AIR TRAVEL Luggage lost, but bargains found

One secondhand store sells just about anything that can be found in luggage.
By DENIS HORGAN
HARTFORD COURANT
SCOTTSBORO, Ala. -- It is the elephant's graveyard of luggage, the Ali Baba's cave of baggage, the ultimate cemetery, RIP, for suitcases gone astray.
Nearly a million people a year visit the "Unclaimed Baggage Center" in this small, distressed community in the foothills of the Appalachians to see what they can find for themselves in what someone else has lost.
What they find are silk scarves for $10, fancy suits for $40, cameras for $30, jewelry for half-price, men's dress shirts for $3, books for a buck, CDs by the hundreds, eyeglasses galore. If you want a nice wedding gown, they have one for $30. Need a hammer, a handgun or an umbrella? Looking for dresses, skirts, fur coats, lingerie? They have them by the hundreds.
There are about 2 billion pieces of luggage flying this way and that as hundreds of millions of people travel each year. The law of averages dictates that some luggage will get lost. It's not much, as percentages go -- one-half of 1 percent -- but bags do become separated from their owners. Nearly all of those -- 98 percent -- are reunited quickly.
But when you're talking about 2 billion pieces of luggage, even the small 2 percent of the one-half of 1 percent indicates that about 200,000 bags never find their way home again. The labels have been torn off. There's no identification. They end up as orphans, floating unloved through the system.
They have to end up someplace. They don't just vanish into some Bermuda Triangle; it's more like a Scottsboro Triangle.
Policy on ownership
After making the three-month effort to locate the owners, then holding the bags for an additional 100 days, airlines have to do something with the bags. So they sell them by the pound or square foot to the Unclaimed Baggage Center.
They arrive in Scottsboro by truck from just about every airline in the country. They are opened, and the contents are examined and sorted out by a staff of about 30 triage folks. If there are things worth keeping, they are cleaned and put up for sale at the company's huge showroom. Every day, 7,000 or so new items are added to the inventory.
Some of the rest is donated to charities. Some is simply thrown away.
"It works out for everyone," says Brenda Cantrell, a company spokeswoman, walking a visitor through the 30,000-square-foot showroom.
"The traveler has already been compensated by the insurance companies. The airlines get to get rid of all those bags. We get to sell things and, most important, people get great bargains."
Variety of items
The quality of the goods is about what you might expect it to be, considering the secondhand nature of what's on sale. People tend to bring some of their best clothes on a trip -- but they also tend to bring stuff they're comfortable with from having worn it awhile. This is not secondhand junk or a tag sale of discards, but often people's Sunday best on display.
"When this began," says Cantrell, a Scottsboro native who often buys things for her young family at the center, "travel was more expensive, so you tended to have a better-off range of people with more expensive clothes and items. Today it's more democratic, so the range is broader."
The center is the brainchild of Doyle and Sue Owens, Scottsboro residents who in 1970 saw the opportunity to remarket things from lost luggage from the local bus company. The idea grew to include a few airlines, and then to today, when just about every domestic air carrier does business with Scottsboro, a community of little one-story houses. The 15,000 townsfolk have been hit hard by factory closings, so the 130 jobs at the baggage center are an important part of the economy.
Company officials won't talk about corporate affairs or finances, and visitors are not allowed to watch the bags being opened. The company is now run by the Owens' son, Bryan, and has withstood several modest challenges over time to be the sole such enterprise of any size in the nation.
People come from all around the region to shop at the center. On a recent visit, cars from nine states could be seen in the large parking lot -- and that was before lunch. A guest book registers cheery comments from people all around the United States and overseas.
Finding surprises
Beyond the shopping bonanza, there are things to be learned by what people pack.
"You could wonder why anyone would pack food in a suitcase, sandwiches and bread and fruit," Cantrell says. "But it happens a lot. After the months it takes for a bag to get here, those can be pretty smelly bags. And it probably says something about some people that we have three trays of men's wedding rings that men have put into the baggage instead of wearing."
The center's staffers have found handguns and even a rattlesnake (no longer alive). They have discovered drugs and contraband (turned over to authorities). They find the expected amounts of dirty clothing, souvenirs and cosmetics.
(Jewelry is appraised locally and sold for half the appraisal price.)
"There's so much more electronic items than before," says Cantrell, a bright spirit attuned to the local commandments that say everyone must smile all the time and say "Hey" instead of "Hi" and always be helpful, cheery and in good spirits.
"People are always leaving their glasses behind, and we sell them to folks who like the frames," she says. "Discmen are common, laptops. Most of our business is in clothing, but there's just about anything you could imagine being turned up at one time or another."
This includes bagpipes, paintings, statues, hats, sweatshirts, crutches, strollers, a rare violin, fur coats, CDs, DVDs, BVDs and just about everything else. People carry the strangest things. There are gewgaws and oddities obviously bought as gifts, items stuffed in a bag as a treasure but now gone with the wind.
Not many bags
What the luggage center doesn't offer, oddly, is a lot of luggage. It seems that after being kicked around the system for six months, after being opened without courtesy of keys, suitcases tend to show the wear and tear. The center does sell baggage, but not all that much.
Sadly, the odds are against your happening upon your missing argyle socks, and the history of the place is not rich with incidents of people discovering their long-lost hats or mittens.
"In all the years, we've only had one instance of that. A man from Atlanta visited, and he bought some nice ski boots for his wife. She needed them because hers had gotten lost. Sure enough, they were the same ones. But that was the only time we know of when that has happened.
"No, what's lost is usually lost for good."
Lost for the good of shoppers at the Unclaimed Baggage Center, surely.
XThe Unclaimed Baggage Center is at 509 W. Willow St. (Route 35) in Scottsboro, Ala. It is open daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. For information, call (256) 259-1525 or visit www.unclaimedbaggage.com on the Web.