When BinStar opened its third location in Saugus, Massachusetts, on May 11, the scene was “crazy,” founder and CEO Jack Laughlin told Retail Brew. Cars orbited the lot, whose ~200 spaces were filled, and as many as 500 shoppers lined up outside the store.

“I went to Walmart three times just across the street to get water, snacks, drinks [and] sodas to give to people waiting,” Laughlin—who volunteered as a copy editor and writer for Morning Brew while in college—told Retail Brew.

It was in keeping with what Laughlin described as the “loosely organized chaos” of BinStar, which opened its first store in Avon, Massachusetts, in June 2023, with plans to open its fourth, in Kingston, Massachusetts, on June 8. Like bin stores across the country, BinStar is making lemonade out of particularly mouth-puckering lemons: the avalanche of e-commerce returns.

• Returns for US retailers were valued at $743 billion in 2023, according to the National Retail Federation.
• The returns rate was 14.5% of sales for 2023, NRF found.

Many retailers find the challenge of reselling returns so intractable that they throw them away, with returned inventory accounting for 9.6 billion pounds of landfill waste annually, according to Optoro, a returns management company. Bin stores aim to divert those returns from trash bins to their bins, which in BinStar’s case are wheeled metal crates that look like the offspring of a shopping cart and dumpster.

Keep reading here.—AAN

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Dollar stores may have their value proposition spelled out in their names. But that doesn’t mean they can rest on their laurels when it comes to getting increasingly cautious consumers in the door.

Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos told shareholders on Thursday that “softness in sales” in Q1 reflected “continued pressure” on its core consumers. He added that shoppers are “very value-oriented,” which was evident from an uptick in sales of private label brands and items priced at or below $1.

But the discount chain isn’t just waiting around for shoppers to get their mojo back.

While rival Dollar Tree is making big moves such as shutting down hundreds of stores and acquiring hundreds more from the recently bankrupt 99 Cents Only, Dollar General is working behind the scenes to adapt its operations with the goal of attracting cost-conscious customers.

Cutting inventory: CFO Kelly Dilts said the company continues to cut back on inventory, reducing its nonconsumable stock by 19.1% compared to last year, which is freeing up cash for the business and mitigating the risk of shrink. She added that shrink continues to be “our most significant headwind.”

This goal relates to another ongoing initiative at Dollar General: a commitment to achieve a net reduction in 1,000 SKUs by the end of the year.

Keep reading here.—AV

T-Mobile will buy the majority of UScellular’s wireless business, the major carrier announced Tuesday, shrinking the number of smaller retailers that cater to more value-conscious customers. Depending on who you ask, this is either great or terrible news.

Washington-based T-Mobile said it will pay roughly $4.4 billion to take over most of UScellular—including its customers and some of its valuable wireless spectrum licenses—and that it aims to close the deal next year following regulatory review. It also includes access to many UScellular tower sites, although UScellular will retain ownership of them.

For T-Mobile, the deal represents a way to break into a different part of the wireless market without curating an entirely new customer base, Chris Stafford, an M&A partner at West Monroe, said.

“It just provides T-Mobile with a greater market share of the broader cell market,” he told Tech Brew. “The other route for them would be to compete in that space on their own and develop their own products and offerings to kind of serve that end of the market. But UScellular has already done that.”

The deal serves up several positives, according to a press release from T-Mobile, including increased wireless coverage for T-Mobile customers, more plan choices for UScellular customers, and expanded home internet options. For some consumer advocates, however, this consolidation doesn’t translate into an easy win.

Keep reading at Tech Brew here.—KG

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