Why Do Stores Throw Away Perfectly Good Products?

The Wirecutter Show

The New York Times

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4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2026

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Inside the “wild west” of retail waste. We investigate why stores trash perfectly good gear and how dumpster diving influencers are exposing this hidden phenomenon.

Transcript

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0:00.0	They leave their cars running.
0:05.9	So they are pulling up to the dumpster.
0:07.8	They're popping open the lid.
0:09.3	They're looking inside.
0:10.3	If they see something good, they'll pull it out.
0:12.5	And if they don't, they are back in the car and they move on.
0:19.3	I'm Rosie Garron, and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show.
0:36.1	Hey, it's Rosie.
0:37.3	My guest today is Anne-Marie Conti. She's a deputy editor in my Hey, it's Rosie.
0:39.9	My guest today is Anne-Marie Conti.
0:43.3	She's a deputy editor and my colleague here at Wirecutter.
0:49.1	Anne-Marie just wrote a piece all about something I think probably most people wouldn't consider doing,
0:53.6	but that some folks do for a living. Dumpster diving.
0:55.8	The article is called, Why Do Stores Throw Away So Many Perfectly Good Products?
1:00.0	I went dumpster diving to find out.
1:03.1	The piece is a continuation of Anne-Marie's reporting on waste in consumer goods.
1:08.5	At the end of last year, she wrote a very popular article all about how she
1:13.1	bought a nearly 500-pound mystery palette of returned items from Amazon. Then she investigated
1:20.9	what was inside, all in an effort to better understand the impact of returns at a large
1:27.2	scale.
1:28.0	Turns out a lot of those goods end up being resold on the secondary market for pennies on the dollar,
1:34.7	also known as liquidation.
	...

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