"Amazing store with amazing stuff and amazing prices" or "a place that sells crap"? The jury's out on Amazing Binz, a West Philly oddity that Jen Kinney profiles for Defector. The corner store that opened in March is basically a thrift store or garage sale on steroids, with thousands of eclectic items piled atop large wooden tray tables for sale for just a few bucks each—everything from home appliances and electronics to "unopened Halloween costumes, an ice mold shaped like a penis, ... a single loose pregnancy test," and similarly quirky items.
Kinney decided to visit "the most fun and most unsettling store on Baltimore Avenue" to see what goes down there, and to see if she could figure out what, exactly, this new type of liquidation-style store is, who's behind it, whether they turn a profit, and, perhaps most intriguingly, where all this disparate merch comes from. Kinney checked out the store every day of the week: Friday is when all items are $10, with the price dropping each day until Wednesday, when everything's $1 (they're closed on Thursday to restock inventory).
She finds the answer to at least one question: The store gets its inventory by tapping into the "vast weird world of 'reverse logistics,'" meaning it receives shipments of major retailers' overstock, returned items, recalled products, and the like. But while the low prices are the main draw, Kinney thinks there may even be something more to Amazing Binz and stores like it. "There are times when [it feels] like an art installation, a message, or a warning," she writes. "Wander through it for a few days and you will start to feel like you are in a room in a haunted house, one where the corporeal forms of the world economy's least-wanted products are trapped, unable to move on." (More here on this volatile business model.)
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