Jun 06, 2025 16:00:00

What is the mysterious store 'AMAZING BINZ' that sells all items for $10 on Friday, $8 on Saturday, $6 on Sunday, $4 on Monday, $2 on Tuesday, and $1 on Wednesday?

A store called 'AMAZING BINZ' in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania, USA sells all products in the store for '10 dollars (about 1440 yen) on Friday, 8 dollars (about 1150 yen) on Saturday, 6 dollars (about 860 yen) on Sunday, 4 dollars (about 570 yen) on Monday, 2 dollars (about 290 yen) on Tuesday, and 1 dollar (about 140 yen) on Wednesday'. It is a mysterious store. Jen Kinney, a freelance journalist who spent a week visiting AMAZING BINZ, reports on the mechanism of AMAZING BINZ and the products lined up in the store.

Seven Days At The Bin Store | Defector
https://defector.com/seven-days-at-the-bin-store

'AMAZING BINZ' opened in West Philadelphia in the spring of 2025. One friend wrote to Kinney in a message, 'I just saw it the other day, and it was scary,' while other friends responded with questions like, 'What is this?' and 'Who is this store for?'

AMAZING BINZ is located on the first floor of a long, narrow building, with a single aisle running down the middle of the store. On either side of this aisle are huge wooden tray tables (Binz) on which a huge variety of consumer goods are piled up indiscriminately, including 'unopened Halloween costumes,' 'penis-shaped ice molds,' 'sparkly penis banners,' 'hot and cold compression gel sleeves for elbows,' 'pregnancy tests,' and 'nose hair waxing kits.'

The biggest feature of AMAZING BINZ is its amazing pricing. On Fridays, when new products are on display at AMAZING BINZ, all items are sold for $10, and the prices drop accordingly: $8 on Saturday, $6 on Sunday, $4 on Monday, $2 on Tuesday, and $1 on Wednesday. Thursday is their regular day off, and new products are replenished on this day.

Check out the embedded Instagram video below to get an idea of what the interior of an AMAZING BINZ looks like.

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A post shared by Amazing Binz (@amazingbinz)

Kinney was so intrigued by AMAZING BINZ that he asked the owner, Ahmed, to cover the store for a week, from Thursday to Wednesday.

◆ Thursday: Stock replenishment
AMAZING BINZ is closed on Thursdays, and the store restocks new products and arranges them in boxes on this day. When Kinney visited AMAZING BINZ at 10:30 a.m., Ahmed was smoking a cigarette while waiting for a pallet loaded with products to arrive from Target, a large discount supermarket.

AMAZING BINZ is able to purchase large quantities of extremely cheap products because it uses a logistics system called ' reverse logistics ,' in which products are sent from the consumer side to the producer side. Products sent back through reverse logistics include those that have been rejected from normal distribution for various reasons, such as 'unsold after the season has passed,' 'returned because the box had a dent,' 'purchasers did not receive the products,' and 'warehouses ran out of space and had to release them.'

According to the US retail industry, about 17% of all products are returned, and the percentage is as high as 30% when limited to online sales. More and more vendors are buying and selling products that have reached reverse logistics at low prices, and Amazon has also launched a service called B-Stock , which sells a truckload of unwanted items in bulk. Some influencers are said to be buying pallets of unwanted items from reverse logistics and opening them while streaming.

The pallets that AMAZING BINZ purchases are also distributed through reverse logistics, but the exact breakdown is not known until they arrive. Among the products they sell, the most popular are home appliances and household goods. Ahmed thinks of his customers as part of reverse logistics, telling Kinney, 'You can buy products here and resell them on eBay or Amazon. You'll get your money back in less than a day.' Opening pallets and refilling them is hard work, and it takes place at night.

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A post shared by Amazing Binz (@amazingbinz)

◆ Friday: All items $10
When Kinney arrived at AMAZING BINZ at 9:35 a.m., two people were already lined up at the door peering into the store, and the number of people in the line before the store opened had grown to more than 30. AMAZING BINZ advertises bargains from its new products on Instagram, so some customers have already decided on the products they want, such as 'children's scooters' and 'bathroom baskets.' In addition, all items are $10, so it's also a chance to get cheap home appliances and products that are easy to resell.

Nebraska-based wholesaler and content creator Colton Carlson testified that when he opened his 'BENZ Store,' a store that sells unwanted items like AMAZING BINZ, in 2018, there were less than 10 similar stores in the United States. In just a few years, the number has grown to about 3,000 across the United States, and Carlson estimates that there are more than 10,000 at the time of writing. This is due to an increase in returns from online sales, as well as the decline in consumer spending after the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left retailers struggling to dispose of excess inventory.

When AMAZING BINZ opened, people crowded into the small store, desperate to secure popular products such as children's scooters, grills, and Target-branded household goods. The store was in a frenzy, and a scalper who couldn't find the product he wanted said, 'Someday someone will get shot,' while one woman said, 'I'll never do this again.' By the time the store closed, the two front boxes, which had contained the most popular products, were reportedly completely empty.

◆ Saturday: All items $8
Saturday is the day of the West Philadelphia produce market, and AMAZING BINZ is still bustling, though not as busy as Friday morning. Popular household goods and appliances disappeared on Friday, and instead were replaced with less high-end products such as soccer balls, bicycle tubes, sand art kits, clothing and shoes.

Baltimore Avenue, where AMAZING BINZ is located, runs east to west from the University of Pennsylvania campus and is a mix of luxury residential areas lined with multimillion-dollar mansions, apartment complexes, and the city's poorest areas. Ahmed originally wanted to open a cafe or sweets shop, but due to the need to obtain permits and pay rent, he decided to open AMAZING BINZ, which has lower expenses and initial investment. Ahmed is from the West Bank of the Jordan River in Palestine, and behind the counter is a flag calling for the liberation of Palestine.

Reactions to AMAZING BINZ are varied. One woman stuffed a mountain of school supplies into three baskets, another laughed when she unearthed a 'penis-like photo book of nature scenery,' another got sentimental when she saw a heart-shaped paperweight for her 25th wedding anniversary, and one person told Kinney, when they made eye contact, 'Have you ever seen a store like this? It's weird. I don't think it will last long.' Kinney's friend used the metaphor of a 'big sieve,' arguing that AMAZING BINZ is a collection of unsold and unwanted items that are filtered by consumers after the huge amount of products that come in from above. 'Those trash cans are like the last step before they are dumped into the ocean,' he said.

◆ Sunday: All items $6
When Kinney arrived at AMAZING BINZ that day, Omran, who is in charge of social media for AMAZING BINZ, was taking a video with a shopper who said, 'I found a lotion that I usually buy at Sephora for $65 (about 9,300 yen).' Omran often takes such videos and posts them on social media to appeal to customers.

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A post shared by Amazing Binz (@amazingbinz)

Omran is also in charge of ordering for AMAZING BINZ, and contacts warehouse staff directly instead of through auction sites to purchase items that are likely to rise in price. AMAZING BINZ purchases a truckload of unwanted items at one time, with an average price of about $16,000 (about 2.3 million yen). They keep the cost per item, which totals several thousand items, to just $2, and strike a good balance between high and low prices.

AMAZING BINZ sells all products at the same price, so there is a chance to buy bargains at a bargain price, but instead there are a lot of products that no one would buy even for $6, such as 'mermaid stickers' and 'straws with the word 'BRIDE' written on them. When Kinney walks through the AMAZING BINZ store, he sometimes feels like an installation art , a message, or a warning.

'Wander around the store for a few days and you'll feel like you're in a haunted room, a place where the world's least needed products are stuck in physical form. With or without AMAZING BINZ, these objects are already there, made for you. Many of them are useful, but rendered obsolete by an overheated economy. Shopping here feels like fighting a losing battle in reverse logistics,' Kinney writes.

Monday: All items $4
AMAZING BINZ was pretty quiet that day, and Kinney couldn't help but wonder how long AMAZING BINZ would last. The 'BENZ Store' bubble has already begun to collapse in other parts of the United States, and Carlson, who was mentioned above, predicted the situation would worsen and decided to sell his second-hand shop business in 2023 and focus on the wholesale business. However, Carlson believes that the second-hand market will continue to grow because consumers have a strong desire to save even a little.

◆ Tuesday: All items for $2
By this time, most of the items they had stocked up on last Thursday had been sold, and they were out of sand art kits, bedding, and curtains. Ahmed said the cost of pallets of unwanted items was rising, and they would soon have to raise prices. Omran, on the other hand, was optimistic that they could keep prices down a little more, saying, 'We're willing to do anything to help save money for the community.'

◆ Wednesday: All items for $1
You can see what kind of products are on sale in the store on Wednesday, when all items are priced at $1, in the embedded video below. There seem to be a lot of clothes and shoes, but there are also piles of cardboard boxes with unknown contents.

At 6:45 p.m., with only an hour and 15 minutes left until closing time, the store was packed with people, and when a woman found a pair of shoes she liked but could only find one, Ahmed insisted, 'I'll keep the other pair if I find it,' and tried to get her to buy them. When Kinney found a flag of President Donald Trump, Ahmed said, 'You can take it,' so she shoved it in her bag, thinking he would throw it away anyway.

Within a week of starting AMAZING BINZ, Kinney had purchased a cat bed, a felt wreath, a heart-shaped chocolate box, a penis-shaped ice cube, a bicycle tube, and an ineffective ant trap. When I thought about whether I really needed these things, the only practical ones were bicycle tubes, or if they were effective, ant traps, and most of them were bought because they were there, like watching Instagram reels. However, the act of browsing through piles of junk is addictive, and AMAZING BINZ will be my first choice when buying new frying pans or bedding in the future.

'I make a final loop and return to the farthest corner of the store,' Kinney concludes. 'This is where the unwanted products collect, filtered down to the end of the supply chain and piled up like sand in this final container. I stare at the mountains, hoping that they will start to decompose before my eyes, each individual item breaking down into a pond of microplastics, their value finally exhausted. I leave the container there and leave the store. Tomorrow it will be full again.'