This past summer I was reading 3D printing posts on Reddit and saw the mention of “bin stores” where people were purchasing filament and other 3D printing accessories for cheap. I started looking at what a “bin store” was and learned that they are stores that buy up Amazon (and other company) returns by the pallet load and sell the contents by spreading them out on tables that have lips (i.e. bins) to keep in the products. In addition to returns, the stores sometimes have items that didn’t sell so there may be multiple of the same item.

I was quite intrigued by the concept and mentioned it to my wife and she was also curious. I looked at a store about 20 minutes from our house and we went the next day. The stores that I’ve found use a similar strategy where they re-stock once or twice a week, have a higher price per item the first day, i.e. $10 the day after restocking and then reduce the price each day until re-stock day. Some stores will clean up the tables before re-stock day and sellable merchandise they take down to Mexico to sell.

Walking into the store, we were overwhelmed to see how much random stuff was for sale. We quickly realized that we had to be good shoppers by actually looking up the products that interested us to see if they were a deal or not. Some things for say $7 that sell new for $10 aren’t that much of a deal; however, something that sells for $25 we can get for $7 may be worth it.

After our first excursion, we decided to go back on the day after re-stock to see if there was better stuff. We got there early and had to wait in line before they opened. While waiting, we talked to a man that says he looks for just tools so that he can resell them and he mentioned another store to also check out. We went to the other store which was huge and spent several hours there looking around. We developed a system where my wife was on one side of the table and I was on the other and we’d go down each row so that we could see if there were any treasures in there.

As each trip is an adventure, my wife and I have been going every few weeks to kill some time. We also stop by the Grocery Outlet next door and do a little grocery shopping. Some of our trips are more productive than others; my son came with us once and picked out a Sony professional microphone that retails for about $250 that he picked up for $7. He sold it on eBay for $95! We’re not always that lucky, but have found some interesting products that at $5 an item (I like $5 day is it is a good balance between impulse buy and decent mix of available products.) are worth the trip.

Here’s a small sampling of what we’ve picked up for $7 or less:

• Non-contact thermometer (human and surface)
• Strainer that clips on pot
• Bluetooth barcode scanner (I wrote an app for this that lets me easily scan items and look them up on Amazon for use on future trips)
• Shoe orthotics
• Foot stretcher (for my plantar fasciitis)
• Fidgets for my wife to use at her school
• Grabber tool (for picking up trash and hard to reach items)
• Brita water bottles (built in filter)
• Webcams (can be adjusted whereas the one on my monitor always cuts off the top of my head)
• Name brand kitchen scissors
• Bluetooth hygrometer/thermometers
• HDMI capture device

So while we’re enjoying this new “hobby” and have picked up some useful items (we usually put stuff in our cart and at the end go back through and ask each other if we really need/want it and if it is worth it; we tend to put back a bunch of items), I’ve started to think more about the return problem.

These bin stores don’t seem to have a shortage of merchandise and the stores we’ve been to are only a small sampling of stores across the country that are doing the same thing. I’ve pieced together what happens from some articles as well as what I’ve seen at the stores. When an item is returned to Amazon (or Kohl’s or Target), a number of things could happen to it depending on the seller. If things are sold by a third party, I’ve read that the seller can either pay to have the return sent back to them or basically just eat the cost and have Amazon “dispose” of it. In addition, if things don’t sell, they may be in the same situation. Shipping costs money and it may cost more than the item resulting in items being “disposed” of by selling by the pallet load.

In some cases, items may be resold if they are new and unopened. However, this has a cost associated with inspecting and restocking the item. I don’t believe that this problem is going to go away any time soon. While it is great for my wife and me to have a treasure hunt adventure, the environmental costs in both shipping the products and disposing of what doesn’t sell even after the bin stores is huge. If companies move towards charging for returns and discouraging returns, that could reduce this slightly.

However, there is still the issue of producing things that don’t sell. For instance, we routinely see metal signs with various slogans on them and it is obvious that they didn’t sell. If a company makes them, ships them from China to Amazon to sell, it may take a few months to arrive. Then they try to sell them for a few months; in the meantime they are producing more. If they don’t sell, they may have part of the initial inventory to get rid of as well as the additional items produced before they were told to stop. Local manufacturing could cut down on the lag time and cut off production sooner, but using the theory “if we make it, we can sell it”, creates more products that people may not need.

Is there an easy answer for reducing the waste caused by returns or over manufacturing products that aren’t purchased? Unfortunately no. I try to do my part my thoroughly researching items before purchasing and rarely return items. This is especially true having seen where the returns end up and thinking about the impacts of my decisions.

As I’ve written, I switched to Consumer Cellular in July in an effort to save a little money. While I’ve been an AT&T customer for many years, I periodically have looked to save money by switching carriers. When I turned 50 this year, I received an offer to join AARP and in the offer was a discount for Consumer Cellular. This was another wake-up call to check for a new carrier. Unfortunately Consumer Cellular didn’t support the Apple Watch. This changed over the summer and I switched all my lines.

Despite a few hiccups in the transfer process, I’ve been quite pleased with the service. Consumer Cellular uses AT&T’s network so there was no change in coverage or my experience using my phone. Prior to the switch, I had 2 phones, a hotspot and an Apple Watch on AT&T and then my son’s phone on US Mobile (5 GB plan).

AT&T allows a maximum of 3 GB of hotspot data on the phone, so having a hotspot with unlimited data was quite useful for traveling and other times I needed to use my laptop or iPad. With Consumer Cellular, you can use any of your data on your phones as a mobile hotspot; this meant I didn’t need a separate hotspot line and anyone in my family could use a hotspot without borrowing the actual device.

This summer, AT&T announced that if you paid by credit card you wouldn’t get a $5/line discount. I always pay by credit card as I get cash back (2.5%) meaning that my AT&T cost went up by 2.5%; that was kind of the last straw on switching.

Pros

• Cheaper than AT&T
• Easier to get a US based human on the phone for support
• Support folks seem to actually care (I had a conversation with one about San Diego while we were waiting for something to complete).

Cons

• Switching carriers is not always a straightforward process

Summary

Consumer Cellular is AT&T repackaged for a significantly lower cost. 5G+ is offered as well as mobile hotspot on the phones. The unlimited data plan is really 50GB of data, but that’s plenty for my family (I think we hit 20GB when we went on vacation this summer).

I’m saving almost $60 per month by switching to Consumer Cellular! This is a huge savings with no change in service. In addition, my son no longer has to worry about his 5 GB of data (I put him on a separate plan as it was cheaper) and we don’t need a separate hotspot device.

As someone who tries to be thrifty, I routinely look at recurring charges and see how I can save some money. I’ve been using AT&T for cellular service for many years on various plans with various discounts. Last year I added a teacher appreciation discount (my wife is a teacher) and brought the rate down a little. I’ve been eyeing other carriers and MVNOs for awhile and gave Visible a try as they supported the Apple Watch and there were only a handful of MVNOs that supported the watch. That test didn’t go so well at the time as my phone was unusable when I went to Costco. They have since changed offerings and I would be tempted to try again.

This week, AT&T sent email saying that if I didn’t switch my AutoPay to use a debit card or bank account, they would charge me $5/line ($20 total) which got me thinking about switching again. My credit card rewards pays me 2.5% so on a $132 bill gives me about $3 per month which effectively increases what I pay. I decided to revisit carriers and discovered today that Consumer Cellular started supported the Apple Watch. I saw it on Apple’s website and then called them to verify. What I didn’t realize until later that they only support the latest versions of the Apple Watch (Series 8, SE 2, and Ultra) and not my 3 year old Apple Watch Series 6.

I was so excited about potentially saving $50 per month ($600 per year) that I ported my number over, added the eSIM and went through the process to get setup. There were a few hiccups as I entered the wrong PIN for the port (you have to request a time limited one from your carrier) and I had to call Consumer Cellular. Each time I called, I was connected to a rep quickly and was able to easily communicate with the US based support. Each person seemed empowered to actually handle my issues. After a little bit, I was up and running on my phone. I tested out mobile hotspot and discovered that I had been assigned an AT&T eSIM giving me basically the same coverage as I already had. Unfortunately things started going down hill when I tried to activate my watch. I called again and finally realized that they didn’t support my watch; I immediately asked for a port out PIN as I don’t want to give up my Watch for running (I don’t like being tethered to my phone).

I went to AT&T’s site and started the process to add my phone back to the account (my wife’s phone is the primary one on AT&T and I hadn’t ported it out as I wanted to make sure everything worked well before subjected her to a switch). After I put in the order (it says I’ll have to pay a $35 activation fee which I hope isn’t correct), I received an email that I had to call to finish the port. So I called and explained the situation and spoke with an outsourced rep. The rep wasn’t able to help; I went through this a number of times as well as the online chat.

After I think 4 hours of getting hung up on, transferred, having to explain the situation over and over, going through phone tree hell, and receiving strange error messages on the website, I finally called again and was connected to a very nice US based woman who was sympathetic and understanding. She asked why I went with Consumer Cellular and I told her; she asked about coverage and I said it was identical to AT&T which kind of surprised her, I think. She was very patient and did everything she could do and unfortunately had to transfer me to another department and I ended up “outsourced” again. None of the outsourced reps seemed sincere about helping me and read from their scripts. I have trouble understanding accents and that made the experience even worse.

Throughout this ordeal, I was about ready to just forget the phone number that I’ve had for over 25 years as I was so frustrated with AT&T. While I created my own mess, dealing with AT&T makes my blood boil. Eventually I was able to get my phone reactivated, but am still stuck with no cellular on my watch. That’s a problem for another day.

I wasn’t planning on getting a new Apple Watch this year as my Series 6 works fine. However, after this experience with AT&T, I am definitely getting the next watch so that I can jump ship and goto Consumer Cellular. Not only will it save me money (about enough in one year to pay for the watch), I won’t have to deal with AT&T’s archaic website, outsourced support, and high rates.

I can’t wait to say “good riddance” to AT&T.

When I was designing ReceiptWallet, I was concerned about the database being corrupted and losing all my data. I decided that as a backup to the database, I'd store all the files as PDFs (later in life it would store other types of files, but for the most part people only stored PDFs) and would embed all the metadata as PDF keywords that could be recovered. The keywords in the PDFs also served as a transport mechanism where you could send a PDF from ReceiptWallet to someone else with ReceiptWallet and when imported, all the metadata would be filled out. In addition to being used as a backup of the data, I envisioned the day when I no longer used ReceiptWallet as I didn't want to keep supporting it.

While this original idea seemed pretty solid, writing the keywords for the PDFs proved to be somewhat problematic. At the time, Apple's PDFKit wasn't completely reliable and could corrupt files when writing them out or crash. Reluctantly I added a switch to ReceiptWallet to turn off this feature (default was to have this on). So depending on the PDF, some PDFs may not have keyword data in them so metadata would basically be lost.

As I wrote earlier this year, that day has come. In my transition away from Paperless (formerly ReceiptWallet), I manually dragged out all files from one of my libraries into the file system and organized them into folders by categories. I placed the folder (named Document Library) in iCloud Drive allowing me to access all the files from anywhere including on my phone. At one point in the past, I started looking at an iPhone version of ReceiptWallet that would sync files; it didn't go anywhere. Now I finally have that feature!

While I moved a document library over to the file system, I left all my libraries for receipts (one for each year) in Paperless and left them to deal with another day. A few weeks ago I was talking to my father about his transition away from Paperless (he likes to follow my lead sometimes) and I asked him if he had a tool to extract all his files, if he'd use it.

I spent a few hours that day working on a small Mac application that did just that. I had a chance to do a little SwiftUI and Swift concurrency. You drop a Paperless library onto the app's main window, it walks the library (the library is a bundle which is just a folder which a file extension) looking for every PDF and then opens each file to find the date and merchant. It then creates folders by year and month for the files.

I've made the source to this app freely available. It comes with no warranty and I will not make a binary of it available; the tool has worked fairly well for my father and me, but may have some quirks (at one point, extra PDFs without metadata were added to the Paperless libraries).

This app was made without using any source to ReceiptWallet or Paperless; the directory structure of a library can be viewed in the Finder by control clicking the library and choosing Show Package Contents.

I have no information on the future of Paperless and I'm switching away from it as the file system handles my needs better than it did when I wrote ReceiptWallet over 16 years ago.