People buy a lot of stuff from Amazon (and similar) online stores. And they return a lot of stuff. For small items, I’ve read processing these returns can sometimes cost more than they’re worth.
Over the last few years, a number of physical stores in cheaper malls largely selling what seem to be unwanted Amazon purchases have opened in my medium Canadian city. These use a novel pricing strategy for cheaper things. More expensive things are just sold at a fixed price, up to a 50% discount from list depending on whether it is seen as desirable.
The price you pay for cheaper items depends on the weekday. If new shipments come in on Fridays, every cheap item is $20 on Friday, and (say) $13 on Saturday, $10 on Sunday, $8 on Monday, $6 on Tuesday, $4 on Wednesday, $2 on Thursday. Don’t know if much is replenished during the week. Nicer stuff is likely to sell more quickly. I’m sure some of it doesn’t sell at $2. A lot of it is electronic stuff; you can plug these in to test it. No returns are accepted.
Do these “price depends on the day of the week” stores exist in your area? Do they mainly sell Amazon stuff?
What name is given to this pricing mechanism?
Any strategy involved?
Just curious. I don’t need much more junk, but wondered if these were a national or international thing? Don’t remember any of these ten years ago.
started out in a similar way, obtaining warehouse overages in large lots which were put out every Tuesday. So if you wanted the good stuff you showed up then. The pricing was probably stable over the course of the week, but the stock certainly wasn’t.
They’ve long since abandoned the details of that model for simply selling cheap crap cheaply. Kinda like “factory outlet stores” were once selling actual factory seconds and such, but “outlet malls” are now simply selling a secondary line of made-to-be-cheaper brand name goods.
The “bargain” come-on still works even if it isn’t real.
So not exactly the same thing as the OP’s Amazon return stores, but sorta kinda in the same general direction.
BTW, the local newspaper ran an article about a new bin store in this area. Some people shop there to get stuff for resale online or at tag sales. So stuff that Amazon or Walmart sells is bought, returned, resold to bin stores, bought by someone else and then sold to yet another person. That is quite the cycle.
I bought a weed wacker off of Facebook Marketplace and went to pick it up at a nice home outside of town with an elderly couple selling Amazon returns. They told me that they were moving several pallets of returns each month. They had about a dozen other items ready for pickup on their porch. So they seemed to be doing alright.
I don’t trust those places because at least in my area ANYTHING with value (like video games) are put off to the side and sold for “what they’re worth” instead of being part of the bargains. That automatically tells me anything they don’t seperate and leave in the bins is just all cheap crap.
I love diggin’ for treasure.
I once found a bin of hardback books. A bunch were crap novels. Some were foreign languages.
But there were a few that turned out to be a great deal at 4 for $1.
Deals are where you dare to dig and how much time you’ve got.
One haulage company I drove for had a regular contract collecting from a warehouse belonging to a major department store. While waiting to be loaded I was able to see what went on and talk to some of the staff.
This Store allowed “no quibble” returns for two weeks after purchase (except underwear and the like). The warehouse was where all returned items - clothes, toys, furniture, electrical goods, computer et al - were sent. They sorted and examined them. Undamaged stock was repacked in the manufacturer’s original packaging and sent to a store as new. Superficial damage was sometimes accepted and sold on as “ex demonstration”, or returned goods. The rest was sold on.
I was collecting electrical goods, mostly fridges and washing machines and they were eventually delivered to a wholesaler who sold them on to market traders and the like. These days, I bet most of it goes via E-bay.
Chatting with a buddy who is huge into 3-D printing (5 or 6 printers of different sizes and purposes). He’s making something for me and I asked about the “stuff” he uses and how expensive it is (turns out it is called filament and can be hella expensive). He has ~400 rolls - much of it bought at our local bin store (we had two, down to one). He’s found many $80-$100 rolls and bought them for $8-10. Most are either untouched or missing a few feet at worst. He’s only had a few that just completely didn’t work (he keeps an older printer to use as a test bed). He loves the place.
I hadn’t thought of it before, but that seems like an ideal hobby for picking up secondhand consumables. 3D printer prices came down massively from the early days when a MakerBot was a low four-figure purchase for the team I worked on. These days much better (faster, more precise, etc.) printers can be had for basically impulse-buy money for a hobbyist—under $200 brand new, so I’m sure on Black Friday they’re to be had even cheaper.
So there must be thousands of the things that were bought and basically never used, or whose users gave up on dealing with their tendency to be idiosyncratic and fickle. Most filament is also prone to absorbing moisture, which makes the prints worse and the printer even more temperamental, but if you’re capable of and familiar with drying out filament that’s going to open up a lot of opportunities for someone else’s frustration to be your gain
Even with some pre-sorting, there can still be value there. I’m thinking of my church’s annual rummage sale. We do get some things that are worth a lot, and we do set those aside and sell them separately, usually online. But of what’s left, you can still get any clothing item for a dollar a piece, or a dollar for a full grocery bag on the last day of the sale. Most of that is definitely worth more than that to the end buyer, but it’s not worth our time or effort to deal with it all separately.
There’s also a lot of stuff that’s worth a lot to the right buyer, but nothing at all to the vast majority of people, and it’s a lot of work to find the right buyer. By pricing it at a fraction of that price, you get buyers to come to you, and effectively crowdsource that process of finding the buyer.
There are some specialty filaments that are very expensive, but mostly it isn’t. I’ve never spent more than $10 worth of material on a single print. It is significantly more expensive than the same plastic bought as raw material on a wholesale industrial scale, but 10x normal plastic prices is still pretty cheap, especially on a small scale. And yes, there are cheaper ways to buy filament, but it’s often of inconsistent quality, and requires more futzing around with printer settings and calibration and such: Some hobbyists enjoy that part, and some don’t.
This is my impression. They used to be all in on the bin prices when they started (or at least got popular as selling Amazon returns) and the allure was that you could show up and grab an expensive item for $12. Now it’s all mid-range trash for $12 and anything of obvious value plucked out and set aside to be a little below retail.
It’s a lot like Goodwill which used to be a place to find a rare bargain until they started presorting the treasures out to sell online and just loading the store with the gone-over dregs.
I think that depends on what the item is - If I return a pair of pants I bought last week with the tags still on it , I doubt very much it would be sold as “open box” because I have never seen returned clothing sold differently than new clothing. “Open box” in my experience refers to items where you can tell the packaging is open but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s been used. It doesn’t seem to refer to anything that’s previously been sold. I’ve never seen anything with no packaging or packaging that you can’t tell if it’s been opened (like a shoe box) or easily replaced packaging (like the thin plastic bags that clothes bought on-line often come in) sold as open box - but clothing and shoes are returned all the time. DSW wouldn’t be able to stay in business if they had to drop the price of every pair of shoes bought online and then returned - or more likely, they would stop taking returns that they aren’t legally required to accept. Speaking of shoes, that brings something else to mind - how much difference is there between a pair of pants or shoes that was tried on by ten people in the store and one that was tried on by ten people in the store and also by me after I brought it home?
My understanding is that the reason for “open box” prices is less because of legalities than because consumers would not be willing to pay full-price for an item that was obviously opened when a sealed one is displayed just a few feet away. Sometimes there are laws defining “used vs new” for particular items which can be strange. My son bought a car that was technically used. Even though it had never been sold , the fact that it had been titled to the dealer meant it was “used”.
" Refurbished" on the other hand usually are not “like new.” They are generally defective items that were returned during the warranty period. They are fixed, tested and cleaned up, but may have signs of use.
This is a department store group. They have dozens of stores and sell online as well. With their generous returns policy and the 14-day rule for online purchases, a good proportion of the returns would be indistinguishable from new, apart from the opened box.
They have an arrangement with their suppliers to receive stocks of “original” packaging, so that when the goods are delivered, they will look pristine.
I have returned goods to Amazon when they turn out to be different to how I expected - the ever-present problem of buying online. They will be unused (in the case of clothes, not even tried on frequently), and I assume they will be restocked and sold as new. Amazon credits the purchase price as soon as the carrier scans the goods.
