Three years after QFC closed its Wedgwood store, the empty building, slated for demolition and redevelopment, sprang back to life. In February, the aisles once stocked with Cheerios and cheese filled instead with pots, pans, suitcases, couches, children’s shoes, Squishmallows, and the occasional Peloton—all selling for well below market rate.

Discount TopLot is a dangerous place to be an impulsive shopper. Quick searches on my phone told me that the All-Clad stainless-steel cookware set I was eyeing for $110 ran somewhere between $150 on sale at Walmart and more than $200 elsewhere. There was only one set of the kid-size headphones I wanted two of, but they cost just $9.99. Did I need a wine fridge? Well, maybe, given that it sold on Amazon for $325 and here it was $169. Dyson vacuums, Spy ski helmets, holiday decorations in July, backpacks, and boogie boards called my name.

The organized but slightly jumbled shelves of Discount TopLot hold screaming hot deals on recognizable, quality brands for shoppers, but for founder Abdul Haseeb, the store has another purpose. Discount TopLot is part of a new trend of salvage and liquidation stores that purchase pallets of overstock, discontinued, and returned items from places like Costco, Target, and Amazon, and sell them to the public at a steep discount.

Haseeb, who graduated with a degree in civil engineering in Afghanistan and moved to Seattle to get his master’s at UW, worried about the amount of returns he saw at places like Costco and how much perfectly usable product ended up thrown out. “Everybody takes whatever they want, and they are returning it without any care for where it will go,” he says. “The main intent is to play our role in landfill reduction.”

In 2023, Americans returned $743 billion of retail merchandise, or about 15 percent of what they purchased, according to the National Retail Federation. It’s a number that has grown in the last decade, from less than 9 percent in 2012, pushing retailers to get their reverse logistics organized—how and where products they aren’t going to sell, for whatever reason, will go.

Costco itself is pretty committed to diverting waste from landfills, and has a variety of destinations for returned merchandise, including donating more than $110 million of non-food products last year. But there are just a lot of returns and overstock. Which means that people like Haseeb can purchase pallets of those products, categorized by presumed condition. Most of the overstock comes on “Like new” pallets, while the A/B designation tends to include member returns where they got as far as opening the box before deciding they didn’t want it. C/D pallets mostly include items that people actually used before returning—sometimes, says Haseeb, for a long time.

Costco is Haseeb’s main source of product. Air conditioners, generators, recliner chairs, and similar big-ticket items fill the center of the store. Name-brand beauty products, small electronics, and toys sit at the front. Shoes line another wall. Everything is clean, items are in their packages, and anything not new or like new is noted—Haseeb and his team sort through every item before it goes out on the floor. He estimates 70 to 80 percent of what he receives ends up in the store, with the rest deemed unsellable and taken to a recycling center, or, worst case scenario, to the place he is trying to avoid: the landfill. What he does sell generally goes for about half the original price, though some items in worse condition get further marked down.

The stock is somewhat unpredictable—on a recent trip I failed to find an immersion blender among the air fryers and pizza ovens. But Haseeb and his team are helpful and give the store a surprisingly warm, family business feel for a place staking its reputation on low prices. On weekends Haseeb’s children help shoppers carry their loads out to the car, and when someone buys something too big to put in their car, he’s got a delivery guy a phone call away.

As prices go up, customers seek out new places to find cheaper items, and the current market has put Discount TopLot and similar stores, such as Discount Liquidation Depot, which opened in North Bend in April, on the leading edge of a trend. While there have always been varying levels of this type of store, manufacturing patterns and consumer returns have fueled huge growth in the genre. According to CNBC, the liquidation market more than doubled from 2008 to 2020, when it was worth $644 billion. Since then, overproduction in response to pandemic shortages has only continued to boost the market, and stores like Haseeb’s have sprung up all over the country.

Discount TopLot stands out for its location, though. Most of these stores are located in suburbs, where they have space for larger items that Haseeb laments being unable to carry, like refrigerators or remodeling supplies such as lumber and tiles.

The cost of his rent is one of Haseeb’s biggest struggles, and his space has an additional challenge in the pipeline. Discount TopLot holds a short-term lease, and its lifespan in the former QFC depends on how long it takes the development slated for the block to get its demolition permit. Which means you might have only a year to get in for your cheap bedsheets, above-ground pool, knife set, or body lotion before he has to move.