THERE may be no answer to the riddle of missing socks, but if you have ever wondered what happens to luggage that is hopelessly lost, there is a small town in Alabama where much of America’s comes to rest, at least until it is sold.
At the Unclaimed Baggage Centre (UBC) in Scottsboro, customers browse through 40,000 sq ft of space filled with digital cameras, diamond rings, DVDs, three-wheel pushchairs, Juicy Couture handbags, Tommy Hilfiger children’s wear and Ralph Lauren sweaters.
UBC, which buys lost baggage from domestic airlines, says that its business often feels like a treasure hunt. The company once found a 5.8-carat solitaire diamond ring hidden in a sock and Egyptian artefacts, including a mummified falcon, in a suitcase.
Occasionally the strategy misfires and thrifty shoppers walk out with much more than they or the store bargained for. One such customer inherited a vase bought for $60 at UBC and realised as she watched the Antiques Roadshow that it was a Limoges piece worth $18,000. A woman bought a piece of artwork for $100 and found that it was worth $25,000, while another acquired a suitcase for $6 and found $1,500 in the lining.
Brenda Cantrell, the director of retail sales and marketing, admits that such stories inspire UBC to beef up its rummaging but prefers to see the stories as positive publicity.
UBC’s trucks travel around America picking up hundreds of bags every day. The company sorts their contents for quality, dry-cleans the clothing and prices items according to brand name and style. This involves ten specialists who window-shop, scan the internet and scour magazines to stay in the know.
When merchandise arrives on the shop floor, which looks and smells nothing like a Salvation Army outlet, apparel is neatly arranged by size and style and expensive electronic equipment and jewellery are locked in glass cabinets. Customers can relax at a café with soft music.
The store sells only a third of the goods it receives, John Marshall, UBC’s president, points out, and consigns the rest either to charity or to the bin. “If it has a hole in it or a stain in it, we don’t put it on the floor,” Mr Marshall says.
UBC draws one million customers from 50 countries and the four corners of America every year. It estimates that half its business comes from local traffic and the remainder from bigger-spending, longdistance customers. Ms Cantrell notes that a revival in motor-home travel is boosting business and says that “snowbirds” — retired people on their way to Florida for the winter — spend large amounts.
The business, which is linked to both air and road travel, suffered slightly in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent rise in petrol prices. It was a blip in an otherwise robust period, as the leisure industry steadily recovered from the downturn in travel after the September 11 terrorist attacks. In the past 14 months it has reopened a store that it closed after the 2001 events and opened one new outlet. It plans to open two more next year. Sales are growing at 8 per cent to 10 per cent a year.
The business had small beginnings. In 1970 UBC’s founder, Doyle Owens, bought a consignment of lost property from the Greyhound bus company. When the pick-up truck full of goods was snapped up in one night, he realised that there was a market for second-hand goods. He approached the domestic airlines and secured exclusive contracts with some — the company cannot say which — to buy luggage whose owners could not be found. UBC has almost no competition, having perfected relationships with the airlines over 35 years.
However, Mr Marshall believes that UBC may be reaching its growth potential in the US. “There’s a finite amount of product. If we grew a bunch of stores we wouldn’t be able to stock them,” he says.
UBC could expand by striking deals with international carriers and taking in bags from global flights, or by launching operations overseas. Mr Marshall says that international airlines have expressed interest in the company.
“We never rule it out, but it’s a different market. Every country is a little different over in Europe with the rules and regulations and how to handle things. Right now we just haven’t found a way to do it.”
In the meantime, UBC customers such as Alan Garner may be wearing your cagoule. The 38-year-old supervisor for the Scottsboro city schools system first visited UBC with his grandmother when he was eight. Back then he bought football boots for “next to nothing”. Now he shops there up to four times a week, picking up bargains on everything from outdoor gear to books. He recently paid $40 for a REI ski jacket that retailed at $200, $30 for a fly-fishing rod worth a similar amount and $6 apiece for the first five hardback editions of the Harry Potter series.
He says getting a “steal” on others’ lost property causes him no guilt: “Often I’ve thought how sad to lose something like that, but there’s no way to get it back to them.”
Besides, said Mr Garner, the passengers are compensated. Domestic airlines pay $2,800 per passenger for losing luggage, while international carriers pay a varying amount governed by the Montreal Convention — currently about $1,400 per passenger. Airlines are not liable for lost hand luggage.
While travellers might be shocked to see so much luggage ending up on UBC’s shelves, the US Department of Transportation says that of 2.7 million reports of mishandled baggage filed by passengers on domestic flights for the nine months to September last year, 98 per cent were solved within 48 hours.
Mr Garner, on whom UBC has clearly left an impression, has never lost anything.
New York state of absent mind
PROSTHETIC legs are among the many items left on New York subway trains, a fact that baffles Tommy Dimopoulos, the NYC Transit official in charge of lost property, among other divisions.
“I don’t even want to venture how they’ve lost those. I’m not trying to be funny but if you need that to walk, how do you lose it?”
NYC Transit received 8,274 lost items in the year to November 2005, of which 1,405 were claimed. Far more items are lost than found; the unit reported a staggering 33,776 calls from people seeking their belongings last year.
Among the things handed in, said Mr Dimopoulos, were laptop computers, wallets stuffed with cash, jewellery, golf clubs, even the occasional chainsaw. Around Christmas time the unit is flooded.
“People do their shopping, they’re in a rush to get off the train; we get newly wrapped packages from Bloomingdale’s that get turned in.”
Passengers are given six months and 15 days to claim their property, which is kept at the Lost Property Office at the 34th Street and Eighth Avenue station. There it is categorised and shelved until the office runs out of space, which is every two to three years.
Then the lost property department holds an auction, which is managed by its Asset Recovery Unit. Its most recent sale, in May, was conducted online and found to be more cost effective than previous sales run by public auctioneers. Buyers are usually private business owners who are required to purchase in bulk.
“They can’t just buy one cell phone,” says Mr Dimopoulos, “They have to take all 3,000.” The May auction raised $18,000, which was ploughed back into the transit system’s general fund.
New York’s taxi passengers are more forgetful than their subway counterparts, if a report from the Taxi and Limousine Commission is any indication. The group received 85,138 lost and found reports last year. Their lost property is handed over to the police.
