We Bought a 450-Pound Mystery Pallet Packed With Returned Goods From Amazon and Beyond. Here’s What We Found Inside.

A lot of things get returned. A lot of things never get bought in the first place.

What do retailers do with it all?

Some of it gets donated, some of it gets sent back to the manufacturer or a retail partner (such as a third-party seller on Amazon), and some of it gets sold to a liquidator for pennies on the dollar.

Once the selected returned or unsold stuff is bundled into big boxes, it moves into what’s called the secondary marketplace. It can be resold in a number of ways, including in places like Dollar General and T.J.Maxx, at flea markets, or through independent shops, both brick-and-mortar and online.

Secondary sales were worth an estimated $846 billion in the US in 2024, up from $297 billion in 2008, according to Zac Rogers, PhD, associate professor of supply-chain management at Colorado State University, who told me that those figures are probably conservative.

The huge scale of these liquidations is a good thing, Rogers said. “All of those returns and overstocks tend to flow back through the system,” he told me in a video interview. “The secondary market provides items for much lower prices to people who might not otherwise have access to these things — especially in retail deserts.”

Certainly, more people are starting to see the value in these goods, especially online. A pallet of unclaimed mail — packages that can’t be delivered for whatever reason and are sold off to the liquidator — is basically a giant blind box.

Have you ever seen a Mini Brands unboxing video, where an influencer opens those tiny plastic replicas of Kitchen Aid mixers and E.L.F. Power Grip Primer? This is just like that, except the objects that come out of the pallet are actually the full-size, usable things.

The very nature of mystery boxes is that it’s a crapshoot. You never know what you’re going to get, from boring car parts to spiffy top hats. The whole thing is a bit like gambling, which is part of the fun. But sometimes the house wins.

It’s unclear exactly how many wholesale-pallet centers exist in the US, but they aren’t hard to find if you’re looking. Knowing who to trust is an entirely different issue.

Jodi Lytle, a social-worker-by-day, influencer-by-hobby, unboxes unclaimed-mail packages under her online alter ego, Pallet Princess. She cautioned me that it’s always best to see the pallet in person before buying it to help guard against some ne’er-do-well running off with your money. She recommended a warehouse that she had previously purchased from.

The only issues: It was hundreds of miles away, it doesn’t do online orders, and we had to figure out the shipping on our own. Nevertheless, my colleague Lisa Fischer and I made the full-day round-trip trek from New York to take a look around.

Stepping inside felt like entering Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, if chocolate were cardboard. The aisles of pallets filled with goods stretched on and on, for hundreds of feet, like one of those optical illusions. The neat rows were stacked so high, I needed a stepladder to peer inside some of them.

And somehow, one extremely hard-working man did every job in the place. He shrink-wrapped containers, moved heavy pallets with a forklift, and popped into the office to complete our purchase and neatly handwrite the receipt, seemingly all at the same time.

As I walked around the warehouse, I felt the same giddy enthusiasm as when you recognize a friend in a crowd. I practically waved hello to Wirecutter picks and artifacts of my childhood among the shelves of returned and abandoned items. Some boxes were bundled by theme, others by store.

“Hey, is that our favorite shop vac in the Home Depot section?”

“All that unopened Lego from Target for $2,675! Someone could make a killing on that!”

“Whoa! Power Wheels! I always wanted one. Is it too late for me to get one now?”

I paid for the merchandise ($742, including tax, but not including shipping) and scheduled a time for it to be picked up by a shipping-logistics company.

But as I spent a bit more time there, the sheer weight of it all began to hit me. The hundreds of pallets in that warehouse were just a portion of the thousands of pallets sitting in storage across the country, all containing stuff that consumers and stores didn’t want.

It’s huge. It’s wasteful. And it’s overwhelming.

A few days later, Wirecutter’s pallet arrived at our office and was placed in the middle of our testing floor. It took two full days for four of us to unbox and log the 430 packages containing 582 individual items.

I set out on this journey as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Grandpa Joe, practically clicking my heels in excitement over the mystery of what could be locked inside. That quickly turned into the sick unease of gluttonous Augustus Gloop being swept down the chocolate river.

My spine compressed and my optimism abated as we ripped open each plastic seal and yet another piece of poorly constructed clothing tumbled out. Pants of every length (extra-long pants, extra-short pants, knee-length pants, calf-length pants, ankle-length pants) with sloppy stitching. Dresses, jumpsuits, shirts, hats, and several pairs of shoes made of materials that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Bathing suits, cover-ups, and at least five novelty Fourth of July shirts made from a deeply unbreathable fabric.

Once everything was out of the packaging, we moved the whole operation into a windowless room in our office that had been built for podcasting. The walls are covered in soundproofing material, which gives the place a distinctive padded-cell vibe.

When I sat in there, surrounded by heaps of returned goods, the echo of silence pounded in my ears. The mounds of fabric, cardboard, and plastic trash filled the space nearly to the ceiling, creating a discordant visual and aural pummeling of sensory deprivation and sensory overload.

To top it all off, every time someone walked in, they commented on the smell, as if it were off-gassing depression.

(A coworker who recently used the room as a quiet space for a meeting messaged me: “Why does it smell vaguely like 1990s Pizza Hut in here?”)

Not every pallet in the liquidator warehouse was filled with junk. Nor was every package in our pallet. Individually, many of the products were fine. But all together, it was nearly too much to bear.

I had pictured us reviewing the products, debating their merits, and wondering why a particular item was returned. Instead, I began calling the growing pile of goods Polyester Mountain, hoping I wouldn’t get buried in the rubble.

Wirecutter’s total investment in this pallet was around $2,000, most of it sunk into shipping. Rough back-of-the-napkin math puts the original retail value of these goods at more than $8,000, but the resale value is likely much, much less. We’re talking garage-sale pricing, maybe a buck or two per item max. (Per our strict ethics policy, we will donate everything that’s usable.)

This pile also contained nearly 70 pounds of trash: 26.8 pounds of hard-to-recycle plastic packaging and 41.6 pounds of cardboard boxes, plus the 48-by-40-inch wooden pallet that everything was stacked on.

I had originally planned to get a pallet of unclaimed mail, which would have contained the largest variety of products, figuring that would be the best way for us to really learn something.

But I ended up getting a returns pallet, with goods mostly from Amazon, judging from the paper slips inside the packages. From what I could tell, when customers across the country had initiated their return on Amazon’s site, the label they’d been given had sent the package directly to a return center in New Jersey. Such products seem to move along the chain pretty swiftly, if our pallet is any indication; items that people had purchased in May and returned in June were included in the pallet we bought in August.

Amazon says it carefully inspects each item and evaluates the piece to determine if it can be relisted for sale. However, the bags and boxes we received in our pallet were still sealed. Our best guess is that they had been passed on to the liquidator warehouse unopened.

I sent Amazon an interview request to talk about returns and the reverse supply chain. A spokesperson responded with a general statement emphasizing that the company’s “goal is to make purchasing products — and returning them — as easy as possible” and confirming that excess products “are resold as new or used, returned to selling partners, liquidated, or donated.”

A returned product’s journey

Quick-and-easy returns are a benefit of shopping at giant corporate retailers, and people take advantage of return policies liberally. An estimated 15.8% of sales, worth around $849.9 billion, will be returned in 2025, according to data from a joint study done by the National Retail Federation and the UPS-owned company Happy Returns.

In some categories the return rate is even higher: 25% of e-commerce clothing purchases are returned as of June 2025, according to Statista.

Many companies are trying to help shoppers make informed decisions. For example, you might see the “customers usually keep this item” and “frequently returned item” badges on Amazon listings, which are presumably intended to help guide behavior.

Few-questions-asked return policies are convenient for the customer. They also make the industry rife with return fraud, in which a buyer initiates a return but isn’t honest about the item’s condition. There are also cases where a con artist replaces the item with something else. As a result, new customers can receive used or incorrect items in their orders — and that could further increase the retailer’s incentive to just move the stuff along. An estimated 9% of returns are fraudulent, according to the NRF report.

The owner of the liquidator warehouse where we bought our pallet told me that he sees it all the time. Someone will return a printer to the store, saying it’s broken. The retailer doesn’t check inside the box, and instead of containing a printer, it’s filled with bricks. The “broken printer” ends up being shipped to the liquidator, but the liquidator can’t resell a printer box full of bricks. It’s a loss for the store, a loss for the liquidator, and a loss for humanity.

From the retailer’s point of view, checking over every return may not be worth the time and effort, and the stock costs them money the longer it hangs around. If they throw it out, they have to pay for disposal. “Even if you’re marking it down and keeping it in your store to sell it — there is always that clearance section in the store — you’re still occupying relative space,” said Rajeeb Mohapatra, a logistics and supply-chain expert. “It is costing the store at a much lesser value until it gets sold.”

I was curious if people understood or even cared about what happened to the stuff they didn’t want. We saved all of the packaging in our pallet, and the return addresses on the items were all visible (some liquidators redact them, especially within smaller-quantity mystery boxes).

My pallet had 430 packages containing 582 individual items. Behind every one of them is a real person.

I sent about 80 letters to the people who had purchased some of the most intriguing items to see if they wanted to tell me the story behind their purchase. Why did you buy five blue mesh sleeveless hooded shirts? What did you need the neon-colored suit jacket and matching pants for? That bright-yellow fringed banana hammock you sent back … can we discuss? (Also, thank you for sealing it in a zip-top bag.)

I got a handful of responses. Some people provided me with the link to the exact item they purchased. Others did not. When I didn’t have the exact link, I used Google Lens to search for the product to get more information about it.

Most people said they hadn’t really thought about where their stuff went after they sent it back. They just assumed that it would be restocked, and someone else would buy it.

We spoke to the people behind these products

But the reasons for return were incredibly, and often devastatingly, human.

I texted with a man in Arkansas whose wife had bought a blue baseball cap for an upcoming trip. She’d had one in pink already and loved it. The new blue hat didn’t arrive in time. She died while they were on vacation.

He gave the pink hat to her daughter and returned the blue one.

I spoke to a woman in California who had lost her home to the Lahaina fires in Maui two years ago and was still working to replace her everyday things. She bought two tube tops ($7 each), similar to what she’d had before. But they didn’t fit right, and they weren’t the same quality as her destroyed ones, so she sent them back.

A man in upstate New York saw some polo shirts in a sort of textured sports fabric on Instagram and then found them for $13 each on Amazon. He does most of his clothes shopping on Amazon. They arrived in the wrong size, and the company didn’t respond to his request for an exchange, so it was just easier to return them. He didn’t rebuy them. The moment had passed.

A woman in Chicago bought a box of hair tools for $89 from TikTok Shop as a Mother’s Day present for her mom. “Some of the tools didn’t work as expected and not accurate to the reviews,” she texted me. “We were hoping to use it instead of purchasing the Dyson but it didn’t work that well so I had to return it.”

Another woman in New Jersey bought a coffee mug that is supposed to resemble a colorful stack of books in a vibrant, stained-glass style. Amazon has multiple listings for this kind of product that range from around $17 to $30, and the photos in the listings make the mug look really cool, as if it were glowing from the inside. “It didn’t look like any shown online!” she wrote in a letter she mailed me back, declaring it a “piece of junk!” She preferred not to speak any further on the topic. We got a few of those in the pallet, so she isn’t the only one who was disappointed.

And much to my surprise, there was a half-empty bottle of $62 Drunk Elephant C-Firma Fresh Day Serum, which, according to the Costco return packing slip, had been sent back by someone because “it didn’t work.”

We also received a lot of plus-size clothing in the pallet. This didn’t surprise me. Brick-and-mortar stores have limited offerings, and sizing is inconsistent. It’s understandable that someone would purchase such clothing online (often multiples), try the pieces on at home, and return what doesn’t fit.

What most people don’t expect is that some of the items they reject will never get restocked, only to end up, in this case, in a basement in Long Island City, New York, via a small-town warehouse.

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.)

My mind keeps coming back to Wirecutter’s role in all of this. At our core, with every product recommendation, our goal is to help people find the thing that’s right for them. We want the things they buy to actually solve their problems. And we want people to understand both the pros and the cons of something before they buy it, so they aren’t wasting their time and money.

I’ve certainly grown more thoughtful about my purchases and returns.

This article shouldn’t stop you from buying things. Nor should it stop you from returning things that don’t work for you.

Done in excess, however — that’s how you get thousands upon thousands of pallets packed with untold numbers of undelivered, unsold, and unloved things.

After all, as Violet Beauregarde, Veruca Salt, Mike Teavee, and the rest of the Wonka wannabes also learned, too much of anything can be harmful.