It happens, as Alice Cooper will tell you, to the best of us.

You arrive for your flight (as he did at Terminal 5 earlier this month), check in your luggage (in his case, filled with 300 obscure horror movies) and forget all about it. Then, at the other end, it doesn’t turn up.

If you’re an ageing rocker, the solution is simple — you offer a reward of two backstage passes for your latest tour and the case turns up within 48 hours.

But for us mortals whose bags are in the 2% that, having gone astray, are never returned, there’s a 30-day wait until it’s officially classed as lost. Then the fun and games begin with the insurers.

The bags don’t just disappear, of course — more often, they’ve lost any identifying feature that could reunite them with their owners (remember: always label your case, both inside and out). Over here, orphaned cases go to auction, where they are bid for, unopened. They do things differently in America, though.

Why waste time sifting through a battered case full of unwashed and out-of-season clothes to find the perfect pair of jeans when you could pick them straight off the rail after they’ve been washed, ironed and filed by type, colour and size?

For the past 39 years, the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Alabama (pop: 15,000), has been bulk-buying lost luggage from American carriers, then unpacking it, cleaning it and selling it at a discount of up to 80%.

More than 7,000 items of lost luggage a day, in fact, from Persian rugs ($1,000) to Y-fronts (99¢), bought by more than 1m people every year.

Vogue has praised its designer clothes at Primark prices; even Oprah sent a team down to inspect the goods. The centre has transformed Scottsboro, a nondescript town at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains, into one of Alabama’s leading tourist attractions.

Halfway through my five-hour drive from Memphis, I’m pulled over by a state trooper for speeding. I plead excessive bargain-hunting-induced eagerness and am promptly let off with a “There’s some good stuff there”.

He’s right, too. Inside the shop (a 40,000 sq ft, Stars and Stripes-flanked concrete hangar taking up an entire block) there’s rail upon rail of clothes, the designer threads muddled in with the cheap stuff (in Scottsboro, it seems, all fashion is created equal).

It sells gadgets (they shift 70 iPods a day), DVDs, suitcases (naturally) and jewellery.