In our town, it’s named Best Bargains Bin. Same general idea. New stuff comes in on Tuesday; next day it’s a buck cheaper; next day it’s another buck cheaper; etc. All kinds of people line up before it opens. Mad rush once the doors open, and those bins get trashed.
I used to watch a YouTuber couple who did this. They seemed quite affable as they quickly sorted through and calculated their expected profit. They sometimes made two or three times their outlay, so it is potentially pretty lucrative.
Because of this topic I went back and looked through the inventory of my local one of these.
It was $3 day and I spent $30.
What I got
1 4K Blu-ray of a film I like (MSRP was $12 new on Amazon)
1 multi season Blu-ray set of a show I like (MSRP on Amazon is $25 new)
3 good quality bathroon mats ($10 each at Walmart)
2 NERF guns (open box returns apparently, retail for $25 each but they were lacking ALL the darts but replacements only seem to be $10 for 50)
1 electronic dart board (Amazon has it for $30, no darts again because it’s open box but Amazon also sells the darts for $6)
1 4K HDMI cord (I paid $5 for one on Amazon not long ago)
1 twin sized air mattress with automatic inflator (open box return, haven’t checked it out yet but I was more interested in getting the auto inflator because it’s stand alone)
So actually not bad for a shopping trip. Not really stuff I NEED but I can use them. Most of it seems like open box returns missing stuff but the Blurays had all their discs so that was nice.
I am slightly amused that your bin store purchases have you returning to Amazon for the missing parts.
(I kid!)
That is kind of amusing. The circle of life!
(I have heard American comedians joke about Costco selling coffins. Not seen this in Canada. Not going to. Canadians would likely find it insensitive.)
It’s surprising to me how many people don’t take advantage of the wealth of price data available on the Internet.
I was at a flea market on Sunday, and someone had an HP-67 calculator with manual for $2. I bought it in a flash, and took it home, pulled the dead battery pack out, cleaned it up a bit, and powered it on with an external power supply. It’s currently on ebay with a bid of $88.00…
Been at my current job for 20 years. As a bonus, I get to choose from an on-line catalog. So, I checked the “retail” price of the items I was interested in. Several were discontinued.
This is very enlightening for the topic at hand, thank you. Highly recommend everyone in this thread read or listen to it.
Note that the Planet Money story mentions that electronics that have been plugged in, even briefly, cannot be sold as new, under federal law.
I wonder how they verify that? Do they have to suss it out from words used by the returner?
My guess is that all electronics returned are assumed to have been plugged in and therefore no longer new. A short anecdote. About fifteen years ago, I was an employee of a subsidiary of the Dell Computer Corporation. We could get discount coupons to buy computers or monitors or anything the company sold at a 17% discount (one coupon per quarter and I was told that 17% represented the gross margin on sales). I decided to buy a new computer and monitor for my brother for Christmas. But he, being a cheapskate, declined the gift. So I was on the phone on December 26 to arrange for the return. The representative offered a twenty percent discount if we decided to keep it. When my brother still declined, they upped the offer to forty percent (I think). We still returned it. So a total of over fifty percent off the price for not saddling them with another product for the outlet store.
I got a microwave oven from Amazon four years ago and it was definitely repackaged. I plugged it in and it was dead on arrival. I was pissed off. Replacing it was easy though. They sent me a new one and gave me a label to print out and put on the old one and it was picked up on my doorstep.
The new one they sent was pristine.
I left the glass plate loose inside the old one and wrote “BROKEN” across the top with a sharpie. I’m certain it was returned the first time because it didn’t work.
Last week I bought a hanging shoe rack from Target. $20. Ordered online and picked up in the store 2 hours later. I already had several and thought I was getting one more to match. Once I got it home, it was obvious this is a different product. So I don’t want it. It’s good as new, never even out of the original package, and I intend to return it to the store next time I’m nearby.
Which will be this evening. I never got a paper receipt with the pickup, so before I leave home I think to hit the app on my phone to confirm my purchase is provable to the clerk from there. It is. Yaay. And there’s a handy return button right there. So I click it, thinking that’ll expedite the process when I get to the store. After a couple more screens I get the final screen. We’ve refunded your $20, and you can keep the item.
Good thing I didn’t drive over there and give it back to them. Saved me the drive and them the trouble of trashing the item they don’t want. Win-win. I think I’ll stick it on a shelf unopened and if it’s still unused a few months from now, then I’ll give it the heave.
Modern consumer logistics and the economics behind it sure includes some odd swirls and eddies.
The person who it is a bad thing for/cares is the person who would have found/used it for $50 if it hadn’t been bought and resold at a higher price by the scalper.
But they wouldn’t have found it at a random antique store far away from them. They did on eBay or whatever.
I would like to add my thanks for posting that NPR discussion.
There still are. They are always welcome at the self-service bookstore I volunteer at, but the library in a nearby town limits them to the first night of their sales, which are Friends of the Library only, and require $20 and a wristband to do this. After implementing these rules, they have not had to call the police, if that tells you anything.
I don’t do it myself, but this past decade of being a book reseller has given me good radar for things with a resale value higher than 50 cents.
Franchise Kicks (I think their names are Dave and Becky) are a hoot! I watch them occasionally. Once in a while, they’ll get an item that they will not resell for personal (most likely religious) reasons. I also asked once in the comments if they ever got a message from someone who said, “Hey, that’s my stuff!” and they said they hadn’t.
One of the local Salvation Army stores has become a bin store. I haven’t been in there since they switched; I should check them out.