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美商店出售机场无人认领行李

Millions of Americans return from long-distance trips by air, but their luggage doesn’t always come home with them.

上百万美国人搭飞机长途旅行回家，但他们的行李并不总是跟着他们一起回家。

Airline identification tags can come loose, and the bags go who-knows-where.

因为航空公司给行李的辨识标签可能变松，造成了行李四处流浪。

Amazingly, some people never pick up their luggage at airport baggage-claim carousels¹.

奇妙的是，有些人永远都没到机场的行李领取处把行李拿走。

And passengers leave all kinds of things on planes.

而旅客在机上留下了各式各样的东西。

The airlines collect the items and, for 90 days, attempt to find their owners. If they have no luck, they are literally² left holding the bags of thousands of travelers.

航空公司收集这些东西，并在90天内试图寻找原物主。如果他们运气不好，他们只好留着上千旅客的行李。

They don’t keep them, since they’re not in the warehouse³ business. And by law, they cannot sell the bags, because the airlines might be tempted⁴ to deliberately⁵ misplace luggage.

但是航空公司不是仓储业者，所以容纳不了这些行李。根据法律规定，航空公司也不能卖掉这些行李，因为如此一来他们可能会故意将行李弄丢赚钱。

So once insurance companies have paid for lost bags and their contents, and they no longer belong to passengers, a unique store in the little town of Scottsboro, Alabama, buys them - sight unseen.

所以一旦保险公司为遗失的行李和里面的东西赔偿旅客后，他们就不再属于旅客所有。阿拉巴马州斯科茨布罗小镇一家很特别的店会连看都不看就把这些行李买下。

The “Unclaimed Baggage Center,” is so popular that the building, which is set up like a department store, is the number-one tourist attraction in all of Alabama.

这家名为“无人认领的行李中心”的店非常热门，店内陈设就像百货公司一样，是阿拉巴马州最受欢迎的观光景点。

More than one million visitors stop in each year and take one of the store’s squeaky shopping carts on a hunt for treasures.

每年有超过一百万游客到此参观，推着嘎嘎作响的购物车寻宝。

The Unclaimed Baggage Center displays one-of-a-kind items lost by individual travelers, plus whole racks of identical items found in freight shipments that for some reason never got delivered.

“无人认领的行李中心”展示了个人旅客遗失的各件行李，还有整柜因为不明原因没被运送的货运物品。

Each day, clerks bring out 7,000 new items, and veteran shoppers rush to paw over them. You can find everything from precious jewels to hockey sticks, best-selling novels, leather jackets, tape recorders, surfboards, even half-used tubes of toothpaste.

店员每天都会拿出7千项新物品，然后老手买家冲到店里抢购。你可以在这里发现任何东西，从珍贵的珠宝到曲棍球球棍、畅销小说、皮外套、录音机、冲浪板，甚至是用一半的牙膏。

That’s right - used toothpaste for 50 cents or a dollar.

没错，用过的牙膏要卖50分或1元。

The store’s own laundry washes or dry cleans all the clothes found in luggage, then sells them. Need a wedding dress? There’s a selection of beautiful lost and unclaimed ones.

这家店自己有洗衣间，会将所有行李里的衣服清洗或干洗干净，然后再卖出去。你需要结婚礼服吗？店里有许多遗失且无人认领的漂亮结婚礼服任君选择。

The Unclaimed Baggage Center has found guns, illegal drugs - even a live rattlesnake - inside bags.

“无人认领的行李中心”在行李箱里发现过枪、非法药物，甚至是活生生的响尾蛇。

The store has a little museum where some of its most unusual acquisitions have been preserved. They include highland⁶ bagpipes⁷, a burial mask from an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb, and a medieval suit of armor.

店里有一个小博物馆，保存一些店家所发现的不寻常物品。这些物品包括了高地风笛、埃及法老陵墓的安葬面具、中世纪盔甲装。

Less than one-half of one percent of luggage checked on U.S. carriers is permanently⁸ lost and available to the store. Still, that’s a lot of toothpaste and wedding dresses that never made it home.

美国班机上虽然只有不到0.5%的行李是永远遗失并被这家店买下来，但是除此之外还是有许多回不了家的牙膏和结婚礼服。