By Joshua Huff, sports editor
Those daredevils that live on the edge of relishing not knowing where their package actually comes from will enjoy a story published by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that investigated the propensity of Amazon.com’s third-party sellers to sell trash.
Yes, trash.
The Wall Street Journal set out to discover just how easy it is to sell discarded goods and list them as new.
In the story, the outlet talked to several people who sold or still sell items either salvaged from dumpsters or purchased discounted items and sold them as new. The ease in which people are able to sell compromised goods is discouraging at best.
The Journal decided to test out the practice. They opened an Amazon store account in September, paid the $39.99 per month and sold items that reporters found in dumpsters behind stores such as Michaels and Trader Joe’s.
“The bins were a humid mess of broken glass and smashed boxes, a stench of rot in the air,” the story read. “Several products were in original packaging, some soiled with coffee grounds, moldy blackberries or juice from a bag of chicken thighs.”
The Journal cleaned and packaged three items: a jar of lemon curd, a stencil set and a sheet of scrapbook paper, and mailed them to an Amazon warehouse. They tracked the items and soon discovered that Amazon promptly listened them for sell without asking about the origin or sell-by-date of the products.
The publication purchased the items before anybody else could. Amazon mailed all three with no questions asked.
Jesse Durfee used to sell items on Amazon that he found in dumpsters behind various stores. He told the Journal that he “used Amazon to sell toys, videogames, electronics and trinkets from dumpsters including bins behind Michaels and GameStop stores. The 26-year-old in Torrington, Conn., said one of his favorite places to find things to list on Amazon is his town dump.”
Durfee opened his Amazon store six years ago and has sold items from dumpsters, thrift stores and clearance sections.
“I’ll go to pawnshops, I’ll go dumpster diving,” he told the Journal. “I’m one of those people who does everything.”
According to the story, sellers have expressed concerns about trash being listed on the site. The Journal found around 8,400 comments on 4,300 listings for items such as food, makeup and medications that described those products as being “unsealed, expired, moldy, unnaturally sticky or problematic in some other way.”
Around 554 of the 4,300 products were promoted as Amazon’s Choice, and 241 of those 4,300 products had at least five reviews from different customers complaining that the item was used or expired.
An Amazon spokeswoman told the Journal that the company “investigates product reviews and takes corrective actions as needed.” She added that Amazon uses “a combination of artificial intelligence and manual systems to monitor for product quality and safety concerns in our store” and that if a product fails its guidelines, Amazon will “take appropriate action against the seller, which may include removal of their account.”
Amazon has since updated its policy to ban items that originate from the trash.