Every day, a hundred thousand people travel through the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, lugging an astonishing quantity of stuff. They leave for vacations, board connecting flights, and come home from business trips. About 5,000 times a year, they leave things behind. They leave cell phones and carry-ons. They leave prayer rugs and acupuncture instruments and snow shovels. They leave rings on the edge of sinks.
Airlines are responsible for things left in boarding areas; items left at security checkpoints are the problem of the U.S. Transportation Safety Administration. But the vast majority of lost and forgotten items, the things left in food courts and taxis and on concourses, become the responsibility of the Metropolitan Airports Commission.
The airport lost-and-found’s one full-time employee and one part-timer have a laudable record of returning things—a one-hundred percent success rate on cell phones and nearly as high on other items that contain clues to owners’ identities. But even after a legally mandated wait of ninety days, about ten percent of the airport’s material orphans aren’t claimed.
That stuff—fishing tackle, sleeping bags, tripods, iPods, Mason Jennings CDs, and, not long ago, a freezer of elk meat bagged in Montana—finds its way to JoAnn Brown, who has a quintessentially bureaucratic title: Purchasing Department Buyer/Seller. Armed with a digital camera and marketing expertise acquired from decades of haunting garage sales, Brown auctions it off.
An animated, chatty woman, Brown grew up on a farm in Canby, in southwest Minnesota. She got hauled to a lot of farm auctions as a child, and it’s her opinion that surplus property disposal should be fun. That’s why she hangs onto the unclaimed goods until she can organize them into themed lots.
“I thought about how to get people’s attention,” she explains. “I used to go to Dayton’s Jubilee Sale and the Daisy Sale and I thought, ‘These [auctions] should have names.’”
When Brown has accumulated, say, five pieces of baseball equipment, she bundles them in a suitable piece of luggage—there are so many suitcases and duffels, the only way she can get rid of them is to use them as free packaging—and thinks up a cheerful name, like “Grand Slam,” or “Batter Up!” Her favorites are lots organized around a holiday, such as a collection of jewelry for Valentine’s Day.
When she’s composed a lot, she noodles around on the Internet to establish minimum bids, then posts pictures on the MAC’s website, with a deadline for bidding.
Lot Six of “Just for Fun” (minimum bid $11.10) was made up of things lost by little girls: a Bijoux Terner black purse, a Hello Kitty calculator “with auto clock,” a Hello Kitty notebook, a My Little Pony tablet, a Happy Aviator date/address book, a tube containing twelve colored pencils, a Minnesota key chain, a Bratz metal lunch box, two Swirly Girl ponytail holders, a package of Tara hair accessories, and a three-inch flying pig.
“Playing Through” was composed mostly of golf equipment, including ten Warrior irons in a Bag Boy Ultra Light blue bag ($59.25), a burgundy bag containing right-handed clubs ($79.45) and, inexplicably, a poster with a depressing painting of a Teamsters meeting ($6.95).
Half-finished lots wait in the purchasing department’s conference room. On a recent day, there were two stuffed penguins, a shark, and a turtle, all packed in a purple duffel and waiting for an aquatic theme to present itself. Brown had already decided on “Stress Relief” for a nylon hanging chair and an aluminum racquet—“After they exercise then they can sit and relax”—but she needed some more stuff to round out the lot.
She’s always amazed to end up with canes and crutches: “You wonder how people get out of the airport without those.” Brown is equally astonished at the things people don’t try to reclaim—a German GPS system, for instance—and the fact that folks are still, by and large, good-hearted enough to turn in jewelry and electronics and other things they could just as easily pocket. “We get wallets belonging to elderly people, with thousands in cash sometimes, turned in intact,” she says.
Besides the auctions, Brown also gives a lot of airport booty to charities. Books go to libraries, and there are several places she sends children’s clothes. Last fall, a bunch of kids’ coats went to flood relief organizations in southern Minnesota.
The lost-and-found auctions bring in $30,000 to $40,000 a year, according to her supervisor, purchasing manager Don Olson, a voluble man with an office full of Thomas Kinkade paintings. That’s on top of revenue raised by selling goods the MAC no longer uses—a double-wide office trailer, a snowplow, outdated security cameras—and items seized by the airport police.
Brown’s been holding sales for twenty years, but things have really taken off since the advent of eBay; she has developed a list of 100,000 bidders who get notices by email. Winners have to drive out to the MAC’s offices to get their loot, so she’s gotten to know some of the regulars.
“It’s fair,” she says. “People pay what they want, and it’s local. The money stays right here.”
Leave a Reply Cancel reply