6 ms·

Seven Days at the Bin Store

227 points by zdw 1y ago

enmyj 1y ago
not relevant to the story, but love seeing a defector link here!
louwrentius 1y ago
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.
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  >(HN) is probably the worst place to voice this out loud 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.
  - Gracana 1y ago
    This comment, or a different one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44123347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44123347
    - citizenpaul 1y ago
      Yeah.
  - jabroni_salad 1y ago
    A 30 second gag is a nearly still a useful outcome, even if it's stupid. Ever since I read this article I have been using 'garfield telephone' as the bottom of the scale: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47732553 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47732553 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.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Ultimately, almost everything is store-to-landfill. All that varies is the amount of time in between. That's why the first "R" is "reduce" rather than reuse or recycle.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    You skipping buying that mask doesn’t improve those kids’ lives, though.
    - bombcar 1y ago
      The sad thing is that buying the mask probably does materially improve their lives. 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.
Freak_NL 1y ago
> “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).
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  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.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  > 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.
nancyminusone 1y ago
>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.
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  >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.
  - alistairSH 1y ago
    What's really amazing is that enough people buy absolute crap from Amazon, then return it, that this business model exists at all. It's downright dystopian.
    - throwawaymaths 1y ago
      well on the flip side god bless capitalism for finding a way to give this junk a second chance at avoiding going straight to the landfill. ... 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.
      - munificent 1y ago
        I suspect that a very large fraction of purchases at the bin store are impulse buys that provide a temporary serotonin hit. 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.
tra3 1y ago
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..
- alistairSH 1y ago
  Nope, I hate returning things. 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.
  - maketheman 1y ago
    1) Find a few brands with more options than just "S/M/L". You want fit variants, like Brooks Brothers' "Milano/Regent/Madison" (and some others) or Jcrew's "slim/extra slim". If button-ups, consider going with neck & arm sizing plus the above cut-variants, instead of "S/M/L" sizing at all. Also, look into Japanese brands (Kamakura?), they might fit you better even if they only have one or two variants of cut. These brands will tend to have pretty consistent sizing. 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.
tantalor 1y ago
> 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.
- jjkaczor 1y ago
  From my experience in Canada, tariffs are definitely having an impact on both returns auctions and bin stores... You can see the amount of "stock/items" available decrease month over month.
Theodores 1y ago
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.
- bombcar 1y ago
  The tech is the saddest/weirdest part. 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.
  - jjkaczor 1y ago
    I have a mother-in-law who has 30-year old electronic gadgets she has no idea what they are for... Image-search turns up no results... (A few are in their original packaging - those are identifiable - but typically useless) 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...)
jccalhoun 1y ago
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.
- throwaway173738 1y ago
  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.
neilv 1y ago
> “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.
- Freak_NL 1y ago
  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.
- kubectl_h 1y ago
  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.
jp57 1y ago
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.
- joezydeco 1y ago
  $16 is a huge leap from $10. The demand curve has probably chosen that price. Plus you get two things from a $20 out of the ATM.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    Most things will have a 6% sales tax, so you’ll need another $1.20 to get those 2 $10 items.
- rufus_foreman 1y ago
  Or $1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, break into smaller packages.
chime 1y ago
Slightly related - Climate Town made a long video on the pallet-sized returns practice: https://youtu.be/WG8idKaX9KI?si=0ejDGzqT9w1zvCXN https://youtu.be/WG8idKaX9KI?si=0ejDGzqT9w1zvCXN
mdip 1y ago
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.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  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.
twic 1y ago
So it's like the Middle of Lidl without the Lidl?
- imp0cat 1y ago
  Lidl has their own outlets now where they offer their unsold inventory for very cheap. But the shopping experience there is probably not very pleasant - way too many people hunting for deals.
ryukoposting 1y ago
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.
neuroelectron 1y ago
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.
- bombcar 1y ago
  The thing to remember is that Amazon and Target know what is in the box before they divert it to the pallet pile. 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.
bravesoul2 1y ago
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".
- compiler-guy 1y ago
  The article tells of a woman snapping up school supplies. Doesn't say if she is a teacher or collecting for her kids or what. She probably doesn't need them immediately, but I figure she saves money by purchasing these things now and storing them until she actually does need them. If you have the space to store consumables, then watching for them to appear on sale and stocking up is a good strategy.
- bombcar 1y ago
  You can find "good deals" but you can also end up with a bunch of "suckers deals". Just like you can find out that the dollar store sells some crap for more than walmart does.
twright 1y ago
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.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
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.
curtisszmania 1y ago
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jjkaczor 1y ago
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...
decimalenough 1y ago
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-applicators-nose-ear-hair-instant-removal-kits-from-wokaar-15-20-times-usage-nostril-waxing-kit-for-men-and-women-safe-easy-quick-painless-10-mustache-guards-15pcs-paper-cup https://wokaar.com/products/nose-wax-kit-100g-wax-30-applica...
- cattown 1y ago
  Thank you! That was the most memorable part of the article for me. Can’t get the phrase “Nose Beard” out of my head.
komali2 1y ago
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.
Caelus9 1y ago
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.
anikozxx 1y ago
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Quenby 1y ago
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LeonM 1y ago
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?
burnt-resistor 1y ago
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] 0. https://www.binstorefinder.com https://www.binstorefinder.com
- a_shovel 1y ago
  I clicked the links for a couple of bin stores near me and both of them sent me to sketchy gambling sites
aa-jv 1y ago
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 ...
JKCalhoun 1y ago
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.
miek 1y ago
For more detail on the returns economy, this is an excellent piece by The New Yorker from 2023: https://archive.ph/YHCoU https://archive.ph/YHCoU (original) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/21/the-hidden-cost-of-free-returns https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/21/the-hidden-cos...
black_13 1y ago
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xg15 1y ago
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.
lloydatkinson 1y ago
There is something very entertaining about this. I'd like to read more.

227 points by zdw 1y ago

not relevant to the story, but love seeing a defector link here!

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.

citizenpaul 1y ago
>(HN) is probably the worst place to voice this out loud 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.
- Gracana 1y ago
  This comment, or a different one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44123347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44123347
  - citizenpaul 1y ago
    Yeah.
- jabroni_salad 1y ago
  A 30 second gag is a nearly still a useful outcome, even if it's stupid. Ever since I read this article I have been using 'garfield telephone' as the bottom of the scale: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47732553 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47732553 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.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Ultimately, almost everything is store-to-landfill. All that varies is the amount of time in between. That's why the first "R" is "reduce" rather than reuse or recycle.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  You skipping buying that mask doesn’t improve those kids’ lives, though.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    The sad thing is that buying the mask probably does materially improve their lives. 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.

Freak_NL 1y ago

> “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).

pavel_lishin 1y ago
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.
AStonesThrow 1y ago
> 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.

nancyminusone 1y ago

>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.

citizenpaul 1y ago
>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.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  What's really amazing is that enough people buy absolute crap from Amazon, then return it, that this business model exists at all. It's downright dystopian.
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    well on the flip side god bless capitalism for finding a way to give this junk a second chance at avoiding going straight to the landfill. ... 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.
    - munificent 1y ago
      I suspect that a very large fraction of purchases at the bin store are impulse buys that provide a temporary serotonin hit. 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.

tra3 1y ago

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..

alistairSH 1y ago
Nope, I hate returning things. 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.
- maketheman 1y ago
  1) Find a few brands with more options than just "S/M/L". You want fit variants, like Brooks Brothers' "Milano/Regent/Madison" (and some others) or Jcrew's "slim/extra slim". If button-ups, consider going with neck & arm sizing plus the above cut-variants, instead of "S/M/L" sizing at all. Also, look into Japanese brands (Kamakura?), they might fit you better even if they only have one or two variants of cut. These brands will tend to have pretty consistent sizing. 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.

tantalor 1y ago

> 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.

jjkaczor 1y ago
From my experience in Canada, tariffs are definitely having an impact on both returns auctions and bin stores... You can see the amount of "stock/items" available decrease month over month.

Theodores 1y ago

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.

bombcar 1y ago
The tech is the saddest/weirdest part. 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.
- jjkaczor 1y ago
  I have a mother-in-law who has 30-year old electronic gadgets she has no idea what they are for... Image-search turns up no results... (A few are in their original packaging - those are identifiable - but typically useless) 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...)

jccalhoun 1y ago

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.

throwaway173738 1y ago
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.

neilv 1y ago

> “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.

Freak_NL 1y ago
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.
kubectl_h 1y ago
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.

jp57 1y ago

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.

joezydeco 1y ago
$16 is a huge leap from $10. The demand curve has probably chosen that price. Plus you get two things from a $20 out of the ATM.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  Most things will have a 6% sales tax, so you’ll need another $1.20 to get those 2 $10 items.
rufus_foreman 1y ago
Or $1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, break into smaller packages.

chime 1y ago

Slightly related - Climate Town made a long video on the pallet-sized returns practice: https://youtu.be/WG8idKaX9KI?si=0ejDGzqT9w1zvCXN https://youtu.be/WG8idKaX9KI?si=0ejDGzqT9w1zvCXN

mdip 1y ago

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.

UncleOxidant 1y ago
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.

twic 1y ago

So it's like the Middle of Lidl without the Lidl?

imp0cat 1y ago
Lidl has their own outlets now where they offer their unsold inventory for very cheap. But the shopping experience there is probably not very pleasant - way too many people hunting for deals.

ryukoposting 1y ago

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.

neuroelectron 1y ago

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.

bombcar 1y ago
The thing to remember is that Amazon and Target know what is in the box before they divert it to the pallet pile. 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.

bravesoul2 1y ago

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".

compiler-guy 1y ago
The article tells of a woman snapping up school supplies. Doesn't say if she is a teacher or collecting for her kids or what. She probably doesn't need them immediately, but I figure she saves money by purchasing these things now and storing them until she actually does need them. If you have the space to store consumables, then watching for them to appear on sale and stocking up is a good strategy.
bombcar 1y ago
You can find "good deals" but you can also end up with a bunch of "suckers deals". Just like you can find out that the dollar store sells some crap for more than walmart does.

twright 1y ago

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.

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

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.

curtisszmania 1y ago

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jjkaczor 1y ago

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...

decimalenough 1y ago

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-applicators-nose-ear-hair-instant-removal-kits-from-wokaar-15-20-times-usage-nostril-waxing-kit-for-men-and-women-safe-easy-quick-painless-10-mustache-guards-15pcs-paper-cup https://wokaar.com/products/nose-wax-kit-100g-wax-30-applica...

cattown 1y ago
Thank you! That was the most memorable part of the article for me. Can’t get the phrase “Nose Beard” out of my head.

komali2 1y ago

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.

Caelus9 1y ago

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.

anikozxx 1y ago

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Quenby 1y ago

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LeonM 1y ago

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?

burnt-resistor 1y ago

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] 0. https://www.binstorefinder.com https://www.binstorefinder.com

a_shovel 1y ago
I clicked the links for a couple of bin stores near me and both of them sent me to sketchy gambling sites

aa-jv 1y ago

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 ...

JKCalhoun 1y ago

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.

miek 1y ago

For more detail on the returns economy, this is an excellent piece by The New Yorker from 2023: https://archive.ph/YHCoU https://archive.ph/YHCoU (original) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/21/the-hidden-cost-of-free-returns https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/21/the-hidden-cos...

black_13 1y ago

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xg15 1y ago

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.

lloydatkinson 1y ago

There is something very entertaining about this. I'd like to read more.