Unused Luggage Sitting In Closets Is Worth Billions, But Shipping Costs Keep Us From Turning Them Into Cash

There are billions of dollars of used luggage sitting in closets that will never be used again. There’s a market for used bags, but most never gets sold into it. And the reason why used luggage isn’t a bigger industry, except in niche cases, is an interesting one.

Why isn't used baggage a bigger business?

— Kumar🇺🇸 (@datarade) June 6, 2026

There are currently over 72,000 results on eBay for ‘used luggage’. That includes 5,961 results for Tumi luggage listings and 2,889 Rimowa listings in the category (that doesn’t make all of these bags real or in reasonably sellable condition, of course).

That’s a snapshot in time, not everything sells, but over the course of a year transaction volume is higher and we’re probably talking about more than $25 million in luggage sales on that platform but less than $100 million – very back of the envelope.

For bulky, mid-value items like most luggage Facebook Marketplace is probably a bigger factor. And of course there are other sites like Craigslist, and offline thrift sales. There’s clearly a real secondary market in luggage, especially for premium brand luggage like Tumi, Briggs & Riley, and Rimowa.

In total it looks like at least a $500 million – $1 billion market, maybe one-third in the United States? That compares against $43 billion for new luggage in 2025.

But there’s also probably 70 – 140 million pieces of luggage sitting unused in closets, implying a resale value over a billion dollars. Globally there could be 10 times that much. That’s just one bag per five people. Not everyone is a traveler, but that’s also the point, non-travelers may have traveled at one point but don’t really travel any longer or again but still have that bag sitting unused.

And that’s precisely the issue: there’s tremendous value in total, billions of dollars, sitting dormant. Some of the higher value individual items get resold, but most of the items are low value on an individual basis. People don’t bother going through the transaction costs (especially including effort) to learn how to sell and actually sell over $30 in proceeds, with platform costs coming out of that gross.

• Clean the item, photograph it, list it
  
• Answer questions from the broader internet
  
• Depending on the platform, meet a potential buyer
  
• Or pay boxing and shipping costs
  
• Deal with complaints

Shipping costs are going to be a significant portion of the value of the lower end of the market (and it makes sense then to buy those items locally new from Target or Costco). The Alchian–Allen theorem explains that when a fixed per unit shipping cost (or similar cost) is added regardless of quality, the higher-quality good becomes cheaper relative to the lower-quality one.

High quality wine gets shipped rather than sold locally. Apples aren’t better in Washington State than elsewhere. Oranges aren’t actually better in Florida. You get great coffee beans in the United States even though the best coffee isn’t grown here.

Reportedly U.S. households sit on 21.1 billion unused items worth about $560 billion with most used items never being sold into re-use. They sell 13.7 billion used items per year. Most consumers have bought used items while a majority have sold them.

So there’s a robust two-sided market for used items, including used luggage. But much of it is too low value to be worth the transaction costs, or to overcome option value (the notion that you might need the item some day and need to replace it, and you think of the cost as new precisely because used items aren’t high enough value to be sold much of the time).