Consumerism is a Trauma Response

On used junk, Stanleys, Labubu, and class disparity.

When you return an item to an online retailer, it almost never ends up back in the store’s inventory to be sold to another customer. Usually, it’s added to a massive pile of other returns, which are bought in bulk by sites like Treasure Liquidation, which I found myself at this past Friday.

Most of these liquidation centers are massive warehouses stocked with palettes of returned items that you can purchase for hundreds of dollars. In this case, it was a small, unassuming brick-and-mortar location in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts where the items were hastily piled into rows of wooden troughs. Posters hung in the windows boasted massive deals on the stuff discarded by the masses; all items were $12 on Friday (the day I went), $10 on Saturday, $8 on Sunday, so on and so forth, until by Wednesday all remaining will be sold for just $1. After that, presumably off to the landfill.