Ann Marie Ki: We weighed it out later. It contained 26.8 lb of plastic and 41.6 lb of cardboard. So, it was about 68 lb of trash.

Rosie Garren: Can we pause for a second? 68 lb of trash.

Ann Marie Ki: Yeah. Yeah. And that's again with the overwhelm like you just start like everything individually feels small and then it starts to literally accumulate.

Kyra Blackwell: I'm Kyra Blackwell. I'm Rosie Garren. And you're listening to the Wire Cutter Show.

Kyra Blackwell: Hey y'all, it's Kyra. It's January and that means it's maybe the season of returns. Maybe you got some stuff that you didn't really want over the holidays and it's time to send it on back. So, we actually recently published a really interesting article on what happens to things that are returned. Our deputy editor, Ann Marie Ki, bought a huge mystery box of returns to dig into the secondary market of what really happens to these things when you do send them back. This episode, Rosie is going to talk with her about the world of returns, what she found in this mystery palette, and how listeners can become savvier in the ways they shop and the way that they return products. So, after the break, Rosie will be with Ann Marie. See you soon.

Rosie Garren: Today my guest is wire cutter deputy editor Amirie Ki. We're talking about returns specifically about what happens to some of the things many of us send back that we've bought online. Amirie, welcome back.

Ann Marie Ki: Oh, I'm so excited to be here.

Rosie Garren: Always love to see you. So, this is a timely topic given many people are likely returning holiday gifts this month. You recently published an excellent piece about buying this huge pallet of returned items. I want to jump into that, but first I want to address what I think could maybe be an elephant in the room and it's Wire Cutters role in this. You publish this on Wire Cutter site. So Wire Cutter is a product recommendation site. People visit the site looking to buy things that hopefully don't get returned but theoretically could. So, I'm curious how you reconciled that when you first embarked on this reporting.

Ann Marie Ki: Well, I I I think that's the incredible thing about this, the fact that I had this story idea and it was approved and people were like, "Absolutely, go for this. We want to know what happens to that world of products." And everybody I know who works here really wants to give the best product recommendations to break through that noise and to really ensure that people understand the pros and the cons of the item before they buy it. We really don't want people buying junk and returning it because it's disappointing.

Rosie Garren: Talk about this project. Explain what you did. What got you interested in the beginning? So, I'm chronically online for better or for worse. And uh you know, I was seeing a lot of these influencers in my feed who were unboxing haul style videos of stuff that they had bought in pallets and now some of them resell it, some of them donate it, some of them who knows what they do with it, but it was always interesting and there was always a variety of products. So, I was

Ann Marie Ki: explain what you mean by a palette. So, the official name is a Gaylord, which we did not use in the piece, but it's the giant cardboard box that is filled with stuff. So, ours was like 6 feet tall. When I first went to look at it, I needed a stepladder to look inside of it. And you're you're you're not not tall. I mean, like you that's sign average. But yeah, people will buy these and then they will open them. And so there's a bunch of different things that you can buy. There's a bunch of different ways you can approach this. And most of this stuff is pushed into this secondary market after a good is no longer wanted for whatever reason. So if you have something that was on store shelves and didn't sell, the store needs to make room. either virtual store or real in-person brickandmortar store needs to make room on that shelf.

Rosie Garren: And so they will often liquidate it for pennies on the dollar.

Ann Marie Ki: There's also returned goods. So you buy something, you return it. Where does that go? Does that get reshelved or does it go into the liquidations market? And then there's also all of this stuff that just ends up never being sold at all for whatever reason. What do we mean by liquidation?

Ann Marie Ki: So, most people are probably familiar with it when a company goes out of business and they're saying liquidation sale. And that's truly when they're selling off everything just to make as much money as they can out of it, even if it's just a little bit. They just have to get some money out of it. And then there's also there's unclaimed mail or misdirected mail. And so that will be something that your address is wrong, the apartment number, the zip code wasn't right, you moved. There's various reasons why a package never makes it to the recipient. And the shipper, because the person who has sent it out, the company who has sent it out doesn't pay for return shipping, they bundle it all together. So it's unclaimed mail, it's overstock, it's returned goods that you could be available for purchase through these pallets.

Rosie Garren: That's what ends up on the P. Okay. So that's what you were seeing on let's say Tik Tok. People are are unboxing all of these types of goods.

Ann Marie Ki: Yes. And so some people can resell the items that they get and you could buy something like a pallet of unopened Lego boxes from Target, right? where you know there's like a resale value to it

Rosie Garren: or you want like a mystery haul and then you buy a pallet of misdirected mail.

Rosie Garren: So, how did that initial interest end up turning into this piece?

Ann Marie Ki: What I really wanted to do was look at some of the items in this palette and really understand the landscape of what was being purchased, what wasn't being purchased. And so I had really aimed to purchase a unclaimed or misdirected mail pallet because I thought that would give us the widest variety of goods from the widest variety of retailers. So you could really see and then we could like wire cutter the heck out of it, right? And then I could talk to our experts and like they can tell me what's good or bad about the product. We can, you know, all of the stuff that we because we extensively test these products, we have our fairly narrow view of the picks that we like, right? And so I was trying to look at the edges of what people are buying outside of that and see if any of our wire cutter picks ended up in there too.

Rosie Garren: So also important before we go further, we should say that you and your team donated everything from the pallet that you got that was usable after you finish reporting this.

Ann Marie Ki: Yes, that is um wire cutters policy is that we never keep things for ourselves.

Rosie Garren: Okay. So my next question is kind of taking a little step backward, a 101. I want to know how much stuff actually gets returned every year.

Ann Marie Ki: So it varies by category and these are all estimates, but 15.8% of sales were returned in 2025. That's $849.9 billion. And that's according to a survey that the National Retail Federation did with Happy Returns, which is a company that facilitates returns.

Rosie Garren: Almost 16% of sales get returned.

Ann Marie Ki: Yeah. And then if you're looking at clothing, about 25% of e-commerce apparel gets returned.

Rosie Garren: Okay. So, when people return a product they buy online, what happens

Ann Marie Ki: with returns? It's a little bit murky, but in general, the item could be reshelved. It could end up in a clearance rack, discount bin, something like that, in the store or it could end up being liquidated for pennies on the dollar and being sent to the secondary market. And that's what we got. Now, Amazon told me that they open and inspect every single package to decide where it goes. But I was opening those packages and it appeared to be directly from the person that returned it. So, I'm not sure how much of that middleman is actually happening to inspect these goods, but my suspicion is that because they know exactly what is being returned, they earmarked these items direct for liquidation. And so that is what happens with the majority of these goods where when they go into what is called the secondary market, they are being liquidated. So, the original value of the item could have been about $25, but it was being sold within this palette. I paid $742. Wire cutter paid $742 for this palette. I was reimbursed. Um, and that was filled with hundreds of products. So, each product was, you know, not very much. And so, that they were just trying to eek out a little bit. And obviously the warehouse had to make some money out off of that. So who knows how much they paid for that pallet. Everybody had to make a little bit of money on this. And then the theory is that someone who purchases these pallets would then resell the goods to make money on that. So you you want to buy a palette that's worth more the contents of the palette that's worth more than $742. You can make money on it. I would not say that we accomplish that. I would probably sell these items for garage sale prices like a dollar.

Rosie Garren: You're describing this secondary market. I'm curious how big it is.

Ann Marie Ki: So, Zack Rogers, who is out of the University of Colorado, he's been tracking this since 2008. These are again estimates because nobody knows and he said that he thinks that his figures are actually conservative. So in 2008 it was $297 billion and in 2024 he now estimates $846 billion worth of goods flowing through that secondary market. And they can be resold in a variety of places. So we're talking about people online reselling it, you know, either on, you know, live marketplaces, eBay, things like that. But they can also be sold in places like factory outlets or pawn shops, flea markets, dollar stores, things like that. That's where a lot of these goods flow through.

Rosie Garren: 297 billion to 846 billion

Ann Marie Ki: in 16 years. That's incredible.

Rosie Garren: It's only increasing.

Rosie Garren: So then what happens? Where does all of this stuff go? What is constituting this secondary market? People might be familiar with these storefronts that have literally bins full of goods. Yeah.

Ann Marie Ki: And so it allows an entry point for people to purchase something less than they normally would have. I was in a bin store over the summer and they had a wire cutter pick simple human trash can for I can't remember it was like 50 or 60 bucks

Rosie Garren: and those are $200.

Ann Marie Ki: They're like over $100. It was at it was at least 50%. New inbox, right? There's a real opportunity twofold for consumers to buy something at a lower price and for people who really want to be entrepreneurs and self-starters to resell these goods and potentially make a living off of it.

Rosie Garren: Potentially beneficial for underresourced communities and communities that don't have access to some of these goods any other way. 100%.

Rosie Garren: So, as these goods travel, at a certain point, they end up in these pallets. Where are these pallets held?

Ann Marie Ki: My guide in all of this is an Instagram influencer by Hobby. She's wonderful. She goes by Pallet Princess.

Rosie Garren: Love it. Um, and so she's on Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube. And she is a social worker by day and an influencer the rest of the time.

Ann Marie Ki: Only in America. Actually, probably not, but it

Ann Marie Ki: I love it. And she, you know, she just sort of fell into this. And she's so wonderful. Her name is Jodie. And she was really helpful to me to understand this world. And she said to me, "If you're going to buy this palette, you should really go see it in person." She's like, "It's really important for you just to have eyes on it before you purchase it." And so that's what I did. She had recommended somebody who she'd worked with in the past. And so Lisa Fischer, who is our amazing video producer, and I drove many hours in a car together. Um, I would rather have been in a car with her than anyone else except for you, Rosie.

Rosie Garren: Um, I would totally road trip with you.

Ann Marie Ki: We've we've sort of mini road trips before.

Ann Marie Ki: Yeah. Anytime. Anytime. you know, whether it be an hour or six. So, she and I took this road trip out there and you walk and it's truly a warehouse filled with rows and rows and rows of these pallets. And there was a singular man like doing every job in the place, running around, he's, you know, shrink wrapping things. He's, you know, he's filling out my bill of sale. He is just like the hardest working man. And it's so much stuff. And so it's organized either by category. So like I said before, the Target Lego boxes or Walmart toys. There was a bunch of teu just like who knows what was in that palette. Or it can be something like unclaimed mail or the returns palette that we ended up buying. I had said to him, I would like a misdirected mail pallet. And part of that is because I knew that I wanted to contact the people who had in my mind had never gotten their goods. It turned out who had returned these goods because I really wanted the address labels on those packages so that I could

Ann Marie Ki: redacted or or anything. If you buy one of the smaller mystery boxes, it's often redacted, but they're not going to go through a giant pallet. And as a journalist, I can reach out to these people in the news gathering, in the efforts of news gathering. I did clear this with the New York Times legal team before I did it. That was a piece of this for me because I did want to understand the loop of this. So, we looked in this palette. I said, "That looks good." And then I was like, "That's strange. All of the addresses on the packages are the same." I thought it was just all one town's misdirected mail, not realizing that it was actually this return center in Monroe Township, New Jersey, and that's why they all had the same address label. So, what had actually happened is somebody, you know, you go to return the shirt that you didn't like and Amazon gives you the return label and it goes directly to this return center. And we did have stuff from Walmart and other retailers, but the majority of it was from Amazon. When you walk into this warehouse, it's as far as the eye can see. It's truly, it feels like acres of stuff. How does that feel standing in that space?

Ann Marie Ki: I was so excited at first because I like stuff, right? Like I'm somebody who I really enjoy products. That's why I work at Wire Cutter. And then we're in there for a little longer and it's like hot in there and everything is like really tall and you just start to understand the overwhelm of all of this. You know, my nervous system started to shut down. I was like, I can't believe how much stuff this is. But I was still excited to see what was individually in the palette. So, it was this weird it was this weird mix, right? Cuz I'm like, "Ooh, ooh. Was this going to be like really depressing? And then I was like, well, once we get the palette, we open open it up and there's cool stuff in there, it's going to be great."

Rosie Garren: Yeah, that's not what happened.

Kyra Blackwell: Okay, after the break, Emory is going to share some specifics of what she found in the pallet of returns that she bought for Wire Cutter. We'll hear about the good, the bad, and the ugly. Plus, we're going to talk about how we as consumers perhaps can be a bit savvier about how we shop in an effort to reduce the amount of returns in general. Stick around.

Rosie Garren: Welcome back. My guest today is my colleague, deputy editor here at Wire Cutter, Anmarie Ki. Before the break, I got kind of a 10,000 ft view of what happens when people return products they buy online. Amarie, I want and need to ask you about this 450 lb 6 foot tall box of stuff that you bought that Wire Cutter bought to report out this story. You said that you did not know what was in the box when you bought it. No clue. It was quite a surprise.

Ann Marie Ki: When we saw it in the warehouse, I picked up a couple of the packages and I was like, "Oh, it's kind of soft." But like, no, I had no idea.

Rosie Garren: So, you are not carting this thing to the wire cutter office yourself. What is this process? You picked out the pallet that you want. Then what?

Ann Marie Ki: Then the wire cutter operations team would not allow me to drive it in a U-Haul across the country. And I'm good on them.

Ann Marie Ki: Yes, they are wise. So, we did have it professionally sent. So, it took a couple days for it to get to us and it came. The funniest thing is that I, you know, I told my husband that I had pitched the story and I was like, "Going to buy a pallet." And he was like, "Where where is it going to go?" And I was like, "Our front porch." In fact, it went to um the Wire Cutters offices and they brought it in on our freight elevator. Now, this thing is heavy and huge and they plopped it in the middle of our testing floor. And then every was like, "You're gonna you're gonna move this, right? You're gonna move this." So, so it took four of us 2 days to unpack everything. And we logged everything. So, we logged how many packages. So, it was 430 packages, 582 individual items within those packages, cuz sometimes there's multiple items in a package. And we weighed it out later. It contained 26.8 lb of plastic and 41.6 lb of cardboard. So, it was about 68 lb of trash.

Rosie Garren: Can we pause for a second? 68 lb of trash.

Ann Marie Ki: Yeah. Yeah. And that's again with the overwhelm like you just start like everything individually feels small and then it starts to literally accumulate. So we organized everything and we started to pick out the things that we knew we want the people we wanted to contact the stuff that was particularly interesting or stood out. And because we couldn't leave the stuff in the middle of our testing floor, we had to move it into what was built as but has never been used as a podcast room. And the one that we have in our testing facility is a little bit like an asylum. Like

Rosie Garren: I can attest to that. I've been inside. No one can hear you scream in there.

Ann Marie Ki: It is a tiny room. The walls are padded and it's dark. The lighting's not great. And when you stand there, you can like hear your heartbeat in your ears. So there was like definitely a telltale heart element to this thing. And we filled it with this stuff. Everything had like a bit of a smell in in accumulation. So there was visual overwhelm. There was, you know, scent overwhelm. And it the whole thing was just

Rosie Garren: excess. You could just feel the excess. When did you start to realize that the majority of what you were handling in this palette was polyester?

Ann Marie Ki: Yeah, I started the unboxing and I had people shoot me for like Instagram videos. A part of the story is like I'll like do the influencer thing. And so then I would like hold something up and I'd be like, "Oh, oh, it's like a long sleeve, not breathable Fourth of July novelty shirt or oh, it's like a New Orleans like suit in in Marty Gro colors or like it was all there was literally oh my god, there was a man's thong like a fringed Like I called it a banana hammock in the piece. It was a banana hammock. Yellow that was boldly returned. It was bold two. He purchased two and returned both of them. Maybe they didn't fit. I don't know. It took five packages for me to be like, "Well, let me dig a little deeper and see if there's something underneath the clothes." And there were. There were seven wall unit air conditioners that clearly didn't work.

Rosie Garren: So, it sounds to me like a roller coaster ride of emotions from start to finish. I'm wondering about the process of contacting some of the folks you were able to to see who had returned mail.

Ann Marie Ki: We wrote about 80 letters and there are several ways I could have reached out to these people, but we figured a letter would feel the least scammy. We didn't we I really wanted to reassure people I'm a journalist. They could have a moment to think about it. And so I gave them several ways to contact me. So, I ended up speaking to several people over the phone. Some people wrote back on the letters and mailed it back to us and some people texted me. So, I got a variety of responses, but we really targeted the people who had the most interesting stuff or someone who bought multiples of something to really understand.

Rosie Garren: And what was your question to them in the letter?

Ann Marie Ki: Why' you buy it? Why' you return it? Did it meet your expectations? and what did you think was going to happen to it? And so I said in the letter, I have your item. And we individualized the letter to say which item it was because sometimes people return many things, right? And all of the people who wrote back to me or called me or texted me said we thought that they were going to go back on the shelves. We had no idea. We had no idea.

Rosie Garren: So besides you for this particular story and influencers who are unboxing these, who else is buying these palettes?

Ann Marie Ki: Yeah, anybody who wants to resell. So you don't necessarily have to do it online. So people do have low entry point brickandmortar stores where they will provide this to the community. And so these bin stores are almost everywhere. And that's something a lot of commenters or people who have written to me since the story are like, "Oh, I have a bin store in my town." It's like, "Yes, that's that's it. That's what you notice." The other thing is that this whole world is a bit rife for fraud. So anyone who is in this world is potentially getting ripped off, right? And there's lots of ways. And that's why Jodie when she was helping me navigate was like you should really see this with your own eyes because it's murky. It's a very strange aftermarket world.

Rosie Garren: What are the potential modes of fraud that you might run into?

Ann Marie Ki: So one one of the things so there's fraud on several levels. So there's returns fraud where someone will purchase a good and keep it and then stuff something else in the box and mail it back and if the retailer isn't checking it ends up at the liquidator. So the liquidator was saying to me, the man who runs the warehouse, he was like, "It happens to me all the time where there's a printer box and then I open it and it's filled with rocks and so somebody has kept the printer." So he loses, right? He's trying, he's like, "The margins are not as big as you would expect on this." So, he's just trying to earn an honest living. And then some of these liquidators are also less honest. And it happened recently to Jodie herself, who's very on top of things. You know, she got a palette, the top layer had good stuff, and then the bottom layer, she was like it was filled with like junk. It was like three quarters of stuff that were like these like packing cube, you know, cube type things that she was like, "This was intentionally done by someone, not maybe not necessarily the man who sold it to her, but the person who sold it to him, right? Cuz there's there's also a whole chain here. So the people who are just trying to make an honest living off of this are also at risk.

Rosie Garren: I had a lot of feelings reading this piece and one thing that kept coming up for me is that a desire to do a little bit better as a consumer. You know, I have two little kids and so we have things that we return and a lot of times it's sizing related or, you know, it's not something for the winter that wasn't warm enough, whatever the case may be. But I I really do want to know if there are smarter ways that I can start thinking about shopping online that might reduce the chance of of return.

Ann Marie Ki: Yeah. I tried really hard not to blame anyone individually, right? Because it's kind of nobody's fault and everybody's fault. And there's corporate responsibility here and there's individual responsibility here. And if we're thinking just about individual responsibility, knowing this now, it's pausing and taking a second before you actually purchase something. And this shouldn't stop people from returning things. Like if something doesn't work for you, then you shouldn't necessarily keep it. Like that's not the solution. But reading product descriptions, reading the reviews, looking at the one-star reviews and not just the fivestar reviews, it's just a good way to make sure that you're being a smart and responsible consumer.

Ann Marie Ki: And you know, it's it's happened to all of us where you get the thing and you're like, ah, this isn't this isn't what I expected it to be. It's a certain amount of due diligence, but also I think you made a point earlier about these folks you reached out to and talked to and many of whom and I'm sure most people I know don't know about this cycle. They just the the the knowledge isn't there. I have gotten more reader mail from this story than any story that I've ever written. It really did allow people to stop and to think. And we're not telling you don't shop online. And especially the other thing is that a lot of the clothing in this palette was plus-size. And how on earth brick and mortar stores are not stocking the range of sizes that many people need? They're not serving people. And so you have to buy online and you often buy multiples because you're not exactly sure which is going to fit. and then it doesn't fit and you return it.

Rosie Garren: Yeah, it might be the question. I don't want to end there. I do want to end on a last question. And usually Kyra asks the last question uh of the show, of every episode. She usually asks people about the last thing they bought that they really loved. Given the topic of this particular episode, I want to know what was the last thing you returned and why did you return it?

Ann Marie Ki: It's such a good question and it's like perfectly emblematic of this trap, right? So, we were about to go on vacation and we had a long plane ride and I saw these little watercolor kits and I was like, that'll be really cool for the plane. And then I got it and it was bigger than it looked online and so I returned it.

Rosie Garren: Human.

Ann Marie Ki: Yeah.

Rosie Garren: Turns out she's human.

Ann Marie Ki: That's how it goes.

Rosie Garren: Amory, thank you so much for joining us. I can't wait to have you back for whatever you're up to next.

Ann Marie Ki: Oh my gosh, I got some things up my sleeve. I can't wait to be back.

Rosie Garren: The Wire Cutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Garin, and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Mattie Maziello and Nick Pitman. Today's episode was mixed by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Loausano, Alicia Eup, Rowan Nisto, Katherine Anderson, and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wire Cutter's deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Fman is Wire Cutters editor and chief. Thank you for listening.

Ann Marie Ki: The funniest thing is that as I started unboxing them, I was wearing linen pants because it was late summer and I I kept unboxing like the pants I was wearing. So I was wearing like these like elastic waist linen pants and then I'm like, "Oh, a polyester pair of linen style pants." And oh, another one in like a variety of colors and in every length imaginable. It was like shorts. It was calf length. It was ankle length. It was floor length. I don't know. I guess I'm on trend.

Rosie Garren: I was going to say I hope it was validating. You're right in the zeitgeist.