If you ever find yourself in Scottsboro, Alabama, a small town in the northeast of the state, you might want to visit one of the world’s most interesting stores: Unclaimed Baggage Center. It’s just as it sounds. This place actually purchases unclaimed luggage from airlines and resells the items from these bags. At the store, the luggage arrives on tractor trailers and is then divided and sorted. They dry-clean the laundry, appraise the jewelry, and test and clear out electronic equipment, then put them out for sale.
That’s right… you can buy items that belonged to someone who never claimed them at the airport. The store was started in 1970, when a man named Doyle Owens came up with the idea to buy a truckload of unclaimed baggage in Washington, D.C. He sold the contents of the luggage on card tables in a rented house until the business became big enough to open a storefront.
Over the years, Owens developed relationships with airlines, and the store, which now spans more than a city block, remains the only lost luggage store in the country. While most of the baggage comes from airlines, some also comes from trains, buses, and trucks. Unclaimed Baggage Center boasts that they put out 7,000 new items each day and wash or dry clean over 50,000 items each month.
People have found some crazy things at the store, ranging from a bag with fifty vacuum-packed frogs to a 40-carat emerald, to a 4,000-year-old Egyptian burial mask. Maybe the person whose belongings you’re sifting
through had just gone on a trek of Southeast Asia, or maybe they went on an African safari and brought back tons of awesome souvenirs they never claimed! It’s definitely a one-of-a-kind concept.