What Actually Happens to the Things Nobody Buys

Once people find out what I do for work, the question that comes up almost every time, right after “so do you just keep the good stuff for yourself,” is some version of what happens to everything that doesn’t sell. It’s a fair question. A typical sale I run moves maybe seventy, seventy five percent of what’s on the tables by the time we close up Sunday afternoon, which sounds decent until you picture the quarter that’s left, spread across a whole house.

The honest answer is it goes a few different directions depending what it is, and none of them are as clean as “donated to charity,” which is the answer people are usually hoping to hear. Furniture that doesn’t move goes to a couple of consignment shops I’ve got relationships with, they take a cut and I take what’s left, or if it’s genuinely low value it goes to a junk hauler who I know for a fact sells some of it out of his own truck on the weekends, which I’ve made my peace with even though it feels a little like double dipping on someone else’s furniture. Books that don’t sell mostly do go to a couple of donation spots, a library sale program and a secondhand shop that’s happy to take boxes.

Games are the category that actually bothers me most when they don’t move, more than furniture or dishware, and I’ve thought about why that is. A book that doesn’t sell still has value as a book somewhere, someone reading it eventually, even secondhand through a donation bin. A game that doesn’t sell and ends up broken up or scrapped loses something a book doesn’t, all those components that only mean anything together, a full run of pieces that took real design work to balance against each other, and once that set’s broken up it’s just plastic bits in a landfill bag rather than a complete thing anyone could still play.

I keep a small shelf at the warehouse now specifically for games I can’t bring myself to send to the hauler, ones that are complete, that I know are good, that just didn’t find a buyer that particular weekend for reasons that have nothing to do with quality, wrong crowd, bad weather, priced a dollar too high on a day people were being tight with money. Some of those eventually go out at the next sale and sell fine. Some just sit there, and I’ve started giving a few away outright to people I think will actually play them, which isn’t good business and I do it anyway.

I don’t have a satisfying ending for this one. Most of what doesn’t sell does find some kind of second life, just not always the tidy one people picture when they ask. And a small amount of it really does just end up gone, which is a fact of the job I’ve made peace with even though I don’t love saying it out loud to people who are hoping for a better answer.