On a cold Thursday morning in early January, BuyWander workers organize and unpack items from plastic-wrapped pallets. In the front of the warehouse at 2626 E. Trent Ave. in Spokane, a mother begins to pick up items she successfully bid for online. Her auction purchases, mostly household items, include a toy for her daughter, who's eagerly waiting in her car seat.
Opened in 2023, BuyWander is a local business that's part of a retail sustainability movement selling returned goods at affordable prices. It's helping prevent the increasing number of returned goods from finding their way into landfills.
Through BuyWander's website, buywander.com, customers can bid online for items in perfect condition or some that are lightly damaged, at often drastically lower prices. Markdowns on big-ticket items can be 75% cheaper than the price at big-box retailers. BuyWander doesn't ship anything to bid winners, allowing the business to pass on savings by having customers pick up their items at the warehouse.
The returned goods store was founded by entrepreneur Jordan Allen, who previously founded Stay Alfred, a Spokane-based venture offering upscale travel apartment rentals that closed as a result of the pandemic.
The team at BuyWander also includes co-founders Brock Kowalchuk, the former CEO of local e-commerce company Kaspien Holdings (formerly Etailz), and Matt McGee, who also has extensive experience in e-commerce.
BuyWander's leaders estimate that they sell about 96,000 items a year and that they have prevented more than 807,000 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions through their business over the last year.
Kowalchuk estimates that with BuyWander's continued growth, they will continue to reduce emissions.
"We'll save over a million pounds of CO2 this year, or CO2 equivalent, from entering the atmosphere, just by reusing these goods," Kowalchuk says. "Then you think about cutting the freight out, logistics and everything that goes into the life cycle of a return."
CleanHub, a company focused on combating plastic pollution, estimates that 24 million metric tons of CO2 emissions are attributed to e-commerce returns yearly. The National Retail Federation reports that retailers expect 16% of their goods to be returned.
Kowalchuk says that if you calculate the billions in sales from local big-box retailers and factor in the average return rate, there could be about $300 million in returns just in Spokane's local retail ecosystem.
Allen says he was previously unaware of how massive the return industry is and how many tons of goods end up in warehouses.
"I was clueless, and I figured everything went back up on the shelf," Allen says. "So when I got exposed to this industry for the first time and saw hundreds of semitrucks rolling into warehouses every single day, hundreds every day, my mind was blown."
The sustainability impact is just one draw for BuyWander, Allen and Kowalchuk say. The company has also utilized its unique business to donate to local charities, helping homeless individuals with shoes and clothes and providing backpacks for needy students.
BuyWander's founders say the community's response has been overwhelmingly positive, with many praising the ability to afford items on a small budget. The growing community support is allowing the business to move to a larger warehouse to accommodate the demand and growth. The move is expected to happen in the next month or so, to a new facility in Spokane Valley.
Spokane Bins is another local returned goods business that operates with a different model. Each week, the company (at 5320 E. Sprague) fills large bins with returned goods that customers sort through. Anything found in the bins can be purchased at the same set price, which decreases each day of the week as the selection shrinks.
Spokane Bins founder Michelle Miller says the amount of returned goods that she could buy by the truckload didn't surprise her because of the current culture of online consumerism.
"Getting a whole truckload of [returned goods] and seeing it is pretty wild and overwhelming initially," Miller says. "But I don't think it was shocking to me because I kind of already had that expectation."
Miller says she would like to source returned merchandise locally from large online retailers to reduce emissions. However, she says she hasn't been able to get a call or email back from the largest online retailer with warehouses in the Inland Northwest (which she asked not to name, since she still hopes to work with them). She says many returned goods she receives come from the Eastern U.S. or warehouses in Nevada.
"I would love to be able to get our returns locally so that we can have less of a carbon footprint," Miller says. "It's really up to the online retailers."
Even with the growth of stores like BuyWander and Spokane Bins, more conscientious consumerism is needed to address the environmental impacts of online shopping. Optoro, a cloud-based returns management system, estimates that in 2023, returns created 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste in the U.S. alone. ♦
