Meet the corporate that sells your misplaced airplane baggage

This story was initially printed on July 11, 2020.
Think about this: An airline loses your checked bag. After an in depth search, buyer help comes up empty-handed. They compensate you and life goes on.
However life goes on on your suitcase, too. Written off as “unclaimed,” it sits in a musty assortment depot for 3 months. Ultimately, the airline sells it — together with a whole lot of different misplaced suitcases and cargo shipments — to a non-public firm, sight unseen.
The brand new proprietor cracks the lock, sifts by way of your former possessions, and marks them on the market.
A couple of days later, a retired mechanic named Charlie buys your grandfather’s look ahead to $150. A 19-year-old line cook dinner acquires your Beats headphones. And a nurse from Florida turns into the proud new proprietor of the headscarf your mother knitted you for Christmas.
That is the weird secondary marketplace for misplaced baggage.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle
Yearly, 4.3B baggage are checked by airways world wide. Round 25m of them (5.7 per 1k bags checked) find yourself misplaced or misdirected. The 0.03% of luggage which are nonetheless not reunited with their house owners after 90 days are bought by the airline.
Chances are high, they’re bought by an organization known as Unclaimed Baggage.
Nestled within the small city of Scottsboro, Alabama (pop: 14.7k), Unclaimed Baggage holds the excellence of being “the nation’s solely retailer of misplaced baggage.” Its huge 40k-sq-ft warehouse holds hundreds of treasures misplaced in transit, starting from uncommon devices to monogrammed engagement rings.
From time to time, a bit of baggage incorporates one thing really extraordinary, like a go well with of armor, an Egyptian artifact, or a digital camera utilized in NASA’s Area Shuttle program.
What are the ethics of reselling vacationers’ intimate gadgets? How does the method work? And the way did one firm come to monopolize this area of interest market?
The story begins 50 years in the past
Again in 1970, a person named Hugo Doyle Owens was at a crossroads.
Born and raised in Scottsboro, Owens had served within the Korean Struggle and returned to his hometown to promote insurance coverage. Between shifts, he spent each waking hour by his ham radio, utilizing radio frequency spectrum to speak to buddies and strangers. At 39, he was stressed and searching for his subsequent journey.
Sooner or later, by way of the radio chatter, he discovered {that a} bus firm in Washington, DC, had an unlimited stack of unclaimed baggage it was trying to eliminate.
In these days, unclaimed baggage have been typically thrown away or auctioned off to native junk outlets. Few noticed worth in vacationers’ misplaced wares. However to Owens, the suitcases — and the intrigue of their contents — have been an ideal basis to construct a enterprise on.
So, he borrowed $300 (~$2k in 2020 {dollars}) from his father-in-law and bought the whole thing.

Doyle Owens together with his ham radio, c. Nineteen Sixties (through Unclaimed Baggage)
On the sting of city, Owens arrange an off-the-cuff storefront, crafted an indication (“Unclaimed Baggage”) by the door, and, with the assistance of his spouse and a couple of sons, splayed out his acquired gadgets on card tables. He ran a small advert within the native paper, informing Jackson County deal-seekers of his new enterprise.
In lower than 24 hours, he bought out of stock and pocketed a tidy revenue.
The novelty of sifting by way of misplaced baggage quickly unfold by word-of-mouth and Owen’s repeated the method. His boss ultimately gave him an ultimatum: Promote insurance coverage, or promote baggage. He give up and got down to flip his facet hustle right into a full-time job.
By 1978, Owens had struck offers to purchase baggage from Japanese Airways, Nationwide Airways, and Air Florida (now defunct). In fixed transit between DC, Miami, Cleveland, and Dallas, he was quickly buying 3k items of baggage monthly, with assist from a employees of 6 folks.
“We by no means know what’s in these suitcases till we open them,” he informed the AP that 12 months. “It’s like shopping for a pig in a poke.”

A person marks suitcases at Sydney Worldwide Airport in 1985 (Peter Morris/Fairfax Media through Getty Photos)
Even essentially the most macabre of things appeared to intrigue his prospects: A marble tombstone inscribed with a reputation and a date of loss of life was bought by a gentleman who made it right into a espresso desk. An Amazonian shrunken head (present in a suitcase within the pre-TSA days) discovered a house with a health care provider in Birmingham.
Through the years, the enterprise expanded — largely due to plenty of secretive, unique offers Owens inked with main airways, hospitality teams, and cargo carriers.
By the point he died in 2016, he’d acquired 3 keys from 3 totally different Scottsboro mayors. Everybody on the town knew his identify. And his one-of-a-kind enterprise had turn into an internationally acknowledged vacationer vacation spot.
Life at America’s solely misplaced baggage retailer
At present’s Unclaimed Baggage is a far cry from the cardboard tables and backroom bus offers of the previous.
Since taking on the enterprise in 1995, Owens’ son, Bryan, has expanded the shop right into a 50k-square-foot behemoth. Earlier than COVID, hundreds of items of baggage — as much as 7k distinctive gadgets — have been flowing by way of the doorways daily. The shop’s devoted laundry facility, used to scrub 70k clothes gadgets monthly, is the biggest in Alabama.
Final 12 months, greater than 1m prospects from all around the world flocked to the small city 140 miles northwest of Atlanta to see what sorts of treasures they might forage.

Prime: a buyer checks out sneakers on the Unclaimed Baggage retailer in Scottsboro, Alabama; backside: crowds browse the expansive girls’s clothes part (Unclaimed Baggage)
Within the final decade, airways have invested closely in RFID chips and central monitoring programs to cut back misplaced baggage. This isn’t simply to maintain prospects joyful: The price of searching down misplaced baggage units airways again $2.1B per year in overhead prices. After they can’t discover your bag, they’re liable to compensate you on your loss (as much as $3,500 for home flights and $1,780 for worldwide).
Promoting off unclaimed baggage permits them to recoup a small portion of those losses.
Unclaimed Baggage purchases not solely misplaced checked baggage, however gadgets forgotten in overhead bins and the entrance flap of the chair (studying glasses are widespread). In addition they purchase tons of outsized cargo and freight — surfboards, skis, wheelchairs, rugs.
The corporate is extraordinarily secretive about its “salvage agreements” with airways and gained’t reveal who it companions with, or how a lot it pays for baggage. However normally, it’s going to fork over a set worth per bag or by pay by weight.
Like storage units, these purchases are “blind:” they by no means know what’s tinside.
When the baggage arrives on the retailer’s sorting facility by tractor trailer, the corporate’s 150+ workers observe a process:
- Gadgets are sorted into 3 normal classes: a) resell, b) repurpose/donate, or c) recycle/throw away.
- Clothes and jewellery are cleaned; electronics are wiped of private knowledge.
- Resellable gadgets are appraised for worth and authenticated by class specialists.
The baggage have already been screened on the airport, however issues typically slip by way of the cracks. Something of an “unlawful nature” (medicine, weapons, unmarked money) is instantly turned over to the native authorities below lock and key.
Something deemed to not be family-friendly (intercourse toys, pornography) is withheld.

Prime: a person browses by way of a whole lot of headphones; backside: watches — a few of that are costly and uncommon finds — line the glass circumstances (Unclaimed Baggage)
“There are a variety of frogs earlier than you get to the prince,” Brenda Cantrell, the shop’s director, says of the sorting course of. “We’re very expert at eliminating the frogs. It’s a tedious course of that we’ve perfected over the previous 50 years.”
Ultimately, solely about one-third of the gadgets in baggage find yourself on the market — normally marked down anyplace from 20-80% off checklist worth.
An extra one-third is donated to dozens of charities: wheelchairs go to prisons and veteran teams; strollers go to teen being pregnant facilities; some garments go to homeless shelters.
Bizarre and wild finds
Cantrell estimates that 60% of the gadgets present in suitcases are garments or equipment. Headphones, e-readers, and neck pillows are additionally in abundance.
Maybe most sadly, the shop sees a dependable stream of marriage ceremony attire, marriage ceremony bands, and engagement rings. (“We don’t know whether or not these folks have been going to a marriage or coming house from one,” says Cantrell.)

Prime: a buyer poses together with his discover, an vintage case; backside: an Unclaimed Baggage worker demonstrates how the corporate sometimes kinds by way of a suitcase when it arrives on the facility (Unclaimed Baggage)
However the sheer quantity of bags they obtain additionally yields finds which are extraordinarily unusual, uncommon, and weird:
- A Gucci suitcase filled with historical Egyptian artifacts from 1500 BC
- The unique, 4-foot-tall Hoggle puppet from the 1986 movie, Labyrinth
- An F-16 steerage system belonging to the US Navy
- A Nikon F digital camera from NASA’s Area Shuttle program
- A mysterious sealed field that stated “Name CDC instantly”
- A stay rattlesnake in a duffel bag
- Vacuum-packed frogs in a suitcase
- A foul-smelling bear disguise packed in salt
- A uncommon violin made by a scholar of Stradivarius
- A xylophone from Neil Diamond’s 2008 world tour
The store launched online store (which includes a smaller collection of unclaimed baggage) has its personal share of ridiculous stuff:
- A show stand for a Star Wars lightsaber ($49.99)
- A glass statue of the Burj Khalifa ($11.99)
- A poster autographed by Nathaniel Rateliff And The Night time Sweats ($300.99)
- A porcelain funnel for filtering hashish oil ($60.99)
- Two kilos of seashells ($13.99)
- An artisanal stuffed camel toy ($450.99)
After which there are the really beneficial finds:
- A presidential platinum Rolex watch price $64k (bought for $32k)
- A 5.8-carat diamond ring appraised for $46k (bought for $23k)
- A 40.95-carat emerald appraised for $25k (bought for $17k)
On just a few events, buyers have inadvertently come throughout their personal misplaced gadgets within the retailer.
A couple of years in the past, a person who’d not too long ago misplaced a suitcase flying again from Europe was looking by way of the lads’s clothes part and noticed his personal custom-made lavender go well with. He purchased it again.

When Unclaimed Baggage discovered Hoggle, the Jim Henson puppet from the 1986 movie, Labyrinth, he was in poor form, in order that they employed grasp dollmaker Gary Sowatzka (prime) to revive it (Sowatzka’s Dolls, Unclaimed Baggage)
Every so often, the shop will even get gadgets misplaced by celebrities, who aren’t resistant to the baggage mishaps of mere mortals.
In 1992, Roy Corridor, a 46-year-old minister, purchased a royal blue Hickey-Freeman jacket at Unclaimed Baggage. When he took it house, he seen the identify “Whitey Ford” — a Corridor of Fame pitcher for the Yankees — written inside it. Knowledgeable of the discover, Ford requested for his jacket again; Corridor determined to maintain it.
Some say the shop has an moral responsibility to reunite folks with their misplaced baggage — particularly extremely private gadgets, like jewellery inscribed with names and dates, or electronics with identifiable info.
However traditionally, the shop has maintained it has a enterprise to run.
“Look, we’re a retailer,” Owens informed a Wall Avenue Journal reporter in 1994. “We aren’t set as much as discover your Aunt Jane’s blue Samsonite.”
Because the adage goes, finders keepers.
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