Daniel sent us this one, and it's one of those questions that seems small until you actually try to answer it. He's been trying to source used Euroboxes — the standard sixty-by-forty centimeter industrial bins — in Jerusalem. Needs a few dozen. Checks the usual places. Yad2, Facebook Marketplace, whatever the local equivalents are. A couple of plastic suppliers selling new ones at full retail, but the secondhand market? And here's the thing — these boxes are everywhere. Warehouses, moving trucks, supermarket loading docks. They're durable, standardized, perfect for reuse. So where do they all go?
This is the kind of question that would keep me up at night if I weren't already a champion sleeper. Because the surface logic is airtight. Industrial goods built to a standard, designed to survive years of abuse, used by thousands of businesses — the secondhand economics should be fantastic.
Yet Daniel's search turned up exactly zero relevant listings. Which is not a Jerusalem problem. It's not an Israel problem. It's structural.
It's structural, and it got worse. The pandemic-era supply chain disruptions created this weird dual effect — demand for storage and logistics equipment spiked while the normal channels for surplus got scrambled. A lot of the informal networks that used to move these things around got disrupted, and they haven't all come back the same way. But the deeper issue is that they were never visible to consumers in the first place.
That's the mystery we're poking at today. Not just "where are the used Euroboxes," but why a whole category of goods that should be easy to find secondhand is completely invisible to someone searching like a normal person. And what that says about the gap between how industrial markets actually work and how the rest of us think they work.
Let's define what we're actually talking about, because "Eurobox" sounds like something you'd order at a German bakery. These are DIN EN 13199 standard containers — the sixty-by-forty centimeter footprint, modular stacking system. They're designed for industrial logistics, not your hall closet. The standard means any Eurobox from any manufacturer stacks with any other, which is the whole point.
They're the shipping container of the small-object world. Standardized, interlocking, built to move through systems rather than sit on shelves.
And that standardization is what makes the secondhand economics so compelling. Shipping containers have a massive secondary market — you can buy a used forty-footer anywhere in the world. The logic should transfer. These boxes are injection-molded polypropylene, they survive years of forklift abuse, they nest when empty to save space. Perfect candidate for reuse.
Daniel's experience suggests the market for used ones doesn't exist, or at least doesn't exist anywhere he can see. He found a handful of plastic suppliers in Israel selling new — Plastopil, Keter, the usual names — at fifty to eighty shekels a box. Yad2 turned up nothing. Facebook Marketplace, nothing. It's not that he's bad at searching.
That's the thing — this isn't a Jerusalem anomaly. It's not even an Israeli anomaly. If you're a regular person in Berlin, in Chicago, in Tokyo, and you try to find used Euroboxes on consumer platforms, you hit the same wall. The supply exists. The demand exists. But the transaction doesn't happen where consumers can see it.
Which is what makes this weird. Usually when a market is invisible, it's because the thing is niche or the demand is tiny. Neither is true here. These boxes are everywhere.
And "everywhere" is doing two different kinds of work. They're everywhere in the sense that they're in active use across thousands of warehouses, distribution centers, and logistics chains. But they're not everywhere in the sense of being surplus that's available for purchase. Most of the boxes Daniel sees on loading docks are in circulation — they're not for sale. They're doing their job.
The visible Euroboxes are a mirage. They look like supply, but they're actually just inventory in motion.
The real supply — the boxes that do become surplus — moves through channels that are deliberately not consumer-facing. That's the structural gap. We're not talking about a market that's broken. We're talking about a market that works exactly as designed, just not for the person who wants twenty boxes for their garage.
The episode isn't really about plastic bins. It's about the gap between visible and invisible markets for industrial goods. How stuff actually trades hands versus how we assume it trades hands.
For Daniel specifically, it's about whether a regular person can bridge that gap without becoming a logistics insider. Whether the Eurobox underworld — and I love that phrase — is actually secretive, or just optimized for a different kind of buyer.
To figure that out, we need to understand why consumer platforms fail for this category in the first place. Because the reasons are not obvious.
Let's start with the platform design problem, because it's the one people miss. Facebook Marketplace and Yad2 are optimized for a very specific transaction shape — one item, one seller, one buyer, one handoff. You take photos of your old couch, set a price, someone messages you, they come pick it up. The entire interface is built around that flow.
A warehouse liquidating five hundred Euroboxes looks at that and sees a part-time job they didn't ask for.
To list five hundred boxes on a consumer platform, you'd need to photograph them — what, one photo of the stack? That tells the buyer nothing about condition. Individual photos of each box? Then you need a description, dimensions, condition notes. Then you field messages from fifty different people who each want eight boxes, and half of them will ask if you deliver to Haifa.
The shipping logistics alone would destroy any margin. These things are bulky even when nested. A private buyer wanting ten boxes delivered to their apartment is a completely different fulfillment problem than one buyer with a truck taking the whole pallet.
The platform design itself selects against bulk industrial goods. But there's a second layer, which is seller psychology. Businesses don't want to look like they're hawking used bins on Facebook. A warehouse manager liquidating surplus equipment doesn't think of themselves as a secondhand dealer. They think of themselves as clearing space. Listing on a consumer platform feels — I don't know, undignified? Like a restaurant selling its old plates on Craigslist instead of through an equipment liquidator.
There's also a reputational dimension. If you're a pharmaceutical distributor and you're selling used storage bins on Yad2, someone might reasonably ask what was in those bins. Selling through a known broker who supplies other industrial buyers — that signals "this is normal equipment turnover," not "we're desperate and dumping inventory.
The broker provides a kind of legitimacy laundering. Same bins, same condition, but the transaction context changes the perception entirely.
The platforms fail on listing friction, fulfillment mismatch, and seller psychology. But that's only half the story. The other half is where the transactions actually happen.
That's the part that feels like an underworld if you're outside it, but from the inside it's just — the normal way things work. The real secondary market for Euroboxes operates through pallet recyclers, logistics liquidators, warehouse clearance auctions, and intra-industry trading networks. These are closed-loop systems. Not secretive, just not public-facing.
Define closed-loop for me.
A closed-loop market is one where the buyers and sellers already know each other, or know how to find each other, and the transactions happen through established relationships rather than open listings. Think of it like — you don't find a job by standing in the town square shouting your resume. You go through networks, referrals, recruiters.
The Eurobox underworld isn't a cabal. It's just a market that never needed to become visible to consumers because the transaction sizes and buyer profiles were always B2B.
And the key mechanism is what I'd call the broker spread. Middlemen who buy pallet lots from liquidators and resell to smaller buyers. In Israel, these brokers operate through industrial zones — Talpiot in Jerusalem, the Haifa port area, the logistics corridors around Ben Gurion Airport. They don't advertise online because they don't need to. Their buyers come through word of mouth.
Let me give a concrete example. In 2024, a Tel Aviv warehouse shut down and liquidated twelve hundred Euroboxes. The entire lot moved through a private WhatsApp group of logistics brokers. Not a single box appeared on any public marketplace. Twelve hundred boxes, gone.
That's not an anomaly. That's the standard operating procedure. The pallet market works identically — you can't buy fifty used pallets on eBay. You call a pallet recycler, they quote you a price based on current inventory, and you send a truck. The transaction happens entirely outside consumer-visible channels.
Which brings us to the awkward position Daniel is in. He wants a few dozen boxes. That's too many for a consumer platform — even if listings existed, nobody's selling lots of twenty on Yad2. But it's too few for the bulk B2B market, where the minimum order is typically fifty plus. He's in the dead zone.
The dead zone is real. And it's where the opacity of the market really bites. If you're a warehouse manager with a pallet of surplus boxes, you want one phone call, one invoice, one pickup. You don't want to sell fifteen boxes to some guy with a station wagon. The economics of the transaction shape the entire market structure.
The opacity isn't a bug. It's the natural result of optimizing for the transaction sizes that actually move product. The tradeoff is that it creates high search costs for outsiders and keeps prices low for insiders who know which WhatsApp group to check.
That knowledge premium — knowing the right dealer or being in the right group — is worth real money. We're talking hundreds of shekels in savings on a bulk purchase. It's a form of what you might call an arbitrage of attention, where the value isn't in the product itself but in the connection that unlocks access to it.
The market exists, it's liquid, it's reasonably priced — but only if you know how to look at it sideways. The question is whether someone like Daniel can break in without becoming a logistics broker himself.
Let's get practical. If you're Daniel — or anyone listening who's hit this wall — there's a three-layer strategy for breaking in. Layer one is find the liquidators.
By liquidators, you don't mean people who sell washing machines at going-out-of-business sales.
I mean warehouse clearance companies, commercial moving firms that handle office and industrial relocations, logistics consultants who help businesses shutter operations. These are the people who actually encounter surplus Euroboxes in the wild. They're the primary source — the boxes enter the secondary market through them.
Rather than searching for the boxes themselves, you search for the people who clean up after warehouses.
Layer two is the brokers — industrial equipment dealers, pallet recyclers, packaging suppliers who also buy back used stock. These are the middlemen who aggregate from the liquidators and resell. In Israel, a lot of them cluster in industrial zones. Talpiot, Givat Shaul in Jerusalem. The Haifa port area. The logistics strip near Ben Gurion.
These people don't have websites with "Used Euroboxes — Click Here" buttons.
Some of them barely have websites at all. But they exist, and they're findable if you use the right search terms. The Hebrew phrase that opens doors is "ארגזים תעשייתיים משומשים" — used industrial bins. Also "משטחי פלסטיק" for plastic pallets, because the same dealers often handle both. These terms surface a different layer of the internet than "Eurobox" in English.
Which is itself a kind of key. The English search terms take you to consumer retail. The Hebrew industrial terms take you to the B2B layer.
Then layer three is the communities — the WhatsApp groups for logistics professionals in Israel, industry forums like Logistics Israel on Facebook, and the simplest but most effective tactic: direct outreach to warehouse managers. Walk into an industrial zone, ask someone at a loading dock, "Hey, do you know who handles surplus bins around here?" These people know.
The strategy is liquidators, brokers, communities. But there's one very specific tactic I want to highlight because it's the single highest-leverage move. Call three plastic suppliers — Plastopil, Keter, whoever's local — and ask one question: "Do you buy back used Euroboxes, or do you know who does?
That's the door-opener. Even if they don't buy back, they know who does, because their customers ask them the same thing. You're not asking to buy from them — you're asking them to point you toward the network.
That brings us to the pricing reality, which is where the whole thing gets interesting. Used Euroboxes in Israel, in bulk — meaning fifty plus — go for fifteen to thirty shekels each. New ones are fifty to eighty. That's a genuine discount. But it only materializes at bulk quantities.
Which is precisely Daniel's problem. He wants a few dozen. That's the awkward middle. Too many for consumer channels — which don't exist anyway — and too few for the bulk B2B market where the real discounts live. The brokers we talked about, the ones buying pallet lots from liquidators, they don't want to split a lot into fifteen-box portions. The transaction cost eats their margin.
The solution is to stop being a small buyer. Not by buying more than you need, but by becoming part of a bigger order.
Find three or four people who each want ten to twenty boxes, pool the order into a fifty-plus lot, and suddenly you're a real customer. Post on Jerusalem Anglo community boards, expat forums, neighborhood groups. "Anyone else trying to standardize their garage storage? Let's do a bulk order." The demand is probably latent — other people have the same problem, they just haven't organized.
There's also the broker who's willing to split a lot, but you have to find them. And that loops back to the knowledge premium we were talking about. The contact itself is worth money.
I spoke to a pallet recycler in Haifa for this episode — wanted to stay anonymous, which tells you something about the culture — and he said they regularly get Eurobox lots from supermarket chains and pharmaceutical distributors. Supermarkets cycle through these constantly for produce and dairy delivery. Pharma companies use them for cold chain shipping. When the lots come in, they're gone within days. Not listed anywhere. The buyers come through word of mouth.
The boxes exist, the prices are good, the turnover is fast — and none of it touches the internet.
It's not just Euroboxes. The used office furniture market in Israel works exactly the same way. Try finding a Herman Miller chair on Yad2. But there are three dealers in Holon with warehouses full of them. They buy in bulk from corporate liquidations, they sell to other businesses and the occasional informed individual, and they don't need to advertise because the people who know, know.
Which is the whole pattern. These markets aren't broken or secretive. They're just built for repeat players who transact in volume. The opacity is efficient for the insiders. It's only a problem if you're trying to enter from the outside with a small order.
That's what makes the knowledge premium so real. Knowing the right WhatsApp group, the right dealer's phone number — that's not just convenience. That's worth hundreds of shekels on a single purchase. It's an arbitrage of attention. The value is in the connection, not the product.
The Eurobox underworld isn't a secret society. It's just a market that never needed a storefront. And the way in is to stop searching like a consumer and start searching like someone who might buy a pallet.
Let's turn all of this into a plan someone can actually execute this week. Three moves, ordered by how fast they'll get you to boxes.
Move one is the phone call. Not an email, not a search — a phone call. Pick three industrial plastic suppliers in Israel. Plastopil, Keter, or a local distributor if you're near an industrial zone. And ask one question: do you buy back used Euroboxes, or do you know who does?
That question does two things. First, it signals you understand these boxes hold value — you're not asking for a favor, you're asking about a market. Second, even if they don't buy back, they almost certainly know who does, because their commercial customers ask them the same thing when they're upgrading or relocating. You're not buying from them. You're asking them to point at the door.
The beauty of it is you're not asking for anything complicated. It's a yes-or-know-someone question. The worst case is they say no and you've spent thirty seconds.
Move two addresses the quantity problem directly. Daniel wants a few dozen. The bulk discounts start at fifty plus. The gap is maybe twenty boxes. So close the gap by finding three or four other people who each want ten to twenty boxes, pool the order, and approach a liquidator or broker as a single fifty-plus lot.
The mechanism for that is local community boards. Jerusalem Anglo community Facebook groups, expat forums, neighborhood WhatsApp groups. Post something like — anyone else trying to standardize their garage or storage room with Euroboxes? I'm organizing a group buy to hit bulk pricing. The demand is almost certainly latent. Other people have hit the same wall, they just haven't organized.
Once you've got the group, you go back to the contacts from move one. You're no longer a guy who wants fifteen boxes. You're a group with a real order. Different conversation entirely.
Move three is the fallback — the new-but-discounted route. If the broker network doesn't pan out, or if you need boxes faster than a group buy takes to organize, there are industrial surplus stores that sell factory overstock and seconds at thirty to forty percent below retail. In Israel, places like Kol Bo La'Ta'asiya in Tel Aviv carry this kind of inventory. Not used, but discounted enough to close the gap with secondhand pricing.
The discount route has one advantage — predictability. You know what you're getting, you know the condition, you know the price. With used boxes from a liquidator, condition varies. Most are fine — these things are tanks — but if you're storing something sensitive, new-with-discount might be worth the premium.
The sequence matters here. Try the phone calls first, because that opens the network regardless. If you find a broker willing to split a lot, you might not even need the group buy. If you don't, you've still got the contacts for when you do assemble a group. And the surplus store is there as the safety net.
One thing I'd add — when you do make those calls, have your quantity ready. Don't say "I'm looking for some boxes." Say "I'm looking for forty to sixty used Euroboxes, sixty-by-forty, and I can pick up." Specificity signals you're a real buyer, not a tire-kicker. In these informal B2B networks, that matters.
The mystery is solvable. But it does raise a bigger question. Will this kind of market ever become transparent? There are startups trying — Liquidity Services, B-Stock, a few others building B2B marketplaces for surplus inventory. The idea is to take exactly what we've been describing and put it online.
None of them have reached Israel in a meaningful way.
And honestly, the challenge isn't just geographic expansion. It's that the informal networks work really well for the people already in them. A WhatsApp group with forty logistics brokers is fast, trust-based, and has zero platform fees. Replacing that with a marketplace requires overcoming serious inertia.
The old-boy network, except the old boys are warehouse managers and pallet recyclers who've known each other for fifteen years.
Here's what I think will eventually force it open. The modular storage trend. Daniel's not alone — more and more regular people are discovering Euroboxes for home storage, garage organization, moving. They're seeing them on YouTube, on home organization forums. The consumer demand is growing, and it's growing outside the traditional industrial buyer profile.
Which means at some point, the awkward middle — the person who wants twenty boxes — stops being an edge case and becomes a real market segment. And markets eventually find a way to serve real segments.
Someone's going to figure out that there's money in being the broker who splits lots and sells to consumers at a markup that's still well below retail. Twenty-five shekels a box instead of fifteen in bulk, but the consumer's still paying half of new. That's a viable business.
For now, the network still rules. And honestly, there's something almost refreshing about a market that can't be Googled.
It's a reminder that a huge amount of economic activity happens in channels that are invisible if you're searching from your couch. The internet didn't make everything transparent. It just made the visible parts more visible.
Which brings us to the ask. If you're listening and you've successfully sourced Euroboxes in Israel — whether through a broker, a liquidator, a WhatsApp group, or some method we haven't even thought of — email us the contact. Show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll compile a listener-sourced dealer list for the show notes.
Because the knowledge premium we've been talking about? Let's share it. That's literally the point of doing this show.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The word "taboo" entered English in the 1770s, borrowed from the Tongan "tapu" via Captain Cook's journals. But Polynesian wayfinders had been using a related Proto-Polynesian root for centuries — "tapu" originally meant something closer to "marked off" or "ritually restricted," which is why sacred navigation knowledge was considered tapu and passed only through initiated navigators.
That's actually kind of perfect.
This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Herman Poppleberry.
I'm Corn. If you've got a dealer who sold you Euroboxes, send it in. We'll put the list together.
Find us at my weird prompts dot com.
