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Are ‘Bin Stores’ an Optimal Way To Liquidate Returns?
“Bin stores” continue to gain significant local media coverage as a way for consumers to score jaw-dropping bargains in a treasure hunt experience as well as for stores to offload returns.
In Columbus, Ohio, a store called Where Ya Bin recently opened featuring 128 waist-high blue plastic bins filled with rejects from Amazon. All items are $14 on Fridays, dropping in price each successive day ($10 on Saturday, $7 on Sunday) to just 25 cents on Thursdays.
Marysville resident Michelle Nicol, according to The Columbus Dispatch, found a crystal butterfly necklace for $1 that was priced at $45 on Amazon.com. Nicol said, “You get excited, pumped up, and you load up your cart. It’s addictive.”
In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a 3,000-square-foot BinSconsin store recently opened selling a wide mix of discarded products from chains such as Walmart, Target, and Amazon. Pricing starts at $10 on Saturdays, then drops each following day until the price of the remaining inventory hits $1 on Tuesday. The store is closed from Wednesday to Friday. Chippewa Valley’s Volume One publication wrote, “They try to sell everything in the bins during their posted open days, and then they start all over again with new pallets of products.”
Similar stores have opened in recent years across the country under names like Bin Shop’n, Hotbins, and BinCredible Deals. Under the formula, the independent store owners buy truckloads of pallets of returned goods as well as some overstocks and items with slight defects, either directly from retailers or third-party liquidators.
Lines often form on key days, such as the first day after restocking. Major finds of the week are often hyped on social media by store owners.
“In the last two weeks people left with XBOXs, PlayStations, and TVs as well, for $8,” Jehad Awad, owner of Mega Dealz, told KGET TV 17 in Bakersfield, California.
Also helping elevate the popularity of the stores are fans posting their bin finds on TikTok, including many bragging about their ability to resell returned items at significantly higher prices on eBay.
Bin stores also help retailers manage returns, particularly helping the resale of one-off items. The National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates that 16.5% of sales were returned in 2022, up from 10.6% in 2020.
A Target spokesperson told the Washington Post that when an item that can’t be resold is returned, the store works with “third-party services to either salvage, donate, recycle or reuse materials.”
In a blog entry for the Reverse Logistics Association, Larry Morgan, CEO at RL Liquidators, said bin stores have “serious staying power.” Liquidating low-value products, he said, “has always been an expensive undertaking,” and retailers can focus their liquidation efforts on maximizing the recovery of high-value items. Bin stores also promise to help avoid low-value products winding up in landfills. Morgan said, “Historically, low value product ultimately found its way to landfills for the simple reason that nobody could figure out how to sell it all without losing money. It was cheaper to simply throw it away than try to liquidate it.”
Discussion Questions
Has the arrival of bin stores in recent years been more of a net positive or negative for retail? Will bin stores continue to see rapid expansion in coming years, or are other liquidation methods more effective?
Poll
Loading …BrainTrust
Joe Skorupa
Influencer, Consultant and Strategic Advisor
Cathy Hotka
Principal, Cathy Hotka & Associates
Social media has amplified the popularity of bin stores, which do provide a way for retailers to clear down returned items. Shoppers like them because they can get real bargains and, for some, are an exciting way to shop. It’s a bit like gambling on what you will get, so there is a kind of thrill. All that said, bin stores are really a symptom of the problem of returns and don’t completely solve the consequent impact on retail margins. I would also be interested to know how many things bought at bin stores ultimately get resold, thrown out, or go unused.
Bin stores have been a net positive for retail. They provide a fun bargain-hunting experience for customers and help stores offload returns and excess inventory. The concept also reduces waste by offering low-value products at discounted prices, benefiting both consumers and retailers in managing their goods. Big retailers like Walmart and Target sell unsold items through brokers, who then supply stores like BinSconsin, creating a business cycle.
It’s likely bin stores will keep growing. They offer a unique, treasure-hunt shopping experience, and social media hype fuels their popularity. While other liquidation methods exist, the thrill of bin stores and their eco-friendly approach make them a compelling choice for both consumers and retailers.
A fun idea, certainly, but….
But ultimately liquidation is a sign of inefficiency, so one has to think the market for this is limited…or at least it better be if retail is to remain healthy.
Bin stores are the in stores, for sure. A bin store is the perfect storm of buy low, sell high, and get your shoppers into a weekly rhythm of store visits. The pricing model is more of a game that I’m sure can be addicting. It works, and hard-core bin shoppers definitely schedule their lives around these bins. So, yes, we’re going to see a lot of these, and expect national plays here soon.
In other news (from August, anyway), when Overstock.com paid over $21 million for the intellectual property of Bed Bath & Beyond, it never occurred to me that they would just redirect their site to the BB&B online site and make the Overstock.com site disappear. But thinking about this bricks-and-mortar bin store development, it makes a lot of sense. Overstock was early on as an online liquidator, but then Amazon and eBay and just about every other discount brand started competing with them successfully online. Shoppers now know they can go anywhere for online bargains, but there’s nothing like going elbow-to-elbow for winning those liquidated prizes in your local bin store!
Will bin stores become so popular that there aren’t enough “unsellable” products to meet the demand? Then, will someone get the idea of producing “unsellable” products to meet the demand?
The treasure hunt never disappoints. I wonder about profitability for retailers, but customers should be thrilled.
OK…on the one hand this is a “treasure hunt” on serious steroids. And the value equation is eye-popping. On the other hand, it is fed by a “supply chain” driven by mistakes and missteps. It’s a “supply chain” that retailers are highly incentivized to eliminate. Retailers are desperate to get returns back to some kind of normal that they can handle without extraordinary steps. Is that even possible given where we are in the evolution of retail? It’s almost like we have added a new layer of retail below TJX, and that just does not sound healthy for the long term.
Let us also not forget that we do have chains of thrift stores that have been doing this – without bins – for decades. Maybe the bins are a way to keep merchandise neatly stored. Some years ago, their biggest challenge was to procure enough donated product.
Bin stores are a win-win for both consumers to get treasure-hunt bargains and retailers to liquidate unsold products while avoiding shipment to landfills. Staying power is questionable, however, since bin stores make very little profit. For now they are filling a useful niche.
These stores are like the old Kmart blue light special, only much, much better. This is a good thing!
Bin stores is definitely one way of handling returns, the key is to make sure there is governance upstream to minimize the returns in the first place. Retailers bottom line is affected based on too many returns, so that needs to be addressed in additional of having a cost effective approach to dispose of the returns.
Bin stores are clearly an interesting and entertaining place to shop. It’s a place for random discovery or things you never knew you needed. I see these stores as both a negative and a positive.
The negative is that it demonstrates the return issues that we are facing in retail- wrong color, wrong type, wrong merchandising choice, damaged packaging or even wrong data in the description that drives billions of returns annually.
The positive is that this may be a more effective way to sell this excess inventory and find an eventual buyer and also reduce the immediate garbage in the landfill. Due to the immense return volume, I see that this format will continue to grow and mature. For the future, I am wondering if Amazon or other large retailers will run their own bin network eventually vs. selling it to 3rd parties.