On a late June Wednesday afternoon, dozens of shoppers buzzed around Spokane Bins LLC's raised wooden boxes piled with items ranging from cookware to electronics, all priced at $1.25.

It was the last day before the business closed for restocking its picked-over bins, a process that consists of receiving and unloading truckloads of pallets filled with lightly used, and often new, returned items from Target Corp. and Amazon.com. 

On Saturday, when the store reopens, hordes of people return to rummage through the refreshed inventory, says Jonathan McConnell, the store's general manager. 

Spokane Bins is part of a growing local and national trend in return retail, or reverse logistics, involving stores where overstocked, returned, or liquidated goods are resold at deep discounts. Since it opened in 2022, more such businesses have started in the Spokane area, including BuyWander Inc. and Voltage LLC. 

Spokane Discount LLC has three stores with a similar business model and has been operating for decades. Attempts to reach its representatives for comment were unsuccessful.

For the three newer enterprises, business is so good that all three have expanded or have plans to expand in the short time since they opened. 

Voltage Bins, a liquidation and overstock outdoor bins store, opened in July 2024 at 311 S. Dishman Mica Road, in Spokane Valley, and is already exploring opening a second location in North Spokane, says customer-turned-bin manager Sean Farr. 

BuyWander, a return-retail venture with online auctions led by Spokane entrepreneur Jordan Allen, opened in February of 2024 in a 10,000-square-foot space on North Sullivan and has moved four times since. It’s currently operating out of a 40,000-square-foot building at 12606 E. Sprague in Spokane Valley. In June, it opened a second location, a 30,000-square-foot store in Kent, Washington. 

Spokane Bins, an in-person store with fixed daily prices that drop throughout the week, opened in 2022 and quickly outgrew its Mission Avenue location and moved to a larger space at 5320 E. Sprague, across from the Spokane Valley Costco Wholesale Corp. store.

All three enterprises are taking advantage of a growing national trend. The National Retail Federation and Happy Returns published a report late last year that showed retail returns more than doubled in a five-year period, from $309 billion in 2019 to a projected $890 billion in 2024. The annual return rate also has increased from about 8% to 17% during that time frame. 

Even though returned retail poses a concern for national retailers, the report states that the ease for customers to make a return is essential to their business as it equals more purchases from loyal customers over time. Eighty-four percent of consumers are more likely to shop with a retailer that offers box-free, label-free returns and immediate refunds, the report states. 

In Spokane, entrepreneurs have tapped into this dynamic, capitalizing on the sheer volume of returns that are often sold by the pallet or truckload for pennies on the dollar. Each business is sourced in similar ways, and all offer a distinct way to shop, save, and stay local. 

Spokane Bins

Spokane Bins started as an experiment, says Becky Miller, mother to Michelle Boston and Sharon McConnell, who started the business with their husbands in 2022. 

Boston and McConnell wondered what happens to all the returns from places like Amazon.com, Miller recalls. They set out to find out, traveling to East Coast locations where bin stores had sprung up. One day, at dinner, they proposed a business idea to their mom: a bin store made up of pallets of returned goods from Amazon and Target. Miller thought it sounded like an expensive business idea, but her daughters assured her that not only was it inexpensive, but one could find items like a returned iPad for a few bucks. 

“My answer to that was, 'I want to shop there,'” Miller says. “And if I want to shop there, I think everybody is going to want to shop there.” 

Miller was right. After opening the store at 14 E. Mission, the lines of people waiting to get in were all the way to the road, she claims. About a year later, they moved to their current, larger location on Sprague. 

“A lot of these online retailers either don’t have the funds or don’t want to spend the funds and the manpower to reprocess all these items, repackage them, and resell them,” says McConnell. “So instead, they just sell them in bulk to stores like ours.”

The bin store is a family-owned and operated venture, says McConnell. The sisters’ parents, Rand and Becky Miller, both work at the store as well, and their younger brother, William, who helped with seed funding, is also an owner. 

Rand Miller calls the store a true treasure hunt. He has found things he never even knew existed, he says, such as halter tops for rabbits, which his granddaughter was happy to gift to her two bunnies.

But aside from novelty finds, plenty of people also use the store to stock up on essential items to give to people in need, he says. That includes Rand Miller and his wife, who is also a pastor. The pair work with homeless people and people in substance-abuse recovery and use the bin store to stock up on clothes, undergarments, mittens, coats, and other essential staples that they then take and donate to people in need, Miller says.  

BuyWander

At BuyWander, CEO Jordan Allen and his partners, Brock Kowalchuck, chief financial officer, and chief technology officer Matt Willis, have taken the same idea and launched an online auction platform, combined with a local bin store for in-person shopping. 

In the past two years, BuyWander has garnered nearly 14,000 registered users and most recently opened a second location in the greater Seattle area, Allen says. The Spokane Valley store receives about 10 truckloads a week of returned goods and lists about 1,500 items online daily, he says. The website hosts between 6,000 and 7,000 active listings at any given time, he adds. 

“Our customers are absolutely thrilled to just be getting smoking deals on these retail returns,” Allen says. 

BuyWander is a hybrid of e-commerce coupled with exclusive local pickups, with no shipping or delivery, he says. The in-person bin store opened recently and has also been a popular addition, he adds, attracting up to 700 shoppers on peak days. 

Ninety percent of BuyWander’s business comes from its online auction platform, Allen says. The company has built a proprietary technology comprised of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools that identifies and lists each item on the company’s auction platform. All items start at $1.

Customers are more price sensitive lately, says Kowalchuck. Because of this price sensitivity, customers are shopping more from discount retailers, he adds. From a supply perspective, there’s plenty of supply, he says, pointing to the National Retail Federation data. 

“We’re seeing this resurgence,” he says. “Customers are typically saving around 70% to 80% of retail on items. It feels like one of those win-win models where we’re helping customers get ahead.” 

Voltage Bins

About a year ago, Ryan Huguenin opened Voltage Bins, which has inventory that's a mix of liquidated and overstocked items from places like Best Buy Co. Inc., Target, Walmart Inc., The Home Depot Inc., and adidas AG, among others. 

Farr, the company’s bin manager, says the company receives about five truckloads of mostly new items every week, from electronics and appliances to clothing and home goods. 

The bin store is open six days a week, from Friday to Wednesday, and operates on a daily price drop model. On Friday, the items are $12 each, then drop in price each day. By Wednesday, all items are $1 each, or customers can fill a bag for $30. From about April to late August, Voltage Bins sets up its bins outdoors in the parking lot, and operates indoors the rest of the year. 

In June, the company launched an online auction platform dubbed Voltage Bids. Like BuyWander, all bids start at $1 and must be picked up in person. 

Voltage Bins has grown in popularity through its social media presence, says Farr, and has steadily been growing its customer base. On Black Friday, just five months after opening, the company had a Black Friday sale that drew a line of 500 people, he claims. To celebrate its one-year anniversary, Voltage Bins is throwing a birthday bash and giving away prizes, including a $10,000 vehicle, he adds. 

“People just love the good deals,” Farr says. “With prices the way they are, people are just trying to live however they can.”