[kubectl_h]

There is a surplus and salvage chain in Maine called Mardens. It's been in business for 60 years and basically purchases pallets or shipping containers full of products that were written off by retailers for some reason or another and re-sells. They take the highest price they can find online and discount the product 20-40%. Sometimes you'll go in and run across really high end products that could easily be sold at full price but they don't really seem to care. Think a Moccamaster coffee maker or Arcteryx jackets. Most of the time it's junk. In any case it seems like they buy at some percentage on the dollar (20, 30?) and resell at 60%, regardless of how expensive it is. Seems like it makes more sense to make a consistent profit in volume rather than optimize profit on individual items.

Fun store to stop by and check in on in every few weeks.

[neilv]

I like that model. If they have the shopper traffic to move stock, I'd guess the 20%-40% discount off highest online price is better than they could net by selectively diverting that item to online.

[kubectl_h]

They definitely have the traffic. They also do not advertise much of what they have, I'm guessing due to agreements they have with the original retailers, so you never really go there looking for something specific, you just kind of go hoping they have what you want or just to browse around. They are a bit of an institution here, where people are pretty frugal in nature regardless of how wealthy (or not) they are.

They will also magic-marker over the original retailers labels, but you can usually see where the product came from. For about a year they had inventory from the Texas sporting goods chain Academy, including apparel from various regional schools in Texas. Mostly Houston and San Antonio. My guess was all that inventory came from stores that were partially flooded by a hurricane.