy." - The Lorax By Dr. Seuss
But, brick & mortar stores rarely have clothes that fit me* AND I somehow end up between sizes, so I tend to order two of everything (in S and M, or whatever) and return the one that fits worst.
From an environmental standpoint, I have no idea if this is better or worse than having fully-stocked brick & mortar shops. But, fact is, those don't exist any more, so this is what I do.
* At 5'7", I'm slightly on the short side for an American male, and at 150lbs, I'm smaller build than most as well. IME, clothes are either cut for skinny teenagers or for dads with 38" waists. And I'm neither, leaving to try on and return many items.
Edit - since maketheman's post got killed... I've yet to find a clothing brand that lists thigh or arm diameter, which tend to be the problem. The "slim-fit" stuff you mention usually fits my waist or torso, but will not go over my bicep or quad. And the normal cut from the same brand fits like a trash bag. I'm fine getting tailored clothes for suits and suchlike, but I'm talking about jeans and casual shirts here. Anyway, it's a totally first-world problem to have, I can deal with it.
2) You're gonna want measurements of your own actual chest, neck, and natural waist. Easy to DIY close enough for this, no need for help.
3) Also, measurements of some clothes that fit you well. Shoulder, seam-to-seam; arm length; pit-to-pit width.
4) The brands from #1 will have charts that provide measurements for their clothes, or else suggested body measurements at a given size. Use the info from 2 & 3 to get good guesses at which sizes and fit variants will work.
5) Thrift or ebay some options. You can resell the ones that don't work out for close to what you bought them for, if it's worth it to you, or just dump them at goodwill. You're paying a few tens or a little over a hundred dollars in failures to find your sizing in a few brands. This is basically the only totally-lost cost to this process (and again, you can actually recover most of this if it's worth it to you)
6) Now you know your size in a few good consistent-sized brands. Ebay with your exact size in each brand (use saved searches, like "(jcrew,j.crew,j crew) 'extra slim' medium shirt") or sale-shop directly from the brands' sites. No, or very few, returns needed. You can also thrift-shop much more efficiently, at least at places that size-sort. You're just skimming for brand tags you recognize, and totally ignoring everything else.
[EDIT] And actually with the measurements from #3 you can ebay lots of shirts from brands you've never tried, with reasonable success rates—any listing worth bothering with will provide pit-to-pit and (when relevant) sleeve measurements, at least.
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.
(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.)
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.
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...
What's missing from the regular usage of the term is the fact the pamphlet was written immediately the enclosure movement had subdivided the literal Commons - common land - that had functioned perfectly fine for centuries without over exploitation... until the enclosure movement subdivided them and landowners began over-exploiting them.
The lesson isn't that people can't be entrusted with unfettered access to common goods, it's that giving decision making power over the distribution of a common good to an owner (capitalist) will result in over-exploitation. In the case of returns, the price of the good has way more to do with the seller just getting the price up as high as they can get it and still profit, and far less to do with labor costs, manufacturing costs, shipping costs etc. A simple question: if they could sell it for more and make more money, why wouldn't they? If they could sell it for less and make less money, why would they? Hence why the cost of goods stayed up after the chip crisis despite the chip crisis ending.
Especially if it's a small business, I can practically guarantee the business owner is hoping beyond hope that if there's an issue, you feel willing and able to mention it and get a return. You bringing it up makes the business owner aware there's an issue, and at that point they can do everything in their power to make it right with you, because chances are they're kept up at night worrying about all the ways to make their customers satisfied. If someone sent back food at the shop, my first though was "oh my god thank you for mentioning there was an issue." The potential loss of money, the extra time and trouble, all of it is pennies compared to the stress you feel when you wake up at 2am and realize holy fuck you forgot to add the extra bacon that one customer ordered. I imagine it's similar if you find out, idk, after shipping out 50 units of something, that the way you're boxing it is causing units to show up just a little bit banged up or whatever. Much better to know right away and make it right with people!
So, I'm not sure if this is you, but if you're being held back by some sense of not wanting to cause trouble, trust me, you're doing the business owner a huge favor letting them know.
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.
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.
https://wokaar.com/products/nose-wax-kit-100g-wax-30-applica...
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).
Almost everything we buy is going to end up in the trash, sooner or later.
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.
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...
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.
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 ...
(original) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/21/the-hidden-cos...
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.
Yeah. I got some hate on HN for saying some store that basically sold what I call "store to landfill" junk was. Well exactly that and it probably is not worth being upset that it was going out of business. As you said it was all about the HN feelings while ignoring the massive wasteful reality for a brief spike of endorphin.
10 Chinese children lived lives of abject poverty in a factory so you can have a $5 rubber monkey mask for a 30 second work gag at the scrum standup. But hey you don't have to see them so who cares.
I have been to the bin store and I want to appreciate them as basically being the retail equivalent of a catalytic converter, but the phrase 'garfield telephone' just bounces around in my head the whole time I'm there.
But the factories are just as happy churning out high quality items are they are cheap plastic shit, but the demand for the latter is much, much higher.
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".
If you have the space to store consumables, then watching for them to appear on sale and stocking up is a good strategy.
Just like you can find out that the dollar store sells some crap for more than walmart does.
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.
I have a bunch of tech in my house, being used, that I wouldn't pick up from the side of the road for free.
It's just waiting to die and be replaced with something newer.
Her box of random cables and "wall-wart" power supplies is huge - puts my old bin to shame... (well, I have since organized my "collection", labelled and sorted everything into many smaller storage bins - sighs... as the story goes, "oh - I no longer need this ancient connector/cable, so I will get rid of it", only to inevitably need it 2-months later, so now I keep them all, but label them...)
Instead of a drawer full of wall warts, I have a drawer with a little baggie full of the ends of warts, which I connect via twisted wire if I have to to a few of the wall warts I have.
Am extremely happy whenever a new device has it, and am making that a purchasing requirement from now on.
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.
But the shopping experience there is probably not very pleasant - way too many people hunting for deals.
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.
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.
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?
And if it is potentially valuable, they check it (Amazon Warehouse, Target Clearance).
The best deals I've found are on things like diapers, where a crushed box won't sell but the diapers are just fine.