Inside a Liquidation Center That Sorts Millions of Returns a Year for Resale, Donation, Recycling, and the Trash

January 3, 2024

In the middle of Pennsylvania's booming warehouse district, the Lehigh Valley, one 300,000 square foot warehouse is full of apparel, personal care products, holiday decorations, rugs, and thousands of random items — most of which have already been delivered, and then returned.

"We get this truckload full of various stuff, and then our job is to accurately account for it and separate it out," Curtis Greve, vice president of operations for Inmar Intelligence, told Insider during a tour of the facility.

Inmar's goal is to maximize the money still to be made on those items by determining where to send them, whether that's back to the store, to an outlet or discount seller, donating them, or, in about 1% of cases, responsibly destroying them.

"If you go back to the 80's, before central returns really started taking off, most of this stuff ended up getting thrown away," Greve said.

Returns have come a long way in the last few decades, according to the industry veteran. For a long time, they were an afterthought — a nuisance to retailers that piled up in a corner. Now, most major retailers have realized proactively handling returns can help with brand reputation and the bottom line.

"Especially in categories like apparel and footwear, where there are really high return rates, customer loyalty and customer experience come down to that complete customer journey," said Thomas Borders, VP and general manager of Inmar. "It's not just how do you feel as a consumer when you buy the product, but on that 30% occasion when I'm making a return, how seamless is that returns experience for me?"

But many retailers need help from companies like Inmar, which has 27 warehouses processing returns all over the country, with the aim of getting sellable goods back into stock as soon as possible.

"It's ugly, it's hard, and it's not intuitive," Greve said. "Retailers are used to shipping things out — filling stores and sending out orders. Receiving returns is an entirely different process," he explained. "We've already got the best practices. We've got the technology. Retailers and manufacturers just don't want to invest their resources in developing those."

Read the full article at Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-returns-liquidation-center-where-retail-returns-resold-trash-2022-12