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.
Seven Days at the Bin Store
41–50 of 116 posts
Re: Seven Days at the Bin Store
#42> “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 d…
Unless it is something really really good I don't think they do. The one that was in my town a couple years ago would post pictures on facebook of all the best things they had in order to entice people to come in.
Re: Seven Days at the Bin Store
#43These 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 tha…
>(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 a…
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.
Re: Seven Days at the Bin Store
#44Right 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.
Re: Seven Days at the Bin Store
#45Does 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".
Re: Seven Days at the Bin Store
#46I'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.
$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.
Most things will have a 6% sales tax, so you’ll need another $1.20 to get those 2 $10 items.
Re: Seven Days at the Bin Store
#47These 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 tha…
>(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 a…
You skipping buying that mask doesn’t improve those kids’ lives, though.
Re: Seven Days at the Bin Store
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
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.
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.
Re: Seven Days at the Bin Store
#49Am 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..
I'll toss in a counter-anecdote in that I am an enthusiastic returner.
Was it misrepresented? Return it - penalize misleading practices.
Was it junk? Return it - penalize hiding that something is junk. (is it priced like junk and not shy about it? great! you know what you're getting! junk can be useful!)
Was it just a bad fit for you and nothing is wrong with it and it might work for someone else[1]? Return it - encourage more thorough descriptions. E.g. "one size fits all" is an extremely lazy lie that just cost you money, measure it and tell me the measurements - they are perfectly capable of that and almost certainly did it multiple times already while creating the thing. (though for some I do feel bad about the cost it imposes, and don't always return here. depends on the details.)
It's not a 100% "I just don't want it" thing, there's plenty of regret-purchases that I just hang onto and give to someone else or sell at a rummage sale. But I definitely don't feel bad about using returns as a "stop being hostile towards your customers" tool.
It's also roughly the only way consumers as a whole can provide feedback to a seller that won't be ignored. Communicate your opinion clearly.
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[1]: Headphones are a pretty good example here. They like to claim sky-high perfection and durability and features, and then ship buggy crap with no support or wildly misrepresent sound quality (e.g. frequency response is quantitatively measurable so measure it, leaving it up to niche reviewers is worse for everyone). Lots of luxury-adjacent products do stuff like this, and I do not feel the least bit bad about calling them out on it - this stuff gets measured during development, used to select materials and tune the final product, and then hidden from you to sell it. And then they often change it after the initial launch, and do not tell anyone. It's blatant hostility, and it deserves to be treated as such.
Re: Seven Days at the Bin Store
#50> “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 d…
Unless it is something really really good I don't think they do. The one that was in my town a couple years ago would post pictures on facebook of all the best things they had in order to entice people to come in.
> The one that was in my town a couple years ago would post pictures on facebook of all the best things they had in order to entice people to come in.
Isn't the comment you are replying to supposing that those were not pictures "of all the best things they had"?