Inside Wirecutter’s Mystery Pallet Adventure
ANNEMARIE: We weighed it out later. It contained 26.8 pounds of plastic and 41.6 pounds of cardboard. So it was about 68 pounds of trash.
ROSIE: Can we pause for a second? 68 pounds of trash.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, again, with the overwhelm, you just start… Everything individually feels small and then it starts to literally accumulate.
CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell.
ROSIE: I’m Rosie Guerin, and you’re listening to The Wirecutter Show.
CAIRA: Hey you all, it’s Caira. It’s January, and that means it’s maybe the season of returns. Maybe you got some stuff that you didn’t really want over the holidays and it’s time to send it on back. So we actually recently published a really interesting article on what happens to things that are returned. Our deputy editor, Annemarie Conei bought a huge mystery box of returns to dig into the secondary market of what really happens to these things when you do send them back.
This episode, Rosie is going to talk with her about the world of returns, what she found in this mystery pallet and how listeners can become savvier in the ways they shop and the way that they return products. So after the break, Rosie will be with Annemarie. See you soon.
ROSIE: Today, my guest is Wirecutter, deputy editor, Annemarie Conte. We’re talking about returns, specifically about what happens to some of the things many of us send back that we’ve bought online. Annemarie, welcome back.
ANNEMARIE: Oh, I’m so excited to be here.
ROSIE: Always love to see you. So this is a timely topic given many people are likely returning holiday gifts this month. You recently published an excellent piece about buying this huge pallet of returned items. I want to jump into that, but first I want to address what I think could maybe be an elephant in the room. And it’s Wirecutter’s role in this. You published this on Wirecutter’s site. So Wirecutter is a product recommendation site. People that visit the site looking to buy things that hopefully don’t get returned, but theoretically could. So I’m curious how you reconciled that when you first embarked on this reporting.
ANNEMARIE: Well, I think that’s the incredible thing about this, the fact that I had this story idea and it was approved and people were like, absolutely go for this. We want to know what happens to that world of products. And everybody I know who works here really wants to give the best product recommendations to break through that noise.
ROSIE: Yeah.
ANNEMARIE: And to really ensure that people understand the pros and the cons of the item before they buy it. We really don’t want people buying junk and returning it because it’s disappointing.
ROSIE: Talk about this project, explain what you did. What got you interested in the beginning?
ANNEMARIE: So I’m chronically online, for better or for worse. And I was seeing a lot of these influencers in my feed who were unboxing haul-style videos of stuff that they had bought in pallets. And now some of them resell it, some of them donate it. Some of them, who knows what they do with it. But it was always interesting and there was always a variety of products. So I was like-
ROSIE: Explain what you mean by a pallet.
ANNEMARIE: So the official name is a gaylord, which we did not use in the piece. But it’s the giant cardboard box that is filled with stuff. So ours was like six feet tall. When I first went to look at it, I needed a step ladder to look inside of it.
ROSIE: And you’re not not tall. I mean, that’s significant.
ANNEMARIE: I’m average. But yeah, people will buy these and then they will open them. And so there’s a bunch of different things that you can buy. There’s a bunch of different ways you can approach this. And most of this stuff is pushed into this secondary market after a good is no longer wanted for whatever reason. So if you have something that was on store shelves and didn’t sell, the store needs to make room. Either virtual store or real, in person brick and mortar store, needs to make room on that shelf. And so they will often liquidate it for pennies on the dollar. There’s also returned goods. So you buy something, you return it, where does that go? Does that get reshelved or does it go into the liquidations market? And then there’s also all of this stuff that just ends up never being sold at all. For whatever reason.
ROSIE: What do we mean by liquidation?
ANNEMARIE: So, most people are probably familiar with it when a company goes out of business and they’re saying, liquidation sale. And that’s truly when they’re selling off everything just to make as much money as they can out of it, even if it’s just a little bit.
ROSIE: Okay.
ANNEMARIE: They just have to get some money out of it. And then there’s also…there’s unclaimed mail or misdirected mail. And so that will be something that your address is wrong, the apartment number, the zip code wasn’t right, you moved. There’s various reasons why a package never makes it to the recipient. And the shipper, because the person who has sent it out, the company who has sent it out, doesn’t pay for return shipping. They bundle it all together. So it’s unclaimed mail, it’s overstock, it’s returned goods that could be available for purchase through these pallets.
ROSIE: That’s what ends up on a pallet. Okay. So that’s what you were seeing on, let’s say TikTok.
ANNEMARIE: Yes.
ROSIE: People are unboxing all of these types of goods.
ANNEMARIE: Yes. And so some people can resell the items that they get and you could buy something like a pallet of unopened Lego boxes from Target, right. Where you know there’s like a resale value to it.
ROSIE: Right.
ANNEMARIE: Or you want like a mystery haul and then you buy a pallet of misdirected mail.
ROSIE: So how did that initial interest end up turning into this piece?
ANNEMARIE: What I really wanted to do was look at some of the items in this pallet and really understand the landscape of what was being purchased, what wasn’t being purchased. And so I had really aimed to purchase a unclaimed or misdirected mail pallet. Because I thought that would give us the widest variety of goods from the widest variety of retailers. So you could really see, and then we could like Wirecutter the heck out of it, right.
ROSIE: Yeah.
ANNEMARIE: And then I could talk to our experts and like, they can tell me what’s good or bad about the product. All of the stuff that we… Because we extensively test these products, we have our fairly narrow view of the picks that we like. And so I was trying to look at the edges of what people are buying outside of that and see if any of our Wirecutter picks ended up in there too.
ROSIE: So, also important before we go further, we should say that you and your team donated everything from the pallet that you got that was usable after you finished reporting this?
ANNEMARIE: Yes, Wirecutter’s policy is that we never keep things for ourselves.
ROSIE: Okay. So my next question is kind of taking a little step backward, a 101. I want to know how much stuff actually gets returned every year.
ANNEMARIE: So it varies by category and these are all estimates, but 15.8% of sales were returned in 2025. That’s 849.9 billion dollars, and that’s according to a survey that the National Retail Federation did with Happy Returns. Which is a company that facilitates returns.
ROSIE: Almost 16% of sales get returned.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah. And then if you’re looking at clothing, about 25% of E-commerce apparel gets returned.
ROSIE: Okay. So when people return a product they buy online, what happens?
ANNEMARIE: With returns, it’s a little bit murky, but in general, the item could be reshelved. It could end up in a clearance rack discount bin, something like that in the store. Or it could end up being liquidated for pennies on the dollar and being sent to this secondary market. And that’s what we got.
Now, Amazon told me that they open and inspect every single package to decide where it goes, but I was opening those packages and it appeared to be directly from the person that returned it. So I’m not sure how much of that middleman is actually happening to inspect these goods, but my suspicion is that because they know exactly what is being returned, they earmarked these items direct for liquidation.
And so that is what happens with the majority of these goods where when they go into what is called the secondary market, they are being liquidated. So the original value of the item could have been about $25, but it was being sold within this pallet. I paid $742. Wirecutter paid $742 for this pallet. I was reimbursed. And that was filled with hundreds of products. So each product was not very much.
And so they were just trying to eke out a little bit and obviously the warehouse had to make some money off of that. So who knows how much they paid for that pallet? Everybody had to make a little bit of money on this. And then the theory is that someone who purchases these pallets would then resell the goods to make money on that. So you want to buy a pallet that’s worth… The contents of the pallet that’s worth more than $742, so you can make money on it.
ROSIE: Sure.
ANNEMARIE: I would not say that we accomplished that. I would probably sell these items for garage sale prices like a dollar.
ROSIE: You’re describing this secondary market. I’m curious how big it is,
ANNEMARIE: So Zach Rogers, who is out of the University of Colorado, he’s been tracking this since 2008. These are, again, estimates because nobody knows. And he said that he thinks that his figures are actually conservative. So in 2008, it was 297 billion dollars. And in 2024, he now estimates 846 billion dollars worth of goods flowing through that secondary market. And they can be resold in a variety of places. So we’re talking about people online reselling it, either on live marketplaces, eBay, things like that. But they can also be sold in places like factory outlets or pawn shops, flea markets, dollar stores, things like that. That’s where a lot of these goods flow through.
ROSIE: $297 billion to $846 billion in 16 years, that’s incredible.
ANNEMARIE: It’s only increasing.
ROSIE: So then what happens? Where does all of this stuff go? What is constituting this secondary market?
ANNEMARIE: People might be familiar with these storefronts that have, literally, bins full of goods.
ROSIE: Yeah.
ANNEMARIE: So it allows an entry point for people to purchase something less than they normally would have. I was in a bin store over the summer and they had a Wirecutter pick, simple human trash can for, I can’t remember. It was like 50 or 60 bucks.
ROSIE: And those are $200?
ANNEMARIE: They’re like over $100.
ROSIE: Yeah.
ANNEMARIE: So it was at least 50%, new inbox, right. There’s a real opportunity twofold for consumers to buy something at a lower price. And for people who really want to be entrepreneurs and self-starters to resell these goods and potentially make a living off of it.
ROSIE: potentially beneficial for under-resourced communities and communities that don’t have access to some of these goods any other way.
ANNEMARIE: A 100%.
ROSIE: So as these goods travel, at a certain point they end up in these pallets. Where are these pallets held?
ANNEMARIE: My guide in all of this is an Instagram influencer, by hobby. She’s wonderful. She goes by Pallet Princess.
ROSIE: Love it.
ANNEMARIE: And so she’s on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. And she is a social worker by day and an influencer the rest of the time.
ROSIE: Only in America.
ANNEMARIE: I love—
ROSIE: Actually, probably not, but that’s pretty great.
ANNEMARIE: I love it. I love it. And she just sort of fell into this and she’s so wonderful. Her name is Jodi and she was really helpful to me to understand this world. And she said to me, if you’re going to buy this pallet, you should really go see it in person.” She’s like, it’s really important for you just to have eyes on it before you purchase it. And so that’s what I did. She had recommended somebody who she’d worked with in the past. And so Lisa Fisher, who is our amazing video producer.
ROSIE: Love Lisa.
ANNEMARIE: And I drove many hours in a car together. I would rather have been in a car with her than anyone else. Except for you, Rosie. I would totally road trip with you.
ROSIE: We’ve sort of mini road tripped before.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah, anytime. Anytime. Whether it be an hour or six. So she and I took this road trip out there and you walk in, it’s truly a warehouse filled with rows and rows and rows of these pallets. And there was a singular man doing every job in the place, running around. He’s shrink wrapping things, he’s filling out my bill of sale. He is just like the hardest working man. And it’s so much stuff. And so it’s organized either by category. So like I said before, the Target Lego boxes or Walmart toys. There was a bunch of Temu, just like who knows what was in that pallet, or it can be something like unclaimed mail or the returns pallet that we ended up buying. I had said to him, I would like a misdirected mail pallet. And part of that is because I knew that I wanted to contact the people who had, in my mind, had never gotten their goods. It turned out who had returned these goods because I really wanted the address labels on those packages so that I could reach out to them.
ROSIE: They’re not redacted or anything.
ANNEMARIE: If you buy one of the smaller mystery boxes, it’s often redacted, but they’re not going to go through a giant pallet. And as a journalist, I can reach out to these people in the news-gathering, in the efforts of news-gathering. I did clear this with the New York Times legal team before I did it. That was a piece of this for me. Because I did want to understand the loop of this.
ROSIE: Of course.
ANNEMARIE: So we looked in this pallet, I said, that looks good. And then I was like, that’s strange. All of the addresses on the packages are the same. I thought it was just all one town’s misdirected mail, not realizing that it was actually this return center in Monroe Township, New Jersey. And that’s why they all had the same address label. So what had actually happened is somebody, you know, you go to return the shirt that you didn’t like and Amazon gives you the return label and it goes directly to this return center.
And we did have stuff from Walmart and other retailers, but the majority of it was from Amazon. When you walk into this warehouse, it’s as far as the eye can see. It’s truly, it feels like acres of stuff.
ROSIE: How does that feel standing in that space?
ANNEMARIE: I was so excited at first because I like stuff, right.
ROSIE: Yeah.
ANNEMARIE: I’m somebody who I really enjoy products. That’s why I work at Wirecutter and then we’re in there for a little longer and it’s like hot in there. And everything is like really tall and you just start to understand the overwhelm of all of this … My nervous system started to shut down. I was like, I can’t believe how much stuff this is. But I was still excited to see what was individually in the pallet. So it was this weird… Yeah.
ROSIE: You’re a journalist. I mean…
ANNEMARIE: It was this weird mix, right.
ROSIE: Yeah.
ANNEMARIE: Because I’m like, oh, is this going to be really depressing? And then I was like, well, once we get the pallet, we open it up and there’s cool stuff in there. It’s going to be great. That’s not what happened.
ROSIE: Okay. After the break, Annemarie is going to share some specifics of what she found in the pallet of returns that she bought for Wirecutter. We’ll hear about the good, the bad, and the ugly. Plus, we’re going to talk about how we as consumers perhaps can be a bit savvier about how we shop in an effort to reduce the amount of returns in general. Stick around.
ROSIE: Annemarie, I need to ask you about this 450 pound, six foot tall box of stuff that you bought, that Wirecutter bought to report out this story. You said that you did not know what was in the box when you bought it.
ANNEMARIE: No clue. It was quite a surprise.
ROSIE: Even a sense.
ANNEMARIE: When we saw it in the warehouse, I picked up a couple of the packages and I was like, oh, it’s kind of soft. but no, I had no idea.
ROSIE: So you are not carting this thing to the Wirecutter office yourself. What is this process? You picked out the pallet that you want, then what?
ANNEMARIE: Then the Wirecutter operations team would not allow me to drive it in a U-Haul across the country. And I’m still-
ROSIE: And good on them.
ANNEMARIE: Yes, they are wise. So, we did have it professionally sent. So it took a couple of days for it to get to us and it came… The funniest thing is that I told my husband that I had pitched this story. And I was like, I’m going to buy a pallet. And he was like, where is it going to go? And I was like, our front porch.
ROSIE: That’s so funny.
ANNEMARIE: In fact, it went to the Wirecutter’s offices and they brought it in on our freight elevator. Now, this thing is heavy and huge and they plopped it in the middle of our testing floor. And then everyone was like, you’re going to move this, right? You’re going to move this? So it took four of us two days to unpack everything and we logged everything. So we logged how many packages, so it was 430 packages. 582 individual items within those packages.
ROSIE: Okay.
ANNEMARIE: Because sometimes there’s multiple items in a package. And we weighed it out later. It contained 26.8 pounds of plastic and 41.6 pounds of cardboard. So it was about 68 pounds of trash.
ROSIE: Can we pause for a second? 68 pounds of trash.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, again, with the overwhelm, you just start… Everything individually feels small and then it starts to literally accumulate. So we organized everything and we started to pick out the things that we knew we want… The people we wanted to contact, the stuff that was particularly interesting or stood out. And because we couldn’t leave the stuff in the middle of our testing floor, we had to move it into what was built as, but has never been used as, a podcast room. And the one that we have in our testing facility is a little bit like an asylum.
ROSIE: I can attest to that. I’ve been inside. No one can hear you scream in there.
ANNEMARIE: It is a tiny room. The walls are padded and it’s dark. The lighting’s not great. And when you stand there, you can hear your heartbeat in your ears. So there was definitely a telltale heart element to this thing and we filled it with this stuff. Everything had like a bit of a smell in accumulation.
ROSIE: Yeah.
ANNEMARIE: So there was visual overwhelm, there was scent overwhelm and the whole thing was just excess. You could just feel the excess.
ROSIE: When did you start to realize that the majority of what you were handling in this pallet was polyester?
ANNEMARIE: Yeah. I started the unboxing and I had people shoot me for like Instagram videos…a part of this story is like I’ll do the influencer thing. And so then I would like hold something up and I’d be like, oh, oh, it’s like a long sleeve, not breathable, 4th of July, novelty shirt. Or, oh, it’s like a New Orleans suit in Mardi Gras colors. There was literally… Oh my God, there was a man’s thong. Like a fringed, like I called it a banana hammock in the piece. It was a banana hammock. Yellow.
ROSIE: That was boldly returned.
ANNEMARIE: It was… Two. He purchased two and returned both of them. Maybe they didn’t fit. I don’t know. It took five packages for me to be like, well, let me dig a little deeper and see if there’s something underneath the clothes. And there were. There were seven wall unit air conditioners that clearly didn’t work.
ROSIE: So it sounds to me like a roller coaster ride of emotions from start to finish. I’m wondering about the process of contacting some of the folks you were able to see who had returned mail.
ANNEMARIE: We wrote about 80 letters and there are several ways I could have reached out to these people, but we figured a letter would feel the least scammy. I really wanted to reassure people I’m a journalist, they could have a moment to think about it. And so I gave them several ways to contact me. So I ended up speaking to several people over the phone. Some people wrote back on the letters and mailed it back to us. And some people texted me. So I got a variety of responses, but we really targeted the people who had the most interesting stuff or someone who bought multiples of something to really understand.
ROSIE: And what was your question to them in the letter?
ANNEMARIE: Why’d you buy it? Why’d you return it? Did it meet your expectations and what did you think was going to happen to it? And so I said in the letter, I have your item. And we individualized the letter to say which item it was because sometimes people return many things, right.
ROSIE: Right.
ANNEMARIE: And all of the people who wrote back to me or called me or texted me said, we thought that they were going to go back on the shelves. We had no idea. We had no idea.
ROSIE: So besides you for this particular story and influencers who are unboxing these, who else is buying these pallets?
ANNEMARIE: Yeah. Anybody who wants to resell, so you don’t necessarily have to do it online. So people do have low entry point brick and mortar stores, where they will provide this to the community. And so these bin stores are almost everywhere. And that’s something a lot of commenters or people have written to me since the story are like, oh, I have a bin store in my town. It’s like, yes, that’s it. That’s what you notice.
The other thing is that this whole world is a bit rife for fraud. So anyone who is in this world is potentially getting ripped off, right. And there’s lots of ways. And that’s why Jodi, when she was helping me navigate, was like, you should really see this with your own eyes. Because it’s murky. It’s a very strange aftermarket world.
ROSIE: What are the potential modes of fraud that you might run into?
ANNEMARIE: So one of the things… So there’s fraud on several levels. So there’s returns fraud where someone will purchase a good and keep it and then stuff something else in the box and mail it back. And if the retailer isn’t checking, it ends up at the liquidator. So the liquidator was saying to me, the man who runs the warehouse. He was like, it happens to me all the time where there’s a printer box and then I open it and it’s filled with rocks. And so somebody has kept the printer. So he loses, right. He’s like, the margins are not as big as you would expect on this. So he’s just trying to earn an honest living. And then some of these liquidators are also less honest. And it happened recently to Jodi herself who’s very on top of things. She got a pallet, the top layer had good stuff, and then the bottom layer, she was like, it was filled with junk.
It was like three quarters of stuff that were like these packing cube, you know, cube type things. And she was like, this was intentionally done by someone, maybe not necessarily the man who sold it to her, but the person who sold it to him.
ROSIE: Right.
ANNEMARIE: Because there’s also a whole chain here. So the people who are just trying to make an honest living off of this are also at risk.
ROSIE: I had a lot of feelings reading this piece and one thing that kept coming up for me is a desire to do a little bit better as a consumer. I have two little kids and so we have things that we return. And a lot of times it’s sizing related or something for the winter that wasn’t warm enough. Whatever the case may be. But I really do want to know if there are smarter ways that I can start thinking about shopping online that might reduce the chance of return.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah. I tried really hard not to blame anyone individually, right. Because it’s kind of nobody’s fault and everybody’s fault.
ROSIE: Yeah.
ANNEMARIE: And there’s corporate responsibility here and there’s individual responsibility here. And if we’re thinking just about individual responsibility, knowing this now, it’s pausing and taking a second before you actually purchase something. And this shouldn’t stop people from returning things. If something doesn’t work for you, then you shouldn’t necessarily keep it. That’s not the solution. But reading product descriptions, reading the reviews, looking at the one star reviews and not just the five star reviews.
ROSIE: Yeah.
ANNEMARIE: It’s just a good way to make sure that you are being a smart and responsible consumer. And it’s happened to all of us where you get the thing and you’re like, this isn’t what I expected it to be.
ROSIE: It’s a certain amount of due diligence, but also I think… You made a point earlier about these folks you reached out to and talked to and many of whom, and I’m sure most people I know, don’t know about this cycle. The knowledge isn’t there.
ANNEMARIE: I have gotten more reader mail from this story than any story that I’ve ever written. It really did allow people to stop and to think and we’re not telling you don’t shop online. And especially the other thing is that a lot of the clothing in this pallet was plus size. And how on earth brick and mortar stores are not stocking the range of sizes that many people need.
ROSIE: They’re not serving people.
ANNEMARIE: And so you have to buy online and you often buy multiples because you’re not exactly sure which is going to fit. And then it doesn’t fit and you return it.
ROSIE: I’m not trying to create work for you and I’m not trying to drop a spoiler for anyone. There’s no plans of a sequel to this piece. If there were, I want to know what the next step in this reporting is. What are the questions you still have that you weren’t able to get answered?
ANNEMARIE: What happens to the stuff that doesn’t get resold? What happens to the stuff that doesn’t end up in this liquidation? And where is it all going?
ROSIE: Yeah, it might be the question. I don’t want to end there. I do want to end on a last question and usually Caira asks the last question of the show of every episode. She usually asks people about the last thing they bought that they really loved. Given the topic of this particular episode, I want to know what was the last thing you returned and why did you return it?
ANNEMARIE: It’s such a good question and it’s perfectly emblematic of this trap. So we were about to go on vacation and we had a long plane ride and I saw these little watercolor kits. And I was like, that’ll be really cool for the plane. And then I got it and it was bigger than it looked online. And so I returned it.
ROSIE: Human.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah.
ROSIE: Turns out she’s human.
ANNEMARIE: That’s how it goes.
ROSIE: Annemarie, thank you so much for joining us. I can’t wait to have you back for whatever you’re up to next.
ANNEMARIE: Oh my gosh. I got some things up my sleeve. I can’t wait to be back.
ROSIE: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin. And produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddie Mazziello and Nick Pittman. Today’s episode was mixed by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Losano, Alicia [inaudible 00:31:33], Rowan Ministo, Katherine Anderson, and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter’s deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter’s editor in chief. And I’m Rosie Guerin. Thank you for listening.
ANNEMARIE: The funniest thing is that as I started unboxing them, I was wearing linen pants because it was late summer and I kept unboxing like the pants I was wearing. So I was wearing these elastic waist, linen pants and then I’m like, oh, a polyester pair of linen style pants. And oh, another one. In a variety of colors and in every length imaginable.
ROSIE: Sure.
ANNEMARIE: It was like shorts. It was calf-length. It was ankle length. It was floor length. I don’t know. I guess I’m on trend.
ROSIE: I was going to say, I hope it was validating. You’re right in the zeitgeist.
