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
I know your question was more specifically about retail, but I’ve been in a position to throw out lots of unused equipment and supplies (working in R&D, I was managing a pilot plant). Really the trade off is simple… it takes time and resources to donate or sell things, and from the companies perspective the cost of getting end users to assume liability is high. It’s easy and free to throw them away — and I don’t have to get permission from lawyers or VPs to do it. Occasionally we would reorganize supply areas and stock rooms and simply throw away lots of unused stuff because they were no longer used in current processes and we didn’t have good mechanisms to donate to universities, or to sell equipment
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