In some unassuming warehouses on the outskirts of Los Angeles and San Francisco in California, you have the opportunity to find many deeply discounted, high-quality products. These are surplus items that large retailers like Costco and Target couldn’t sell, and some of these products can be priced as low as one or two cents on the dollar.
According to a report by the San Francisco-based news website SFGate, there are many such warehouses, also known as outlet stores, throughout California. They resell the overstock, discontinued, and returned goods from large retailers like Costco at super low prices.
If you are on a tight budget and looking to score brand-name clothing and appliances at a discount, it’s definitely worth checking out these small warehouses.
There are several such outlet stores in the Bay Area, but many seem to be concentrated in the suburbs of some cities in Southern California.
A local chain store with branches in Half Moon Bay and San Bruno called “Twice as Nice” is one of these outlets. The owner and operator, Sadana Traxler, told SFGate that the store often sells brand-name products at half price.
She explained that despite the low resale price, these goods are not defective. The reason why large retailers sell them at a cheap price is simply because their packaging has dents or damages that prevent them from being put back on the shelves.
Costless is another discount store of this kind, offering a variety of products from Kirkland brand food storage containers to drones, with some discounts going as high as 98%, costing less than a penny.
In the Santa Fe Springs area of Los Angeles County, there’s a discount store called “Jona’s Outlet” that almost exclusively resells Target products, including shoes valued at three dollars and brass table lamps.
GTM Discount General Stores is another larger chain store that resells a variety of Costco and other retailers’ surplus inventory at prices as low as thirty percent off, according to their website. They sell about twenty thousand items in several warehouses located in Southern California, with over two hundred suppliers and receive multiple deliveries five days a week.
A. Shaji George, an expert in information and communication technology researching the rise of e-commerce, wrote in a 2024 paper that there is an unprecedented “crisis” in the United States with $800 billion worth of returned inventory each year. Although most of these items are new and unused, nine and a half million pounds of them still end up as landfill waste every year.
George noted that lenient return policies by stores, coupled with the convenience of online shopping and a lack of awareness in this area, have ultimately fueled this wasteful consumption behavior.