We Bought a 450-Pound Mystery Pallet. Here’s What We Found.

It’s complicated. It’s no one’s fault. It’s everyone’s fault. How can there be value in anything if the value of everything is nothing?

“The secondary market mitigates the wastefulness, but also it allows for more wastefulness, because what we keep doing is just figuring out ways to get rid of more and more of this,” said Rogers. “It’s like adding lanes on the highway. It will relieve traffic, but it also invites more traffic.”

Resellers, however, are the Charlie Buckets, just looking for an honest day’s work. (Apologies, but I really need to press on with the chocolate-factory metaphor.)

“In American society, we’re over-consumers, over-producers, over-everything, right? The excess we have is not good. We’re polluting the environment. We pollute the landfills, or we ship it to Ghana,” said Dean Moussalli, then the director of marketing and digital strategy for Via Trading, a wholesale liquidator. But with the secondary market, “we’re creating a green-circle economy,” he continued. “Instead of big boxes throwing things in the garbage, we’re giving products another life.”

Rogers agrees. “Ultimately it does provide a societal good,” he said. “People are willing to turn one person’s trash into another person’s treasure. I think portraying it as wasteful is taking a very narrow view of the whole thing, because I actually think there’s a lot of societal, environmental, and economic benefits of this robust secondary market for people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to primary markets.”

There are plenty of high-quality products making it to people and communities they might not otherwise. I’ve seen several Wirecutter picks in the wild. Over the summer, I stopped at a liquidator storefront housed in an old fire station that sells a mix of food, household goods, and seasonal items, things that would have otherwise ended up in the landfill. I found a new-in-box Simplehuman Rectangular Step Can for $54; it usually retails for $130. An odd-lot store just down the block from the New York Times headquarters sold (unexpired!) Neutrogena Hydro Boost Gel Cream moisturizer for $10 (normally $20), and Gillette Mach3 razors for $4 (normally $10).

People are building businesses, some large, some small, through reselling. Moussalli told me that Via Trading has customers who make anywhere from $15,000 to $4 million a year reselling. It can be an entry point for people who are just starting out or looking to get on their feet after a job loss.

“It’s an industry for entrepreneurs,” said Moussalli. “It’s an industry for the people who want to work for themselves and grow their business and become their own boss.”

And then there’s social media.

Jodi Lytle, the Pallet Princess, has the warmth of a Midwestern mom, her voice full of round O’s, as she chatters to the camera from her garage. Occasionally, she’ll drag out a load of packages at family events and have attendees open them White Elephant–style. They’ll crack up as they try on the clothing or decipher what a piece of gear is used for. It makes for a fun party game.

She usually doesn’t resell the items she gets. The money she earns through her videos’ performance gets fed back into her pallet purchasing, creating an infinite loop of unboxing entertainment. “I don’t like stuff. Stuff actually kind of stresses me out,” she told me. “We donate and share everything, because I’m like, ‘Get it out of here.’”

The thing that gives her the most satisfaction is reconnecting people with their sentimental items. She’ll post a video of the item and shout out the person’s name and location, calling on her followers to help get an item that couldn’t be delivered back to its intended owner. (She once reunited a family with their dog’s ashes.)