The Not-Quite-Everything Store

Wish, the ultra-budget e-commerce app, is about as online as shopping gets. What happens when it comes to your neighborhood?

At MRK Computing Solutions, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, Marc Anglade helps customers with technological needs: computer repair; web and app design; CCTV installation; printing, faxing, scanning. Mr. Anglade, 34, described his small business, which has earned many positive reviews on Google and Yelp, as “a neighborhood Staples.” Since 2019, however, it has doubled as a miniature warehouse, distribution point and delivery hub for Wish, the discount e-commerce platform. Between frequent phone calls and walk-ins, Mr. Anglade fishes for orders in boxes stacked high on shelving units he installed in the middle of his shop, providing the last link in a logistical chain that, in most cases, runs straight back to vendors and factories in China. So far, he estimates that he’s moved more than 100,000 packages. Not that he always knows what’s in them. The items come from a disparate inventory over which Mr. Anglade has little control, built largely out of products, many packaged together, that other customers have neglected to pick up.