The Bargain Bin Evolves (2024)

Today in Tedium: If you want to know whether a society is truly advanced, look at how it manages its glut. Does that glut just hang there in piles? (Yes.) Does it get incinerated, destroyed, or hidden? (Also yes.) Does it get recycled? (Not really.) Or does it get sold back to us, as a product—or perhaps, even as an event? (It turns out … yes it does.) In an era when glut can be delivered to our doorsteps in creative ways and with beautiful packaging, it can feel like we’ve found our societal peak. But the thing is, waste takes many distinct forms. Today’s Tedium ponders the rise of the “bin store,” and what it says about us. — Ernie @ Tedium

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Imagine pallets like these filled with literally hundreds of unwanted items from Amazon. (Anatole Shukla/Flickr) If you haven’t heard about the bin store concept, let me tell you all about it The bin store may be the defining retail business of the 2020s. It is what happens when commercialism has bled so far into every element of life that we even have to create a use case for the junk nobody wants. These stores come with weird names, highlighting the randomness of their models or the deals they promise. They have names like “Price Break,” or “Super Deal Bin Store,” or “Treasure Hunt Liquidators,” or “Buried Treasures.” Their goal is not to give you a spotless experience. Far from it. Once you get out of big cities and into the suburbs, these spots are everywhere. They are known for their virality—they want you to take photos of your finds on Instagram. At their core, these businesses are essentially giant arbitrage machines, leveraging the fact that returns are cheap in bulk, but may potentially, possibly have valuable things hiding within them. And you don’t have to wait for a bin store to open up to buy your own pile of crap. Whether directly (as Walmart does) or through a third-party, if you want to buy a pallet of random crap people didn’t want, you can buy those pallets on the cheap and see if you can sell them to people who do. Want to buy a laptop? For the price of one laptop, you can buy, like a dozen from a site like BULQ. The challenge, of course, is that there’s no guarantee of the condition of any of this junk, nor is there a guarantee that this junk is something you might even want. But if you’re transparent about this fact and turn it into a virtue, suddenly, what was once a downside of the product can become the product. At its core, bin stores turned the entire concept of random sh*t in a box on its head. It’s not risky anymore. You know that the liability that stuff won’t work is high just by walking in the store. Now it’s an opportunity to get something for surprisingly cheap. Watch on YouTube An example of a viral “bin store.” In many ways, bin stores merge multiple concepts. They bring in the lightly-staffed nature of a dollar store, the discovery-minded approach of a thrift store, and the just-moving-stuff-around nature of a local Goodwill. (If you’ve ever been in a Goodwill outlet store, which tends to be a bit larger, the bin layout will feel familiar, even though the items in those are totally different.) But weirdly, they also make it feel like an event. The venues are structured around the “drop date” for the next round of stuff they’re selling. These bins will be picked over for a full week, but all the good stuff will be gone within 30 minutes. And each Saturday, when the new bins make their debuts, everything costs a little more, but your odds of getting something good increase. And on Wednesdays, when the odds are high that everything has been completely picked over, they let you buy bag-loads of stuff for a flat fee. It’s a brilliant model. It has made purchasing the byproduct of e-commerce waste feel like an adventure. I, of course, had to do this. So, earlier this weekend, I went.

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