Hartland Township — Christmas comes early at Dealz Dealz.
Owner Michelle Walker-Schaefer buys the Hartland Township liquidation store’s holiday merchandise as soon as most stores have tossed the year’s tinsel. Her holiday shopping season is about to start.
Walker-Schaefer stocks Dealz Dealz’ shelves with items that are diverted from online retailers and big box stores such as Target, Amazon, Kohls and others. Sometimes that merchandise has been bought and returned by customers. More often, it’s merchandise that isn’t selling fast enough to earn its keep on store shelves, so the retailers repackage the items and sell them in bulk.
In the case of the 40 artificial Christmas trees she bought from a liquidated merchandise supplier last year, big box stores sometimes get rid of seasonal items they aren’t willing to store for another year. That’s where Dealz Dealz has an edge.
“I’ll store them at my house,” said Walker-Schaefer, standing in front of five of the eight remaining trees. “It’s worth it to me.”
Liquidation stores such as Dealz Dealz are part of the ecosystem managing the tangled network of returned and unsold merchandise that moves across the United States. As e-commerce fuels shopping, shipping and returns, retail companies are left to deal with a mountain of unwanted stuff destined for a discount at a liquidation store, to a nonprofit program or to a landfill.
That has big implications for the environment, said Simone Peinkofer, an assistant professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University.
“There are a lot of emissions that go into (transporting and processing a returned item),” she said. “Then, let’s say you are able to sell it. You have to package it. Packaging material creates a lot of waste. That’s another environmental impact. And then, of course, anything that ends up in a landfill has also an environmental impact.”
E-commerce fuels returns, emissions
Online shopping is really convenient, Peinkofer said. It removes the need to zip up a coat and schlep to a store. The National Retail Federation projected both online and total sales would increase this year, as they have for the past decade.
Convenience and increased online shopping leads to more returns, Peinkofer said. Approximately 17% of merchandise sold in the U.S. was returned in 2022, according to the National Retail Federation, amounting to approximately $816 billion in lost sales.
That’s where the environmental costs start really adding up.
First, there’s the shipping: Sometimes, items are returned and re-sold at a physical store. That’s not so bad. But if not, they are trucked or flown to warehouses and logistics centers, then to stores or landfills. Each leg of that journey creates carbon emissions from semi trucks to small delivery vans.
“We’ve made things so easy to order that people don’t really think about the consequences in terms of energy use,” said Greg Keoleian, director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems. “We just do it.”
The barrier to buying stuff is low, he said. All it takes is a credit card.
“Definitely that’s feeding our consumption,” Keoleian said. “We’re in a climate crisis, climate emergency, and we need to reduce our consumption and reduce our footprints. Transportation is a big part of it, but also, just e-commerce is enabling us to consume more.”
Second, there’s the packaging: Every new bag, box and scrap of tape has to be manufactured, distributed and sold. From there, that material either ends up trashed or recycled. Some stores are addressing this by designing packaging that can be reused for returns, such as plastic bags with an extra strip of adhesive.
“We really do need to take care and do the responsible thing with all of that packaging, which requires recycling services,” said Kerrin O’Brien, executive director of the Michigan Recycling Coalition. “That is kind of the base-level kind of programming we’re working to provide for Michiganders everywhere. Once that infrastructure really gets established across the whole state and becomes accessible, then we can put our efforts at a higher level.”
O’Brien envisions that “higher level” as, possibly, an extended producer responsibility law that would require the companies that make a product to be responsible for what happens to the product and packaging, including after it’s discarded. That could mean producers pay into a fund for recycling programs that can handle material in their products.
“It’s trying to use market signals to amend producers’ designs to be more thoughtful,” O’Brien said.
Colorado, California, Oregon and Maine have extended producer responsibility laws.
Lastly, there’s the stuff itself. Less than half of the products that get returned are re-sold, Peinkofer said.
Some things aren’t re-sold for safety reasons.
Others — such as “fast fashion” garments — are so cheap to begin with that stores won’t take on the expense of processing, inspecting, shipping and reselling them.
Online retailers like Amazon issue customers a full refund if they return clothes within 30 days, fueling practices of shoppers ordering multiple garments to try on and adding to the amount of energy used to ship and process each article of clothing.
“Processing returns is labor intensive and very costly, so if you have a fast fashion item that doesn’t cost that much money, does it really make sense to spend that additional money to put it back into the inventory, or are you just going to trash it?” Peinkofer said. “Oftentimes, because of the cost, the decision is to discard it.”
Discarded textiles from the U.S. and other wealthy countries have crammed landfills and communities in countries including Ghana and Chile, according to international news reports from The Guardian, Reuters and other outlets. Some countries have banned imports of secondhand clothes.
The problems caused by online returns are reasons the Michigan Retailers Association encourages people to shop in-person at brick-and-mortar stores, said Andrea Bitely, the association’s vice president for marketing and communications.
“You’re able to actually physically touch that item, so you know what you’re getting,” Bitely said. “And if you’re shopping locally at a brick and mortar store, you’re contributing more to your local economy than if you’re shopping online at an out-of-state retailer.”
‘Saving things from the trash’
The shelves are stuffed at Dealz Dealz. It’s a varied mix — fly swatters, a box of fake eyelashes, chic wooden play kitchens, Star Wars bowling pins, a wheelbarrow wheel, pillows, Wet Wipes, Pokémon paper plates, ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped like lemons. And so much more.
Walker-Schaefer walked through the store on the morning of Dec. 19, giving a tour of the wares for sale that day.
The toy section was stocked for late Christmas shoppers, as were the shelves of seasonal decorations.
The store was full but organized, with places set aside for hardware, fitness gear, musical instruments, bedding, pet supplies, food, clothes, kitchen appliances, furniture, vitamins, costumes and other categories of items.
Dealz Dealz has a bins section, where Walker-Schaefer organizes low-cost items for customers who like to hunt for a serious bargain. She designed that part of the store in the model of “bins stores,” liquidation centers that are popping up across Metro Detroit offering bargain hunters a wide variety of discounted goods.
Dealz Dealz’ prices are 40-80% lower than the original prices at big box stores, Walker-Schaefer said. She sees the store as a service. Every sale helps families save money.
“This way, I feel like I’m helping a lot of families,” Walker-Schaefer said. “And those people who are helping families, I’m helping them help those families because this stuff is so much cheaper. They can get them better toys, they can get more toys, they can get bedding.”
Walker-Schaefer hosted garage sales when her children were younger and the family had little much money. She learned about the process of buying liquidated goods from someone who sold her a liquidated baby gate at a deep discount. She was hooked and started Dealz Dealz as a permanent garage sale with an online store component last year.
She ran the business from her home but said the tents she set up outside eventually caught the township government’s attention, so she renovated and now rents space in a former laundromat on East Highland Road, less than a mile from a Target store near the U.S. 23 junction. The brick-and-mortar store opened in August.
Walker-Schaefer travels around southeast Michigan and Ohio to find the merchandise to sell at Dealz Dealz. She buys from “pallet companies” that sell large amounts of repackaged goods from Amazon and big-box stores. She tries to get a variety of items from different stores.
The things in those loads are a bit of a mystery. Walker-Schaefer takes pains to get a good haul but still doesn’t always know what she’s getting.
Still, she’s confident she can sell what she buys.
“I can knock them down to five bucks. They’ll go,” Walker-Schaefer said. “Trust me, when there’s things sitting around, I will post them up on my (Facebook) page, I’ll do a $5 post, I’ll put up a whole bunch of stuff, I’ll do a $10 post, I’ll put up a whole bunch of stuff. When things are that cheap, they will sell.”
Walker-Schaefer estimated 90% of Dealz Dealz’ merchandise has never been opened or used, just pulled from shelves because it’s seasonal or isn’t selling well enough for the big box stores. Another 5% is returned, and she’s unsure about the last 5%, which could be unused or returned but carefully repackaged.
People don’t need to be afraid of buying an item that was returned, she said, as long as they have a chance to return it if they discover there’s something wrong. That’s why Dealz Dealz has a return policy.
“When people hear ‘return,’ they’re scared,” she said. “But how many times do you buy a pair of shoes, you get them home, and you think, ‘eh, they don’t look right.’ You never wore them. But guess what, they end up on that pallet a lot of times.”
Things don’t go to waste at Dealz Dealz. Walker-Schaefer and her husband will do the legwork to save a product from the trash, like calling a manufacturer to get a missing part or offering broken items up to people who will fix them or scrap them.
“I don’t know if you’d call it environmental or not,” she said. “It’s more, just making sure stuff’s not going to waste. If somebody else isn’t buying it or reselling it, it’s going to go to the garbage. The things I can’t salvage, I have to send to the garbage. So yeah, I would say I’m saving things from the trash. There’s things that didn’t need to be pitched.”
ckthompson@detroitnews.com
