August 21, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is David Owen’s absorbing “There and Back Again,” a report on the “rapidly evolving but still only semi-visible economic universe known as the reverse supply chain.” Owen tells about attending “a three-day conference, in Las Vegas, conducted by the Reverse Logistics Association, a trade group whose members deal in various ways with product returns, unsold inventories, and other capitalist jetsam.” He sketches the history of refunds, tracing it back to J. C. Penney (“Among his innovations was allowing customers to return anything, no questions asked”). He describes visiting a liquidation business called America’s Remanufacturing Company (A.R.C.), based in Georgia:

We walked through the receiving area, a large, open space that was filled with recent arrivals—tilting piles of household appliances, stacks of yellow bins containing miscellaneous Amazon returns—and stopped in front of a pallet on which half a dozen Husqvarna two-thousand-pounds-per square-inch electric pressure washers, made under a license by Briggs & Stratton, had been stacked and bound with plastic stretch wrap. (A pressure washer is many homeowners’ second-favorite power tool, after their chainsaw. It shoots a stream of water at high velocity, and can be used to clean a roof, blast mold off a wooden deck, or scare away a bear, as a friend of mine did after being surprised by one while scrubbing down the inside of his swimming pool.) As Adamson and I watched, workers sorted units by model and year of manufacture. They checked electrical components and replaced damaged parts with parts they’d salvaged from returns they couldn’t repair. Much of the refurbishing was done on a manufacturing line that A.R.C. bought from a Briggs & Stratton plant, in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and modified, in part by adding a car-wash-like cleaning system to one end.

The rampant consumerism underlying the reverse supply chain is appalling. But the innovative way the market responds to it is impressive. The reverse supply chain is a great subject. Owen writes about it clearly and engagingly.