Diabetic Test Strip Buyers in Washington

A low local rate does not lower what your boxes are worth

What a sealed box of Contour Next or OneTouch Verio is worth has nothing to do with the prevalence figure for the postcode it is sitting in. It is a national market with national demand, and the parcel goes where the need is rather than staying in King County.

It is worth seeing how uneven Washington itself is, because the Puget Sound tech corridor is not the state. Tacoma reads 10.9%, Spokane Valley 10.5%, Spokane 10.3%. Everett is at 9.4%, Kent at 9.3%, Renton at 8.5%. The gap between Tacoma and Seattle is 4.8 points, and those two cities are close enough together that people commute between them daily.

So even inside Washington, supplies leaving Seattle are usually moving towards somewhere they are more needed. That is the normal shape of this trade rather than an unusual one.

The one buyer in the state is at the far southern edge

Washington has a single listing and it is in Vancouver, at the bottom of the state on the Columbia, effectively part of the Portland conurbation. Vancouver itself reads 9.9%.

That listing is worth more than it looks, because Oregon has no listed buyer at all. For the whole of the Pacific Northwest, the Vancouver listing is it. If you are in Clark County or anywhere along the lower Columbia, an in-person handover is a straightforward local trip.

For everyone in the Puget Sound region — Seattle, Tacoma, Everett, Bellevue, Kent, Renton, Federal Way — it is at the wrong end of the state and not a sensible drive for a few boxes. For Spokane and Spokane Valley, right across on the Idaho side, it is further still. This is a state where the population lives in one corner and the coverage sits in another.

Which is why most of Washington posts it

Washington has 605 ZIP codes and the prepaid label reaches every one of them at no cost to the seller. From Bellingham, from Yakima, from Walla Walla, from the middle of Seattle — the mechanics do not change and neither does the price of postage, which is nothing.

The only case where the drive to Vancouver beats posting is a large lot from somewhere within reasonable reach of it, where being paid on the day is worth the journey. Below that threshold the post is faster in practice, because you are not spending a Saturday on I-5.

None of this is a compromise. The great majority of sellers in the great majority of states do it by post, and the protections that make it safe are the same ones described further down this page.

What is actually bought

Test strips: FreeStyle Lite, Contour Next across its versions, Accu-Chek Guide, Aviva and SmartView, OneTouch Verio and Ultra, and True Metrix. Box count is not a detail — one 100-count box is worth meaningfully more than two 50-count boxes of the same strip, so a lot should never be broken up to make it look tidier.

CGM: Dexcom G6 sensors and transmitters, G7 sensors and receivers, and FreeStyle Libre 1, 2 and 3. Libre carries one restriction that matters in a border state — US retail versions only, and sensors bought outside the country cannot be resold here whatever condition they are in.

Pumps and pods: Omnipod 5, DASH and Classic pods. Pods rather than controllers. Some sealed Medtronic and Tandem components as well, which are worth a call rather than an assumption about what qualifies.

Two conditions apply across all of it. The packaging has to be factory-sealed and unopened, because an opened box cannot be verified by anyone downstream and therefore has no value. And the supplies cannot have been obtained through a government-covered program, because supplies paid for that way cannot be resold. A pharmacy label with your name on it is not a problem and never has been.

Expiry dates, and the two items the rule does not cover

For test strips, six months of remaining shelf life is the working threshold, and once the date has passed they are finished. That is a safety position rather than a commercial one: a degraded strip returns a wrong reading, and nobody benefits from that being sold on.

The best-read guide on this subject applies the same verdict to every expired item and tells readers there is very low or no value in any of it. That is accurate for strips and inaccurate for two things, and the two things it is inaccurate about happen to be among the more valuable items in a typical cupboard.

Omnipod pods keep value past their date — 5, DASH and Classic alike — and are bought at a reduced rate. Dexcom G7 sensors do too, also at a reduced rate. Dexcom G6 sensors do not, which is the trap, because the G6 and G7 boxes sit next to each other in most people's memory of what they were prescribed.

The instruction that follows is unglamorous but it is the highest-value thing on this page: before the out-of-date pile goes in the bin, check it for pods and for G7 sensors.

Getting paid without the figure moving

Agree the number before the parcel leaves Washington, and have it written down. A quote for the boxes you actually hold is a different thing from a published range, and the difference only becomes visible at the point where somebody wants to revise it. By then the supplies are in their building and the conversation is no longer even.

Photograph the sealed boxes with the expiry date and lot number legible. Do not open anything to improve the photograph — that trades the value of the box for a better picture of it. Hold the photographs until the payment shows up.

Payment is made within 24 hours of the parcel being received and verified. Verification is a real step: somebody opens the outer packaging and checks the sealed boxes against your description. It is why the clock is quoted from arrival rather than from the day you posted it.

If the figure changes on arrival, ask what specifically caused it and for pictures of what was received. Seals do occasionally break in transit and counts occasionally differ. Those are concrete, checkable reasons. Anything less concrete is a renegotiation, and asking for the supplies to be returned instead is entirely reasonable.