Hasta La Ideas

This holiday season, buy the forgotten dreams of the young man in 22-D

More people than ever are flying these days. Which means more people than ever are forgetting stuff on airplanes and/or experiencing lost baggage. Did you ever wonder what happens to all of those belongings that go unclaimed?

Chances are it winds up on the shelves of a store in northern Alabama, perhaps the most unique retail outfit an American shopper could visit on this Black Friday. Unclaimed Baggage, as it’s called, receives a staggering 7,000 items a day that never made it to their intended destination. The family-owned company then re-sells the best of the best, drawing a million shoppers a year to their sleepy town (population 15,000) out of a facility that “covers more than a city block.”

Before you think it’s all junk like unwanted scarves, forgotten earbuds and cheap sunglasses, think again: They do a brisk business in laptops, cell phones and iPads. “We’ve become quite the Apple Store in our own way,” Barbara Cantrell, the store’s Brand Ambassador, told The New York Times. Other big-ticket items are designer-label clothing, jewelry and high-end watches, like a $60,000 Rolex. Then there’s the weird stuff they’ve come across, like a batch of 50 vacuum-packed frogs, a 19th-Century replica suit of armor, a diamond hidden in a sock, a 4,000-year-old Egyptican burial mask, a live rattlesnake, and a freaking U.S. Air Force missile guidance system (which they returned to the government).

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