Avery Trufelman

To quote a 1947 article from the Quartermaster Review, imagine a warehouse capable of holding a million dollars worth of property.

It would take 34,000 such buildings to accommodate the War Assets Administration's total inventory.

Army surplus stores were rare oddities before World War II.

After World War II, they explode.

They are everywhere because it is so easy to buy up large amounts of cheap inventory.

In just one month, according to a January 1946 Newsweek article, the War Assets Administration sold off four million pairs of cotton and wool socks

1,895,000 pairs of work clothes, 10,000 khaki shirts, 884,000 navy raincoats, 5,000 parkas.

I could keep going.

This was all in one month.

It was all for a song.

The War Assets Administration could not get rid of this stuff fast enough.

Yeah, after World War II, I would say there was a generation that just saw it as like the place to get underwear and like a place to get jeans and socks.

Yeah, exactly.

It was the Uniqlo of the 50s.

You know, you need something, you just go to the surplus store.

A lot of gear companies that we know and love today got their start by selling surplus, or they sort of padded their inventory by selling surplus.

Like REI was a great example.

REI

You know, they've been around for a long time.

They've been around since the 30s, but a member of their co-op was a veteran and was able to get early access to some of the surplus stuff.