We Bought a 450-Pound Mystery Pallet Packed With Returned Goods From Amazon and Beyond. Here’s What We Found Inside.

When I convinced my bosses at Wirecutter to spend over $700 on a 450-pound, 6-foot-tall cardboard box filled with hundreds of mystery products that had been returned to Amazon and other retailers, I assumed that what we’d find inside would be a revealing snapshot of what shopping looks like today.

Anyone can buy these pallets stuffed with discarded products. For months, I’d watched content creators on social media giggle in excitement as they’d pull packages one by one from their own surprise boxes and rip them open, ceremoniously revealing a bevy of weird and wonderful items.

Secondary sales were worth an estimated $846 billion in the US in 2024, up from $297 billion in 2008, according to Zac Rogers, PhD, associate professor of supply-chain management at Colorado State University, who told me that those figures are probably conservative.

Quick-and-easy returns are a benefit of shopping at giant corporate retailers, and people take advantage of return policies liberally. An estimated 15.8% of sales, worth around $849.9 billion, will be returned in 2025, according to data from a joint study done by the National Retail Federation and the UPS-owned company Happy Returns.

We Bought a 450-Pound Mystery Pallet. Here’s What We Found. | Reviews by Wirecutter