My wife has been addicted to watching dumpster diving videos where people end up finding brand new expensive things thrown away by retailers. It made me remember reading somewhere that the reason they do this is because it’s cheaper for them to throw away or destroy their inventory than it is to give it away or sell at discount. HOW???
I don’t see how they could possibly save money by destroying inventory rather than putting it on extreme discount. Surely they could make more money selling at an extreme discount versus no money at all by destroying .
In: Economics
Product takes up space and space in a retail store is expensive and finite. You’d be shocked to learn what it costs to get a 3″ x 3″ space for your toothpaste on the shelf at Target.
So if you have product that the company that produced it isn’t supporting anymore and isn’t promoting anymore, you have to put it somewhere. Wherever you put it becomes, effectively, dead space. It’s not generating profit because the stuff in it isn’t selling, it’s not creating new income because you can’t sell shelf space that’s already occupied, etc.
Plus the retailers that don’t specialize in marked down merchandise kinda hate the appearance that it gives off, and I do understand why. Target, to stay with the example, tends to put all their clearance stuff on one back of the aisle endcap because it looks bad for a store that’s promising to be the place you go to get whatever is currently hot and trendy to have markdown tags all over the building.
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