From what I’ve read, much clothing purchased from online stores like Amazon or the like is never resold but instead ends up in landfills or even in a Chilean desert.
That was going to be my comment. Things that are valuable to a hefty fraction of the populace, e.g. video games, are easy enough and remunerative enough to pick out. Things that are valuable to a teeny fraction of the populace, e.g. 3D printer filament, are not. So they languish in the $5 bin until someone happens by who recognizes what they are and have a need.
As a separate matter, all these kinds of return streams couple with the existence of places like Etsy & eBay where individual citizen’s quasi garage sales can go online, also cause secondary and tertiary markets to spring up.
At every bin store there’s somebody scavenging the bins every day to buy stuff priced with enough margin left to be profitably resold on e.g. eBay. Which of course leaves little but trash for the casual browsing curiosity shopper.
In a similar vein the antique consignment shops have been having a hard time. Many people put ads up on eBay for goods they don’t own, but have seen in a nearby shop. Then they go buy the good when, and only when, someone has already ordered and paid for the eBay item. Funding those middlemen in effect comes out of the shops’ (and consignees’) margins.
In many ways this reminds me of the garbage pickers common in poor countries such as India. Humans are entrepreneurial. If there’s any value left in some object, somebody whose hourly wage requirement is low enough will go prospecting for that sort of stuff wherever it can be found and resell it.
They’re mining garbage piles for rich ore no differently than real mining companies dig up the richest ore beds they know how to locate.
A decade or two ago, there were people who went to used bookstores or library sales and scanned the barcodes of the books for sale, looking for ones that had high resale value.
Still are. But a bit like MW_Degen_Gamblr has been lamenting lately, as the number of players working the game go up, the return to each go down. Eventually none but the enthusiasts and the desperate are still tilling that increasingly barren soil.
See also: Used Vinyl sales.
I suppose one part of the bin store economics is that a lot of people probably feel compelled to buy something after digging for 40 minutes just to make their time feel worth it. Oh boy, an opened HDMI cable for $5, sure why not. What a deal…
How is that a bad thing for anyone? The shop has it for sale for $50. Someone buys it. Who cares if they display it in their home, keeps it for a few years and then sells it or immediately sells it for $75?
Interestingly (and anecdotally) today I was starting to build my new computer. I unpacked the computer case (which is large(ish)) and there was a noticeable dent in the top. I am certain the case will still work just fine but that’s like saying you will accept a new car with a big dent in the door.
So, I took some photos and went on the seller’s webpage where there is a selection for replacement. I filled out the form, added the photos and sent the request. Within two hours I got a notice back that a replacement was on the way and I can keep the damaged one. Clearly they see no value in paying for return shipment of a damaged item they can’t sell (or have to mark way down…open box AND damaged).
Not sure what I will do with it now but at least I don’t have to mess around with shipping a large item (but I have to figure how to dispose of it…I live in a hi-rise and they will not take it as trash).
In my hi-rise items the size of PC cases won’t go down the trash chute. But down at ground level there is a janitor room where they have a dumpster / compactor combo that residents can (and should) bring their bulky items down to. It won’t take a couch, but it’ll sure take a PC case or a microwave oven or …
if this is the first big thing you’ve had to dispose of, you might check w your management about some similar arrangement.
Set it out on a curb marked “Free”. Scrappers will get it in a heart beat.
That would be the answer here but I’m guessing leaving trash on the curb outside your high-rise is frowned upon.
Depending on how committed you are to giving it a new home versus just getting it our of yours, maybe throw it on FB Marketplace for some nominal $10 price and someone trying to make a budget build might think it’s a great bargain. But now you have to deal with the flakes and dweebs of FB Marketplace.
I find it interesting the two laments in this thread:
People going through discount/thrift stores to find cheap items where there is some arbitrage left to make money selling it on eBay, Marketplace, etc.
Discount/thrift stores pulling the valuable items aside and selling them at the eBay prices instead of at the standard thrift store bulk prices.
Many, many, many years ago, Dell used to have an outlet store in Austin. It was mostly PCs that had been returned, and were discounted slightly from the catalog prices.
The interesting stuff was the large bins of components. There’d be pallet sized boxes full of expansion cards for $5 each. Most were completely worthless, like proprietary mouse cards without the mouse. If you were lucky though, you could find things like accelerated graphics cards or SCSI cards that new were worth hundreds. Good times.
I don’t think the two are contradictory. The place pulls the computer components, video games, televisions, etc that are obviously worth money out first. You have no chance of finding a high/mid range digital camera sitting in a $5 bin. Other people who make a business out of it then remove the less obviously valuable stuff with the best rate of return. By the time the casual person thinks “That sounds neat”, it’s pretty much just trash left over or especially niche items that might be a “find” for one person in a hundred.
There’s very little “exploring” to be done. The business and people investing in resale can just zap bar codes with their phone, find out what an item is worth and toss it back in if it doesn’t meet the threshold.
Very well said. Thank you.
ISTM whether one complains about this state of affairs very much matters on which role in the system you want to adopt. And what you imagine the counterfactual world would be like that lacks whatever real world feature is drawing your ire.
The advent of WWW e-commerce promised to reduce search costs to next to nothing, to compete away most arbitrageable price differences, and to eliminate all sorts of middlemen.
Which makes the rise of these kinds of bin-scavenging (or used book sale scavenging) middlemen reselling on eBay seem a) unexpected, and b) wrong / immoral somehow.
Of course what it really is, is the same goods re-entering the neat clean efficient e-commerce stream a second time after a short trip into the real world where they got bunged up and are now in a somewhat used condition. Somebody human has to get paid to do that re-entry work in the real world.
Sorta like a cow and a cud. Same food, same chewing, different “flavor”. And most of all, the same goal: to wring all the value out of the “food” somehow.
I think this is still within the bounds of this thread:
Who eats the cost of a returned item? The manufacturer or the seller? ACME makes a Widget and Amazon sells the Widget. I return the item to Amazon because of a defect. Does Amazon ship it back to ACME? Does ACME just take Amazon’s word for it? Who is out that money?
What if it is just a return because you decided you didn’t like it?
Who eats the cost depends on the reason for the return. My husband sold tools and supplies to hardware stores. If something was defective , my husband’s company gave the hardware store a credit and his company in turn get a credit from the manufacturer.
Returns because you don’t like it or you bought the wrong size or you decided you didn’t need the widget after all - that’s going to be on the store that allows you to return it. And if they refund you $25 but can only sell it for $12 because they have to sell it as an “open box” , well, that’s part of the reason for restocking fees
Ultimately we all do. The prices of everything in effect include the costs of damaged, defective, lost or stolen goods.
For expensive enough individual items the various layers may reimburse one another. But a lot of it is simple self insurance: Amazon just assumes X% of goods come back wrecked or just disappear. They eat the cost but expect to eat the cost and have priced accordingly
Not Amazon. They are the 500 pound gorilla of the interaction. Third party sellers on Amazon are at the mercy of Amazon’s return policy. For example, if an item is returned for being damaged, it is up to Amazon to decide if it was damaged by Amazon (Amazon’s problem) or by the shipper or customer (the seller’s problem).
From the number of “thrift store finds” Facebook groups my wife belongs to the treasure hunting aspect is no longer getting an amazing deal, but rather finding that unique and strange one of a kind item that either makes you rejoice in the creativity of humanity, or question our very existence.
Hand made rhinestone covered leather vests and matching boots or taxidermy ranging from amateur and scary to professional and scary are a whole different beast than a nearly new commodity item for 15% of new cost.
Sure but you won’t find those in an Amazon Returns Bin Store. I was thinking earlier (but didn’t post) that the only reason to hit the thrift stores these days is for kitschy junk that tickles you (and didn’t tickle anyone else). My favorite glass is some 25¢ glass mug I found on vacation. It has a nuclear power plant etched into it and was a reward for a continuous uptime record in 1986. Why does it tickle me? I dunno. But it was a quarter and I like it.
Not sure if you ever watched the TV show, “How I Met Your Mother”, but there were a few episodes where they riffed on that. They would put anything they didn’t want on the sidewalk and before they could get back up to their apartment whatever it was was gone (except one time).
(This was in New York but Chicago, where I live, is not so different in this regard.)
I still don’t have a compact name for a price that depends on what day of the week it is. I’m going with “variable weekday pricing”.
I don’t go to many of these stores. I went to one a few times mainly since the process sparked my curiosity. There tends to be a lineup of twenty people when they get new stuff in, who are definitely looking to resell stuff and buy moderate amounts of stuff that to me barely looks worth $20. The stuff on $20 day is, to me, largely worth $5-70 (retail) with a possible median of about $10-15.
There are definitely good items mixed in at the beginning, and many specific items of no use to most which would be well worth it to specific people or hobbyists. I have found neat stuff still there on $8 day, though it is stuff most people would not want.
Recent finds? A Japanese stone bath mat matching the bathroom paint ($10), a portable mini fridge ($20), a Lodge iron pot ($20), a portable induction stove ($20), a coffee burr grinder ($10), a blood pressure cuff ($8), an oximeter ($8), a good brand rice cooker ($10). Nothing that was needed, exactly, but reasonably decent value. I can see the appeal. I don’t think I’ve seen 3D printing stuff but might not know what to look for.