You can now get your sub, by sub, in suburban Atlanta. Pipedream Labs, a logistics startup that’s using autonomous vehicles to make speedy deliveries via underground pipes, launched its first one-mile track in Georgia. Their electric robot vehicles can travel at up to 45 mph, carry up to 40 lbs, and — here’s the biggest selling point — theoretically put an end to one of modern society’s greatest nuisances: that Uber Eats car with its blinkers on blocking a lane of traffic.
In today’s email:
A $10 iPad?!: How bin stores work.
Holiday cards: Whybillions are sent and spent.
Around the web: Signs of a perfectionist, visualizing meteor showers, a tool to better understand emotions, and more.
👇 Listen: The most surprising stats behind the holly jolly juggernaut that is the holiday card industry.
The Big Idea
Bin stores are the hot new way to score ridiculous deals
Bin stores offer deep discounts on returned merchandise from Amazon, Target, and more.
2023-12-21T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Rylah
If you’re looking for a real deal, consider the “bin store” — it’s where merchandise from Amazon, Target, and other retailers is resold, sometimes for as cheap as $6 for a PlayStation 5.
How? It’s a one-man’s-junk operation, with retailers offloading excess inventory or returned items that can’t be resold.
How it works
Retailers known as “bin stores” buy massive truckloads of returned items from merchants or through liquidation companies, perThe Washington Post. The Bin Store in South Carolina, for example, sorts through ~25k items per week.
Bin stores tend to be bare bones; many are cash only and require shoppers to bring their own bags.
Items are placed in bins for customers to rifle through.
Typically, prices are highest on restocking day, then drop throughout the week.
Customers often line outside the store on restock days to score headphones, smart lights, toys, kitchenware — even Xboxes and iPads.
One bin store operator toldThe Penny Hoarder that a customer once nabbed a $4k rifle scope for $12.
Are they profitable?
Because bin stores sell items for dirt-cheap prices, their profits depend on moving a lot of volume.
Tom Shultz broke down what he makes at Deal Daze, a 10k-square-foot bin store in Winter Haven, Florida.
In one month, he spent ~$23.5k on inventory for a total overhead of ~$33k. Monthly sales were ~$39.4k, for a profit of ~$6.4k, or ~$76.8k annually.
That said, bin store operators say it’s also gotten harder to find and buy goods as the retail model has taken off.
To stay competitive, many try to court loyal customers through social media accounts where they post upcoming hauls, enticing them to come on restock days when prices are the highest.
BTW: For more sales, there’s always GovDeals, which sells liquidated items and stuff confiscated by the TSA. Unfortunately, you’ve just missed this absolute steal on nine pounds of assorted nail clippers.
Free Resource
17 emails for clear correspondence
As much as we love email, we would never advise you to craft every intro, onboard, apology, inquiry, or circle-back message from scratch.
Save time on common communications — pick and plug from evergreen email templates that get the job done in bright-eyed fashion.
These starters will help you stay direct and collected when dealing with co-workers, clients, and vendors.
Sick of renting? The fix is easy: Just drop $425m to buy the whole building, like Prada did with the 12-story NYC tower housing its Fifth Avenue flagship store. Prada’s timing is a bit surprising given last quarter’s sales dip; still, the slow quarter managed to bring in $1.18B in revenue, so they can afford to play by different rules than the rest of us.
SNIPPETS
A developing media-consolidation bombshell: Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global met to discuss a possible merger, perAxios. If a deal came to fruition, it’d unite streaming rivals Max and Paramount+, news rivals CNN and CBS News, and sports rivals Turner Sports and CBS Sports.
Rite Aidagreed to a five-year ban on its use of AI-powered facial recognition software after the Federal Trade Commission found the chain had falsely accused customers of crimes, particularly people of color.
Navy Federal Credit Union, America’s largest credit union, is facing a class-action suit over allegations of racial discrimination, after a CNN investigation found it had the industry’s widest racial disparity in mortgage approval rates. NFCU reportedly approved 77% of white borrowers and only 48.5% of Black borrowers in 2022.
Bird, the e-scooter company known for cluttering your city’s sidewalks, filed for bankruptcy protection. The company, founded in 2017, was one of the fastest startups to reach a $1B+ valuation and still has scooters in 350+ cities.
Toshiba has delisted after 74 years on Tokyo’s stock exchange. The famed but struggling electronics maker was taken private by a group of Japanese investors in a $14B takeover.
Parler, the conservative social media platform, will return in 2024 after shuttering in April. Parler, which peaked at 12.3m users in January 2021 had just 137k users by August 2022.
Southwest Airlines and its pilots’ union agreed on a $12B contract, following similar pilot deals struck by United, American, and Delta earlier this year. It only took Southwest three years of negotiating to get here.
NASA successfully tested its deep-space laser comms system, firing a 15-second video from a spacecraft 19m miles away to California in under two minutes. The video’s star: Taters, an employee’s orange cat and an easy pick for 2023’s best celebrity.
Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, wants to sell his Malibu home for $53m. But bidders beware: The place is mid-gut renovation, still needing millions of dollars worth of plumbing, electrical, and HVAC work. It also lacks windows and doors.
Don't miss this...
In 2023, marketers got creative, driving innovative campaigns despite shrinking budgets. We polled the HubSpot Media team on their favorite campaigns of the year, and the results might surprise you.
Video
Why people are so obsessed with sending holiday cards
“Oh no, I’ve got too many good friends.” As much as we’d shoot a look at someone presenting that as a big problem, it still technically is a problem…
… One that was solved by Englishman Henry Cole back in 1843. A man of some means living in early Victorian England, with a social circle so wide it overwhelmed him, Cole devised a brilliant solution to his mounting backlog of holiday letters.
Cole, with help from an artist friend, printed 1k copies of a card bearing a generic message, leaving room for a faux personalized touch (i.e., filling in the receiver’s name and nothing else — always a classy move).
Just like that, the modern Christmas card was born. And it sure didn’t stop there: Americans alone send 1B+ holiday cards every year.
Cole had the advantage of paying only a penny to send his cards; we aren’t so lucky today. Between taking the perfect photo, designing the card itself, and paying for postage (which is about to go up to 68 cents, BTW), the cost of sending well wishes to our friends and family has gotten steep. Like, many hundreds of dollars steep.
In this “Hustlenomics” episode, we wanted to know: What is it really costing people to keep this tradition going today? And, in this economy, why are so many people still doing it?
🏀 On this day: In 1891, James Naismith tested his new game — basketball — at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, with 18 players.
😊 That’s interesting: Psychologists Paul and Eve Ekman created the Atlas of Emotions, as suggested by the Dalai Lama, as a tool for understanding how emotions affect our behavior.
