Often, sellers will invent destinations to
give their travels a direction. Anderson likes
to follow bands. He recently followed the
Mountain Goats across four states and is
planning to do the same this summer when
Tool goes on tour. National parks are a
popular destination, which can create a
distinctly American-feeling juxtaposition of
natural splendor and commerce, big stores
and open sky. Iles reminisces about waking
up in his van to see the sun rising over the
Grand Canyon after a weeks-long tour of
closing Toys R Us stores. Anderson takes
detours for roadside attractions like the
largest basket in Ohio, and he always stops
for caves.
But sometimes the Amazon app, acting as
a Geiger counter of consumer demand, will
light up on something strange, and it’s time
to chase a product. Anderson recently hit
half a dozen Walmarts buying Game of
Thrones Oreos. You learn to develop an eye
for things that could set off the scanner.
“Ooh, weird cleaning products—I love
’em,” Anderson says as he leaves a TJ
Maxx aisle full of plastic avocado-half con-
tainers and Jim Beam–branded steak knives.
There are objects that are intentionally
scarce and marketed as such, like the Oreos,
and then there are everyday things that sim-
ply vanish in the churn of seasonal redesigns
and obsolescence. The attachments people
develop for these unremarkable commodi-
ties can be intense, at least as measured by
their prices on Amazon. For Anderson, the
holy grail is the Bounce Dryer Bar, a $5
plastic oblong you affix to the dryer rather
than adding a dryer sheet to each load.
Now discontinued, a two-pack sells on
Amazon for $300. Anderson once hunted
a particular brand of discontinued dental
floss across the Big Lots of America, buying
six-packs for 99 cents and selling them on
Amazon for more than $100 apiece.
He has no idea why someone would pay so
much for such things, but the scanner tells
him people do. His best guesses are melan-
choly ones. Discontinued cat food is a big
seller, which he didn’t understand until his
mom’s cat grew old and senile and refused
to eat any of the new flavors.
He once saw a post from a parent whose
son was autistic and drank from the same
plastic cup every day for 20 years. The cup
eventually disintegrated, and he didn’t want
to drink from any other vessel.
“I’ve always wondered if it’s something
like that,” Anderson says. “But it can’t be
that common. Plus, I don’t see how you get
that attached to it. I can see a cup, but I
don’t get a dryer bar.” In any case, demand
exists. Someone bought a $300 dryer bar
last month.The last word^37
AP
L
IFE ON THE road isn’t easy. Sellers
“don’t realize how isolating it can be at
times,” says Iles, who travels between
New York and Florida in a Ford conversion
van. It also takes a tremendous amount of
work to be financially viable. While there is
a robust economy of influencers promisingit able, skull-covered American Sniper–
branded car seat covers with gun holsters,
plastic succulents, TVs, drones, and a toy
that was labeled simply “egg.”
“What kind of weird parent gets their kid
an egg?” Anderson asks.
There’s nothing quite like a clearance sec-
tion for feeling the intensity and fleetingness
of consumer desire: all these plastic leftovers
of huge public appetites, which were shaped
for a time by enormous companies and
have since moved on to robot monkey fin-
ger puppets or whatever. The scale is over-
whelming. Anderson recalls an auction for
a pallet of robotic hamsters called ZhuZhu
Pets, which were briefly hot in 2009, with a
Disney Channel cartoon and video games.
The pallet was No. 20,000. “That means
somebody imported 20,000 pallets at least.
That is an insane number.” Doing the math,
he comes up with almost 800 tractor trailers
full of robot hamsters.
I was surprised at first by how often the
nomads distanced themselves from material
culture, speaking of their customers and fel-
low shoppers from an almost anthropologi-
cal remove. But it makes sense when you
realize that they make most of their money
by immersing themselves in the pre-holiday
buying frenzy. Anderson has Thanksgiving
with his mom a day early so he can venture
out to the stores, a tradition that dates back
to his time working retail. He always brings
a buddy; it’s too harrowing to face alone.
He’s seen hungry-eyed adults fighting over
TVs and parents crying out in desperation
that, without a particular toy, their kid’s
Christmas will be ruined.
“Too many people are unhappy, and I don’t
think they know why they’re unhappy, so
they’re like, ‘I’m going to buy a new toy,
and that’ll make me happy,’ and it does
not,” he says. “So many people are owned
by their possessions.”
Anderson is still eager to travel, he says, as
we sit outside at a Starbucks along a busy
road, cars whooshing home in the evening
rush hour. He’s had depression for a lot of
his life, and when he’s traveling is when he’s
happiest. Yesterday, he drove through the
Pine Barrens, which was beautiful. Tonight,
he might drive down to Philadelphia and
see his dad, or up through Jersey to get din-
ner with a fellow nomad.
“It’s kind of nice to just be carefree, you
know? I’m gonna see.” Then it’s probably
off to Harrisburg, Pa., where he recently hit
a rich vein of discontinued Pop-Tarts.This story originally appeared in TheVerge
.com on July 10 and has been edited by
The Week. Used with permission.Closeouts can turn into a feeding frenzy.
riches through retail arbitrage, the actual
margins are unforgiving, and the practice
has been declining for years.Iles, who was studying to be a music
teacher before he decided it wasn’t a
viable career, pays himself about $40,000
a year and works long and strange hours,
sometimes overturning shopping carts in
Walmart parking lots at 3 a.m. to serve
as makeshift countertops as he packages
goods to send to Amazon. Anderson says he
makes “about $100,000” a year, of which
arbitrage represents roughly half.
The nomads must also endure the over-
whelming feeling of being confronted
with so much stuff. I started to experience
this as the afternoon wore on. By 4 p.m.,
Anderson and I had been to Target, Ulta,
TJ Maxx, Walmart, Kohl’s, and had moved
on to GameStop. We had seen quivers of
yoga mats, pro-wrestling action figures,
vast Nerf arsenals, and copper-plated pans.
There were plush Star Wars droids, plas-
tic dinosaurs, Sour Patch cereal, Churro
Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal (weird
cereal can be lucrative, Anderson says),
Elmos, Teddy Ruxpins, glittering purple
bath bombs, body mist that a rival seller
had registered as weighing 500 pounds so
the scanner app registered it as un prof-