Nestled in the south portion of campus, Michigan State’s Surplus Store has been home to many hidden gems over the years. The store collects materials and items that are not needed anymore by campus departments for resale and reduce waste as opposed to throwing the items in the trash.
Inside the store, there is a wild assortment of items, including MSU-made jam, fresh meat, comic books, audio equipment, clothing, computers, dishes, lamps, lab equipment and more.
The Surplus Store, which was completed in 2009, also has a variety of items from Michigan State Athletics. The store started partnering with the Athletic Department in 2010.
Chris Hewitt, the operations coordinator of the Surplus Store and Recycling Center, has been with the store for five years. He was one of the people that benefited from the store’s partnership with the Athletic Department. Hewitt remembers buying a football jersey from the Surplus Store before he became employed by MSU.
“We’re here to be a partner for all the departments on campus,” Hewitt said. “Athletics is just as much of a department partner as the geometry department or something like that. Whenever departments have something that is no longer needed or wanted, we’re here to sell it. Athletics tends to have more of the entertaining and more marketable stuff.”
Some of the more popular sports items that the store has sold in recent years include football jerseys, pieces of the basketball court and benches from Munn Ice Arena. They also sell other common sports-related items like football helmets, goal lights from Munn and weight equipment.
However, the real wacky, out-of-the-box items that have been sold in the past few years include a full Zamboni, which went to an in-state ice rink. Other unique items that have been sold are treadmills, size 18 basketball shoes, a balance beam, NCAA tournament water bottles, football play call signs and basketball player mannequins.
So, how does the surplus store end up with all these items?
“We're approaching each other,” Hewitt said. “We just had to develop partnerships with other people and contacts. Last summer, when Breslin Center got a new scoreboard, they needed to take the old one down and get rid of it. We’re partners with them. They knew we could find value in that. So, they lowered it down, we hauled it back over to our facility and disassembled it and were able to sell parts of it off as memorabilia. Then, we return the profit back to athletics. They know that we are here to help them.”
That mindset of being there to help each other is echoed on the Athletics’ side.
Dylan Marinez, MSU Athletics’ associate athletic director for Facilities and Capital Projects, oversees any large renovations done at athletic facilities. He is also the main athletics contact that Hewitt goes to for communication between the store and the athletic department.
“When our programs have extra equipment or apparel, new or used, that we have that’s come into life or we’ve got extra, we don’t want to just trash everything,” Marinez said. “So, surplus, we have a great relationship with them where they’ll come, pick it up, work with our staff, get it out and find a reasonable price (to sell it at).”

One of the projects that Marinez oversaw was the installation of the new video board inside the Breslin Center.
“That’s another instance where we relied on surplus,” he said. “Because it was electronic equipment, a lot of it is recycled in a special way. We don’t want that to be in a landfill. It had some branding on it that said ‘Spartans’ and ‘Michigan State’ and Spartan heads.
“That brings some value to some of our fans to have a piece of Breslin in their home or wherever else they might want it.”
The old video board was disassembled and the Surplus Store was able to put those pieces to good use.
“We broke it apart and the screens were sold separately,” Hewitt said. “Then, there were a couple of light up Spartan heads, like giant LED Spartan heads and Michigan State lettering, so we pulled those off and auctioned them off in separate chunks.”
One of the other big renovations recently happened at the football facility.
“Two years ago, when we tore the football building down and rebuilt it, we stripped the old building down to bare bones with any kind of Spartan head, equipment, doors, door knobs, anything that you think branding wise somebody may want,” Marinez said. “It’s just good for the public to be able to get their hands on those kinds of things at a fair price.”
One of the pieces from the old locker room inside the football facility before the upgrades happened sits inside the Surplus Store today – a locker, which has a current starting bid of $5,000. The locker stands at 10-feet tall and weighs approximately 700 pounds.
“There’s been a couple people interested, but I think it’s over 10-feet tall and it’s quite heavy and large,” Hewitt said. “Someone needing the right space and ability to transfer has been the biggest barrier.”
The Surplus Store has sold unique items that some people may not know have value. That’s why Marinez and the Athletic Department like to leave it to Hewitt and the Surplus Store to have the final say of what they sell and what they don’t sell.
“From our end, we like to give surplus a heads up, like we’ve got a project going or a team is turning over, we may have some equipment,” Marinez said. “We kind of leave that to them because they are the experts. They can sift through it, check what is more valuable, what isn’t as valuable. If something isn’t valuable, since recycling is right there, they’ll make sure it gets recycled.”
One of the benefits of the Surplus Store is that they help out all aspects of MSU. Having items from all the different departments helps expose customers to a variety of stuff. Last year, the store returned over $1.5 million back to university departments.

Athletics, receive a majority of proceeds from sales of their items. The exact percentage of proceeds varies based on the department and item.
“We’ll have some revenue that comes back to us,” Marinez said. “Then, we’re supporting the rest of campus to go through surplus. For some universities, they’ll have an athletics garage sale, or something like that, but you don’t get the same exposure. And then we can help piggyback with other things surplus is selling to get better advertising for them as a whole.”
Reduce, reuse, recycle is a common cliche used, but the Surplus Store and Recycling Center at MSU embodies those three words.
“I think it’s just an emphasis on everyone on campus working together collectively to take care of things,” Marinez said.