July 17, 2006 03:18 pm
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While visiting northern Alabama, one of the most unusual places I found goes by the catchy name Unclaimed Baggage.
The center, located in Scottsboro (about 40 miles east of Huntsville), is snuggled in the foothills of the Appalachians. Nearby is 70,000-acre Guntersville Lake, cited as one of the top three bass fishing lakes in America.
The enterprise couldn’t be more aptly named.
Founded in 1970 by insurance salesman Doyle Owens, Unclaimed Baggage began as a few card tables used for selling luggage accumulated by an airline transporter. The business has since contracted with multiple major airlines and freight haulers to purchase, sight unseen, baggage for which owners can’t be found.
According to spokeswoman Brenda Cantrell, more than 1 million bags are checked in with the airlines each year. Of these, less than 1 percent of all mishandled bags end up completely lost and unclaimed after an extensive 90-day search. The vast majority of these, she said, are transported to the Center in Scottsboro.
Eventually, truckloads of bags and passenger property make their way to Unclaimed Baggage, and a whopping 1 million items are processed annually. Most of these items are resold in the center’s sprawling, 40,000-square-foot, glass-and-granite shopping facility, almost as large as a city block.
About 60 percent of the inventory is clothing. The remainder is comprised of cameras, electronics, sporting goods, jewelry, designer glasses, books and, of course, luggage — all available at 20 to 80 percent off the manufactured suggested price.
Upscale items include Hermes scarves, Gianni Versace dresses, Burberry raincoats, even a yellow silk Christian Dior jacket. Across the parking lot, the Center’s annex is stocked with unclaimed business-to-business cargo that also houses a sizable room full of paintings, framed posters and art work. (Reports say that a traveling salesman once bought a $60 painting there later valued at $15,000 to $20,000).
“We stock 7,000 items each day and dry clean about 40,000 pieces of clothing each month,” Cantrell said. “Eventually, one-third of the items is donated to charity and another third is thrown away.
“As for eyeglasses, unclaimed luggage accounts for 1 percent of all the donations distributed to the needy by the Lions Club International.”
The first thing one sees after entering the building (it resembles a large department store) is a guest book, along with a map with pins identifying the places of origin of visitors from around the globe.
“Only about 40 percent of our more than 1 million annual guests are from a 30-mile radius of Scottsboro,” Cantrell said. “The remainder are from all over the globe, and total attendance makes us the most-visited, nonadmission attraction in the state.”
The Center houses a small museum of interesting unclaimed artifacts that include the film prop Hoggle, the gnome-like gatekeeper from Jim Henson’s movie “Labyrinth;” a set of bagpipes; and several Egyptian artifacts. Other unusual items found over the years include a rare violin made by a student of Stradivarius, a 41-carat emerald appraised at $13,000 and a medicine man’s walking stick adorned with a shrunken head.
According to Cantrell, there’s only one documented case of an owner finding one of his lost items at the Center. In this instance, the man was a resident of Atlanta who found his lost ski boots in the sports section of the store.
Those with a shopping fatigue can stop at the in store café for a Starbucks latte or espresso, then head back out onto the floor to look for additional treasures.
(Dave Zuchowski writes a weekly travel column for The News.)
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