
A store in Scottsboro, Alabama, USA, sells abandoned or lost personal items at 20 to 80 percent off their retail price. It’s popular with bargain hunters not only because of the lower prices but also for its large selection of merchandise.
Each year, millions of clothing items, pieces of jewelry, electronics, books, and other things occupy the sprawling store that opened in 1970. As its name implies, more than 90 percent of the items in the store come from unclaimed lost luggage of flyers.
Air travelers get separated from their suitcases due to mishandling by airlines, but most are returned to their owners. For the small fraction of unclaimed suitcases, they accumulate over time after airlines spend up to four months trying to find the owners. Eventually, they are disposed of by selling them as is to Unclaimed Baggage, CNN reports.
Unclaimed Baggage receives a million visitors yearly while also selling to international customers who purchase items online, owner Bryan Owens said, according to CNN. Its appeal comes from unusual items that are not ordinarily sold at conventional stores.
Examples are displayed in a museum within the store, such as a funeral casket key, a suitcase packed with wigs, a jar full of shark teeth, a suit of armor, a set of bagpipes, a Gucci bag filled with Egyptian historical artifacts, and a puppet — of Hoggle, a grumpy dwarf — used in the 1986 fantasy movie Labyrinth, according to CNN.
Since airlines compensate travelers for their lost luggage, it is safe to buy items at Unclaimed Baggage. Bags found elsewhere, however, could lead to trouble, as happened to a company executive in Japan.
The 26-year-old man, working in Nasukarasuyama, Tochigi Prefecture, stumbled upon a bag belonging to a 55-year-old man who had left it in the toilet of a convenience store in July.
The owner was able to reclaim his bag when he returned to the store but complained that the money inside the wallet in the bag was gone.
Police investigated the theft. Upon analyzing the store’s surveillance camera footage, they identified the thief who took 600,000 yen from the wallet of the bag’s owner.
They arrested the thief, who admitted to stealing the money so he could spend it for leisure, Japan Today reports.