“Every day” is how often Shannon Kincer, 58, of South Toledo, stops by her local liquidation store, Ohio Liquidation Pros, 720 Illinois Ave,. in Maumee, in pursuit of that good deal.
“I save a lot of money. A lot of money,” Ms. Kincer said, as she cashed her cart of eclectically sorted items out and pushed them to her minivan.
Across the store’s concrete floor on a recent Tuesday afternoon, people rummaged from large wooden tables equipped with guardrails to keep the items from falling off. Anything on those tables was only $3.
“It would have been about $30,” Ms. Kincer said, as she piled on an out-of-season, marshmallow Halloween mask she looked up online for the original price, dropping it in her bag like putting a cherry on a sundae. “I’m paying $3,” she revealed.
Paying 10 percent of retail prices does seem like the icing on the cake to any bargain shopper, especially as inflation roars, but how does this work? How does a liquidation store manage to sell items for pennies on the dollar? And how can customers leave Luckey Liquidations on a Friday, only paying $0.50 per item from the bins they set up?
“It’s all a numbers game,” said Nick Boltz, the owner of Luckey Liquidations at 228 Main St., in the Wood County community of Luckey.
As the full scope of the pandemic began to play out in 2020, people faced a lot of downtime.
“I tried my hand at crocheting and arts and crafts,” Anita Daigneault, 38, the owner of Ohio Liquidation Pros in Maumee said, as she searched for a hobby to pass the time under lockdown. “And just, that’s a no,” she said.
On a whim, Mrs. Daigneault bought an Amazon mystery box for the fun of it, and she discovered one thing she did like to do.
“Well, I don’t need any of the stuff in this box,” she said. “But I posted it online, and like tripled my money.”
Online roots
And from there the hobby of buying and reselling things organically morphed into a business, relying heavily on Facebook to connect with friends and family, then friends of friends, right on out into several degrees of separation.
“I used to work with Susan in the hospital,” Danielle Geroski, 37, of Portage, Ohio, said, referring to Susan Shroyer, one of the owners of Shroyer’s Steals and Deals, another similar liquidation reseller out of Perrysburg at 27475 Holiday Lane, suite 6.
“I saw them share some of their deals and then the Facebook page, so I followed them.”
And now Ms. Geroski visits Shroyer’s at its physical location that grew out of the online presence.
“Because I knew her personally, I would contact her and then arrange pickups,” she said.
Facebook intervened in the infant stages of what would become brick-and-mortar resellers, that took leftovers from corporate retailers, and resold items for a profit, still leaving the customer with a handsome discount.
“We spent really the last three years, building our customer base on Facebook,” Mrs. Shroyer said.
And these connections were strong.
“We weren’t worried,” Mr. Boltz said, referring to the money put down to buy the location in Luckey, Ohio, for the store. “Because we already had a following,” he said referring to his Facebook contacts.
Rural ties
Rural parts of northwest Ohio such as Pemberville, Luckey, and Woodville had already expected name-brand goods from Mr. Boltz and his wife, Kimberly.
“It was like 82 percent were against a website,” Mr. Boltz said, referring to when he put a Facebook poll up asking if his customers would prefer moving their platform over to website made by the Boltzes. “They wanted to just do and how we’ve been doing it.”
Relying on Facebook for their income made the Shroyers a little nervous, but ultimately the move to a physical location was out of practicality.
“We’d have people over for a cookout, and we’d have to hide stuff in closets,” Mrs. Boltz said, recalling some of the moments the business began to take up some of their personal space.
This problem was familiar to the Daigneaults, as well, as their business expanded.
“And once we got bigger, we were actually going and buying full pallets,” Mrs. Daigneault said. “It went from a little table in my basement to now I’ve got a pallet in my garage, to now we’ve got four or five pallets in my garage.”
“And he was like, ‘OK, I can’t get to my tools,’” she said.
Mrs. Daigneault dreams of one day expanding into “the old Andersons and have 100 tables.”
This is because bigger is better when dealing with liquidation reselling.
“The people that buy directly from Amazon are buying multiple trucks at a time not just one or two,” Michael Daigneault said.
When Mr. Daigneault Talks about trucks, he’s talking about semi-trucks, and he mentioned that a semi-truck full of goods is about 24 pallets of assorted goods.
“Most of the brokers sell those individual trucks,” he said. “At that point, it kind of is a trickle-down effect.”
And this trickle-down effect is how each of these businesses got their start, and where people are still getting their start.
“I just like to see what he buys,” Kloe Moehling, 17, of Perrysburg, said about her new boyfriend, Connor Sniadanko, 17, of Perrysburg, who makes some extra money in the summers with items he finds and resells online.
“I thought it was so weird, but then I just come here, and you find so many little things,” she said.
A look inside
Overstock, slight alterations of seasonal items, and closed store branches are all part of the equation when it comes to why items are up for sale. But all three grassroots resellers stay away from dreaded returns, because all three said the quality becomes suspect.
“There’s a lot of risk and reward in this business,” Mr. Boltz said. “So when the rewards come in, put them in your pocket and save them, because there’s gonna be a loss coming sometime.”
Losses happen oftentimes because pallets or truckloads don’t have good descriptions, so when resellers buy them it’s unclear what they are buying. Mr. Daigneault had the unfortunate encounter with a broker who completely burned him and didn’t even ship $16,000 worth of product.
“He had a good name,” Mr. Daigneault said. “But he also had trucks that he brokered.”
“He got however many trucks that were extremely bad, and he couldn’t recover,” Mr. Daigneault said, explaining the volatility of the business, where people don’t know what products they might end up with.
Within one week, Mr. Daigneault said he could expect about a tractor-trailer’s worth of goods that he’ll throw out on his floor and be ready for another the next week. With turnover like this, Ohio Liquidation Pros is able to set up their store with super deals that make customers feel like they’re at a Black Friday sale.
“Finding things that you’re not looking for” is the favorite part of going to Liquidation Pros for Lorri Wonnell, 62, of Maumee, who said she wasn’t leaving without finding a deal.
But Sundays are the big day, when new stock gets thrown in the bins, and every item, regardless of worth, is $7. Each subsequent day is less expensive for the bins, down to $1 on Wednesday, until the bins are replenished the next week.
“When we open [on Sundays] that’s when the initial rush is,” said Brieanna Daigneault, 19, daughter of Anita and Michael, showing photos of people waiting outside for the store to open.
Adding up the savings
The savings to be had are extreme if the store has something relevant to the customer. The Daigneaults showed off higher priced items not available in the dollar bins such as wine coolers retailing for $185, but selling for $60, LED projectors $90 at a regular retailer, but sold at their store for $40, and a plethora of power tools at half price.
Young Daigneault even remembered selling a $3,200 computer for $1,200.
This similar business model is available at Luckey Liquidations. Its stock is designed to provide essentials for rural Ohio communities.
“I’m OK with $50/$60 items,” Mr. Boltz said, explaining that the lower valued items come with less extreme strings attached.
Shuffling through a trailer full of items he pulled out a shaving kit with a clear $19 value printed right on the case he was selling for $6.
The Boltzes recently transitioned out of their full-time factory jobs and wanted to provide a store with essentials for people in Luckey.
Mr. Boltz, who grew up there, introduced the village as a community without a gas station so much of what they offer is practical: clothes, bathroom supplies, and kids’ toys.
It doesn’t mean they don’t have treasure finds, but their store focuses more on creating a shopping experience at rebated prices for a community the Boltz couple knows well.
Similarly, the Shroyers are working with a smaller space, limiting the items they can sell, so they’re just trying to figure what works for their customers.
“We have all these cleaning products, and they don’t want to buy them half off because they get points at Kroger,” CJ Shroyer, the husband of Susan Shroyer and the owner of Shroyer’s Steals and Deals, said.
In between Mrs. Shroyer’s job as a nurse and Mr. Shroyer’s flooring business, the two are trying to make ends meet for them and their five children.
“We kind of needed to do something to start supplementing the income,” Mr. Shroyer said, and they found out during the pandemic that they have a talent for buying and reselling overstock.
This newest liquidation store had its grand opening the weekend of May 19. It is aiming to establish a customer base.
“So we like to stop by once a week, and see what’s new that they put out,” Kelcee Hall, 33, of Holland in Lucas County, said about stopping at Shroyer’s with Ms. Geroski.
“I got a cooler, some little toys and a sports bra, and I only spent $20,” she said.
“And our husbands aren’t mad at us,” she laughed.
First Published June 3, 2023, 2:30 p.m.