Right as I was loading up the last of the Princeton Review™ bullshit, I found the neighbor who was throwing all this nonsense away (as he had just been accepted to a medical school). He told me, with no hesitation, that I should find a different career if I didn't want to be burnt out all the time.
Sage advice, and I wish I had listened (could have saved years of my life; I dropped out after the first year, myself, disgusted by what I then saw forming within US healthcare / ACA).
----
Decades later, I still have several boxes of 1"x3" index cards, which the future doctor had thrown away several thousand of (mostly blank). So-as to not tempt a future pre-med (into matriculating), I burned everything else.
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If any pre-med is reading this, please feel free to contact me so I can offer my opinions on better alternatives. You probably won't listen (and there certainly are happy physicians), but if you're attempting this career "to help people" and/or "make money," there're hundreds of easier ways to accomplish both.
EEVBlog's dumpster diving videos pulls computers with xeon processors ha
I'm frankly surprised other dumpster divers didn't get there first. I used to cruise around my university's campus during the end of the semester - got quite a bit of stuff that way, although none of it quite as pricey as what Duke students are apparently tossing.
We got tons of high end, brand new electronics. Laptops, desktops, audio equipment, etc. Whatever we didn't keep we would sell.
Kids don't give a shit. Their parents bought all of their stuff and it's just too annoying to deal with moving it. If it won't fit in their car/luggage they won't take it. It's too much effort for them to sell it.
I'm only a little jelly.
I can’t say it was a great return on my time, but it did give me something to do and I ended up with a little pocket money and 6 Aerons for the family and our guest room computer desk.
If you want to do this, look for ones with a bad strut (or set a marketplace alert for Aerons under $150). They’ll seem really broken to most people, so they sell cheap, but it’s a pretty easy fix (just needs a HUGE pipe wrench* and a $30 strut [and optionally, a $20 set of Rollerblade wheels]).
* or a large pipe wrench and a black pipe “cheater” to fit over the handle.
One year I pulled a gaming PC with a current gen nvidia card in it, two current playstations and six current xboxen out of the pile (straight to ebay, minus the gaming PC which I gifted to a friends kid) along with some household items (pots and pans, some of that wire storage shelfing) that I still use.
Hell my current apt which is across town from the university (though I guess seattle u is semi close...) I still see the same kind of stuff end up in the free pile at the beginning of just about every summer and the end of some semesters. I can't tell if it's kids that communing outside of the neighborhood to school or potentially some 'travelling nurses' working at the nearby hospital, but the eating is good.
How much time it took to figure that out, and what is the chance the thing would turn out unsalvageable?
I don't know how likely it'd be for something like that to turn out unsalvageable. I think that essentially everything at that level uses wooden enclosures, so it'd come down to whether the speaker bit is set into the wooden enclosure with screws or adhesive, and I don't know about the industry enough to know what the ratio is on that. Probably mostly screws. Then getting a compatible driver is probably guaranteed, at worst you have to replace both sides to keep them balanced.
I’d Spend all morning in the dumpster with some friends. Name brand clothes were good finds, also pretty much all the textbooks carried a trade in value. Lots of sealed food snacks as well.
I don’t know if the kids that threw them away were lazy or they just didn’t know about buy back, but the books easily brought me $100 for a couple hours of morning dumpster diving.
I did my part by leaving a nearly brand new king size mattress (got married and had my wife move in 2 months before moving away from the area) as well as multiple items that a Rent-A-Center failed to pick up before we left (large sectional sofa, dining room table + chairs).
When I was in college at Michigan State, the local pizza joints (Hungry Howies and Gumby's) had a "collect 10 tabs, get a free pizza" promo going on. Every Wednesday, my roommate and I went to all our dorm dumpsters and came home with 40-50 tabs. We ate free pizza all year.
I think much of it is a combination of jet-setting affluence, and of international students, who might not be affluent, but who can't take it with them, and are too busy to sell it.
The sad thing to a curb-shopper is the knowledge that most on-campus discarded stuff never makes it to the curb, other than "Allston Christmas".
The other day, when there were a lot moveouts happening (when you can actually "pahk yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd") someone had set up some large donation bins, so hopefully the things are going to someone who will use it, rather than to a landfill. (The city now also runs year-round clothing donation receptacles.)
Earlier this month, I helped this person who needed help getting a nice piece of furniture from the curb into their car. She capped off gushing about the nice find, with "Harvard students!"
What restores a little of your faith in humanity is when people will go out of their way to donate, or to put something carefully on the curb with a sign, when it would be easier just to toss it into the dumpster.
Sometimes the guilt doesn't come from picking something up. It comes from realizing that we're getting used to throwing things away. Not just stuff, but effort, relationships, and even the part of us that once tried to live with intention.
I have found that this persists in work too. For some people it is way more difficult to deal with a larger number of simpler tasks than a smaller number of sophisticated tasks, while for others there is basically no observable difference.
I personally never throw away anything that could be useful to someone. There are organizations around me that accept almost anything.
Quite simply, it's not worth people's time/effort to dispose of these items in another manner given the exhibited nature of these events and limited travel (esp. airline) cargo capacity. Most folks are simply making the best use of the economic utilities provided to them.
FWIW, some universities offer convenient "bulk disposal/donation" sites on-campus and some clubs/sororities/fraternities volunteer to help managing the logistics.
Americans buy, on average, over 50 items of clothing per year. Older people buy less, younger people buy more.
The result is too big to carry. "Omnia mea mecum porto" is from a very long time ago.
Because you get too wrapped up in things that don’t really matter at all?
They are engineered like consumables. Utter insanity. For over $100.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/may/18/richemont-d...
The explanation might be simpler than this: as the students are moving out, taking this stuff with them might be prohibitively expensive. They might have liquidated their belongings and, as they have a hard deadline to get out, they need to get rid of things.
Also, it seems the author might have inflated some of the value. The article mentions things like $980 Valentino sneakers, but it also mentions they were worn but wearable. What's the real value of used shoes? Would someone who spends $1k on shoes bother with getting tens of dollars back by selling used sneakers?
To answer your question, the cost of a used shoe could be the cost of time, despair, and anxiety spent treating a transmissible disease.
Punchline: This is a great idea. It sure would save me a lot of money on coats.
I'm gonna bet used Valentinos, in my size, are still gonna be at least 200$. I'm not a shoes guy, but I know they are worth something.
Can you tell us more about it?
First, why do people throw away tennis shoes, unopened food etc? Why not take with them on to their next destination?
Second, why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items? This is very common for example here in Switzerland - you put unwanted things ranging from old kid toys to books to furniture on the sidewalk with a sign saying „gratis - zum mitnehmen“ (free to take with you) and people who want/need come and collect them. Only if anything is really unwanted, you take back and throw away.
Third, I was surprised the author felt bad. A sign that there is unfortunately some stigma in re-using things. She is actually doing very nice work by collecting them and trying to give them a new lease of life for herself or others (she mention she donated some of the items)
It was also a surprising PITA to get someone to take my gently-used mattress. Most places (Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc) didn't want it, which I can understand. I know several of my roommates ended up just dumping theirs. I called around some churches and they finally put me in touch with a family that lived in a trailer park nearby who were happy to come and collect it. I let them survey pretty much everything else in my room that I hadn't already packed up at that point as well and take what they wanted--the bed frame, some lamps, etc.
I found literally a full bedroom of oak furniture, bed, a dresser, a desk, a bedside table, and an armoure... I could not get the armoure on my pickup truck, but I moved out all my old stuff, and moved in the oak, and oiled it all up, ( it had not been cared for well, so it soaked up all the oil, after a few treatments, it was grand.
Literally every university town, Berkeley, SF State, Cal State Chico... has yard sales in the late spring, and resales in the early fall, and a literal cottage industry of people who make money reselling, and armies of people who drive those neibourhoods late a night picking up everything they think they can resell - Its why all those mattresses are left.
Usually the trash is pretty well picked-through by the time we get to it, but every year, we drive off with a pickup truck full of stuff. Common items I typically find are: clothing (especially coats), backpacks (which sometimes have money and other valuables in the small pockets), food (unopened), bathroom supplies, cleaning supplies, notebooks, bins/organizers, tools, sports equipment, batteries (new in box), etc. Oh, and alcohol. So much alcohol.
There is lots more that I typically don't bother with because I have no use for, things like furniture, vacuums, lamps, "items of a personal nature," etc. Basically anything you can imagine fitting into an apartment, you are likely to find in the dumpster.
For some reason, I have yet to find a laptop or anything particularly in line with my other hobbies, but the general day-to-day stuff is quite plentiful if you're willing to take the time to find it, and possibly get a little dirty.
In the first dumpster, you should get a couple of backpacks, rucksacks, and a broom handle (to aid in digging). We'd find all kinds of things. Books we'd resell, lots of porn, lots of perfectly good clothing. It was great.
The best thing we ever found was a giant projection TV (it was the 90s) outside a frat. We took it home, and it turned out the TV had been rained on, and a few discrete components needed to be fixed in the low-voltage section. A couple trips to Radio Shack, and we had a massive frat TV (it was a pain to move it). We went back to the frat a couple of days after we had fixed it, and asked them for the remote. They chased us off.
Dumpster diving in college towns is definitely something the townies do.
So, yeah, a lot more just really rich students than there used to be, rich enough to think nothing of throwing out luxury goods, finding it more convenient than doing something else with them.
Then the increase of wealthy international students on top of that -- also richer than most students 20 years ago, and add on even less convenient to try to move anything back home or do anything else with it.
It is expected right? Our population has grown and we also have huge streams of foreign students...but the count of universities has largely been static. The class sizes are a bit bigger and the dorms accomodate more, but nowhere near in line with the demand. Naturally the prices have risen to meet the limited supply.
Not saying this is good, rather...we should be building more universities to stay in line with the general population
- a snow blower
- various weed eaters
- vacuum cleaners
- a generator (higher capacity than the one I already had)
- a log splitter
- pressure washers (nozzles usually clogged with dirt)
- a chainsaw
- multiple typewriters (the Selectric I kept, the others I sold)
- a boat motor
- a sump pump (bottom was clogged with sand)
We've all seen those "saved from the garbage" restoration videos on youtube and wondered just how "garbage" that stuff was. Believe it, it happens.
This seems to assume that all students are “discarding” the same quantity of items each year. It also assumes that the only student donations that occur are ones that are tracked by their university. It’s hard to believe that it is true.
A place like UChicago is not known for being a party school; I doubt Balenziaga or Valentino items are in high demand. I would assume that people aren’t all that into fashion that goes out of style quickly, thus they probably aren’t throwing as much away. But maybe that’s just an “unfair” stereotype I have about UChicago students ;)
One thing I do know, however, is that up in the area of Northwestern, there is a strong tradition of donating things to churches and synagogues, who then hold rummage sales. There is even a “rummage sale season” and a circuit - every weekend there is a different set holding sales. It seems that any such donations here would not show up in any data that this author has collected.
This amount doesn't really surprise me. This has been happening ever since students were in dorms. Even in my little liberal arts school, people would dumpster dive for stuff in the dorms where the rich kids lived. The dedicated divers would even go around after Thanksgiving break and the end of fall semester, when the kids who were too into partying left (or were kicked out) and just left stuff behind that the RA threw out.
The unofficial motto is "where fun goes to die"
I vividly recall every fall the crazy number of wrecks by fresh students after "Daddy gave me a Maserati" with no idea how to drive it -- always asian. And then in the spring a couple of the poorest international students would commit suicide when they flunked out and all their families savings back home were forfeit on the tuition.
Didn't have time to juggle craigslist no-shows and stuff. Wasn't worth the $150.
I never feel any guilt about taking things from the trash. About trespassing to somewhere you're not supposed to be? Sure. But if it's something that's 100% clear is in the trash and will be going to the landfill and not going to some charity reuse place or something, and I want it, I'm taking it.
You're rooting around in the trash. Humans know, or learn pretty quick, that trash is yucky.
At one point we upgraded to having an intern standing in the dumpster throwing stuff out to us as we directed him.
When I was in college I found a perfectly working DVD player in a dumpster on move-out day, and I wasn't looking particularly hard -- only casually glancing at the most obviously visible items in the nearest dumpsters I happened to walk by. I could easily imagine finding $thousands worth of items if you go to a big campus with the right student demographics on the right day and systematically search all the dumpsters.
Rent them for $95 for the year and the school probably makes more money and definitely creates less waste and less inconvenience for students.
Mini-fridges are so cheap now it probably doesn't make much economic sense to rent one.
For transient university housing as in the article, I imagine the dynamic shits due to the volume of temporary items being cycled through.
That's all to say, I'm guessing for many of these rich kids they're not thinking twice about throwing out a table or some slides their parents bought for them.
So this person spent several days digging in trash to scavenge items that would be worth a total of $6000 new.
But these aren't new. Many of these items have severe depreciation. Used slippers have poor resale value. Used leggings have poor resale value. Used pillow cases have poor resale value.
[Also saying that a pack of 60 disposable cups cost $18 seems sus to me].
I think there is a realistic question of if instead of doing this the author got a min wage job and spent the same amount of time at it, would they have made more money [presuming they sold all items]. If so, i think we have answered the question as to why people throw this stuff out.
I, as a non Chinese, have received a used laptop via mail and was not charged tax by customs ("is used...") and I have brought 2000 Euros handbags for friends.
[0]: https://www.strugglecare.com/struggle-care#:~:text=You%20Can...
Over the years I have refurbed some furniture which is a fun hobby in addition to being environmentally helpful.
I think it’s also worthwhile to pay for higher quality items that are made well and last. A nice pair of leather boots can get repaired for minimal cost and mine have lasted over a decade of very hard wear.
When I later graduated from college I had to dump stuff, mainly because I didn't have a car, and was moving to a small apartment in the city ~70 miles away.
Never went through the dumpster or got any "luxury" goods (probably wouldn't even recognize them if I saw them), but my wife did randomly bring home a pair of nice looking speakers that ended up being around $700 if bought new. I'm sure some wealthy international students do throw away some expensive stuff and not think twice about it. I actually did the opposite and tossed some of my own bulk items in a student dumpster once which was probably a violation of some kind although I didn't see any signs to say otherwise.
I saw some decently nice tvs or other things that could have potentially been resold by someone looking to do that, but I was only interested in taking something I would personally use.
I think this is just a lack of planning and options for many students. Think about it - it's the end of the year, you've got a pile of exams to study for, and then a week or two later you've got to be out of the dorms. Many students don't have a car to haul things to Goodwill or sell them further afield, and nobody on campus wants to buy their stuff because everyone else is moving out at the same time. If they look into shipping the stuff, they find it's prohibitively expensive. So the only option available in the time they have is to trash it.
My impression is that only about half the population, at most, even pretends to care about environmentalism.
At my wife's alma mater, the way move out in the dorms worked was that you had 24hrs after your last final and then had to be gone. That didn't really leave a lot of time for a lot of people that had maybe two checked bags and a carry on to work with, and had spent the previous time focused on studying for their finals.
- give 2-3 extra days for students to move out.
- maybe partner with a few moving/freight companies? you’d bring them a lot of customers and they could provide a good rate.
Generous. When I was taking part in student exchange I had to be gone from the dorms a week before one of my finals.
Like at this stage? I'd love to find a quiet place to run.
But in the meantime, I'm not studying for finals or having a kid. Just buying plant-based mayonnaise like a boring adult and scraping lizard crap out of cages in what some could see as a patronizing metaphorical cholesterol or dendrite decaying act of desperate cleansing against time.
So yeah, if the kids at Duke can buy new shoes and time doesn't matter to them, and there's a high likelihood they'll be reused and it's all by choice? Cool.
Choices are good.
It's very possible for the cost of transport to exceed the value of the goods, especially if one is flying to one's next destination.
> Second, why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items?
This I can't help with. As far as I have seen, this is a common practice everywhere in the northeast US. The police don't always love it, but that doesn't really prevent people from doing it.
My guess is that the college does not want to allow students to dump their mostly-garbage on the neighbors.
At the same time, wealthy students who will throw out items of value may feel they have better things to do than separate out items to donate. That’s especially true if they wait until the last minute.
Overall, separating items to donate from one’s trash is a way to avoid paying to dispose of trash at the dump and a way to perhaps be charitable or environmentally conscious. I’m not convinced it’s all that effective as an altruistic move. If the college sets up a place to dump for free, I’m not at all surprised many people take advantage of it without another thought.
*Unless it is an old non-wide LCD monitor. Nobody wants those...
People put it out to feel good about themselves.
Once I saw a bunch of random wires with a label, “FREE - great for art projects.” It’s like thanks for letting me know I was going to knock on doors until I found the right person to make an offer to.
>Second, why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items?
Often they are, but most of the people already have their own stuff and limited space for additional stuff. When I lived in a dorm, anything larger items you didn't want you could put on the 3rd floor lounge area and the school would donate or dispose of them. Any other students were free to take that stuff, but unless you had preplanned to have a truck or uhaul, you could only take so much.
More generally, it's dumb that it's so much more work to give something away than to trash it - or even buy it in the first place. Our logistics for buying stuff is incredibly efficient, for reusing we're stuck in the 15th century - everything done artisanally (and with free guilt-labour)
Throwing away things that could be sold could be a matter of (1) frustration/exhaustion with the end of the semester, (2) no place in their car / plane luggage for extra items, (3) indifference of kids who don’t know the value of a dollar (the Ballenciaga slides are literally the most expensive version of a slide you can buy — I usually get mine for less than $10).
On the street might be a better solution, but in the US you can be fined for littering (“dumping”) if you abandon items on someone else’s property. Lots of local laws in the USA are designed to maintain high property values (while subsidizing the very expensive police departments).
Or you know, them being rational actors who know spending an hour to sell something for $5 is not a good use of their time.
The author did find a couple of allegedly more expensive items, but is also e.g. talking about used pyjama bottoms. How much money do you really think you are going to get for used pyjama bottoms? Is it worth it? Almost certainly no.
Same thing happens on Craigslist: You can post an item for sale for a fair price - and it may take days or weeks - or you can post it free and it will gone in hours (to someone who will resell it perhaps but whatever.)
you'll have a dozen people immediately claim it and ask you to hold it for them, but actually getting rid of the item is another story. maybe 1/4 or less actually take it. I recommend donating to a thrift store (even one of the "evil" ones where the CEO makes $600k) or posting it in proper category, putting $1 for the price, and saying "free" in the item description. As opposed to using CL's "free" category.
Boston does this! The locals refer to it as “Allston Christmas”, it takes place every September 1st, and it’s a great time to scavenge furniture and appliances, even computers and electronics.
My big concern remains bedbugs, personally. As a renter myself, I don’t have the facilities to disinfect and kill off any pests that might’ve hopped on between the old apartment and the curb, which narrows my selection considerably. Still, lots of students and locals partake in the yearly turnover tradition and walk away with new room furniture sets!
From: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
"The median family income for a Duke student is $186,700. A significant portion of Duke students, 69%, come from families in the top 20% of earners, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Additionally, only 1.6% of students come from low-income backgrounds"
Does it? I don't know anything about Duke, but a lot of colleges I know of tell your tuition is around that price. However dig deeper and you discover it is almost impossible to not get scholarships thus making the real price cheaper. I know of one school near me that automatically gives everyone a 40% scholarship, then they look at your background to figure out if you qualify for anything more.
Because transport costs more than the item? Especially if you are travelling by plane.
Sure there might be cheaper transport options but the opportunity cost of arranging them quickly dwarfs the value.
> Second, why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items?
If you are in a university setting where maybe 500 people are leaving all at the same time, i imagine university admin may not be thrilled at the prospect of cleaning up after this.
Leaving it in the "trash" room is the equivalent of this in large apartment buildings ime. Note these reusable items were set aside, not tossed in the dumpster. I would agree the curb is better, where any passerby could take it, but in buildings large enough to have staff on-site that isn't tolerated because it would make the property "look bad."
It's common in the US too.
People do put things on the curb other times of the year, but a dedicated clean up day helps everyone - you know when it is your turn, and the scrappers don't waste gas driving down dead end streets.
> Third, I was surprised the author felt bad. A sign that there is unfortunately some stigma in re-using things.
Ever since my wife and I got married 20+ years ago, we've had a clothesline, and we are constantly line-drying our clothes, weather permitting. I've had plenty of weird looks and probably even a few comments. I definitely have had the impression that people look down on me for doing so, but weird stigma be damned.
Going thru literally thousands of items (many hobbies, too small apartment in short) and deciding where to pack which and what to throw away is gruelling.
If I had choice (I wanted to get deposit back and not leave a mess), I'd leave most of that after picking the most important items, as a lot of them can be replaced cheap for when (or if ever) I will need those items again.
But
> First, why do people throw away tennis shoes, unopened food etc? Why not take with them on to their next destination?
that is just weird (unless food is something that would spoil in few days I guess)
There are also plentiful thrift stores which take donations. The profound selfishness of throwing this stuff out rather than passing it on so eventually some person with less can have a better life -- the thrift stores generally are non-profits supporting the homeless, hospices, and so forth -- boggles my mind.
1) Usually because they can't take it with them. A lot of students fly home, some don't have drivers license, and/or the cost to ship it third party exceeds the price of the items. It's also laziness, but I pin it mainly on practicality and cost.
2) They do, and at Santa Barbara I saw groups gathering, knowing the move-out days, to pick it up. These were migrants, homeless, and thrifty individuals. A lot of the stuff is still in its original packaging, as the parents of the student bought well intentioned but impractical gifts that never even got opened. A lot of room for better organization, but mostly folks just don't care, they're so caught up with finals and getting home that it's very far back in the list of priorities.
3) Picking through trash is a uniquely de-humanizing experience. Its one of the few things that makes me stop walking even in high-homeless areas like the Tenderloin, because I can't even imagine what it feels like to be picking through trash for items to sell, or particularly foodstuffs.
I visited a friend's apartment, and he described the decor as "a mixture of TarJay and Hippie Christmas."
We also regularly leave stuff by the curb and it gets taken. Conveniently, you leave it out a day or two before trash day, and if it's not taken, then you can throw it in the trash.
oh there's precedent for this solution, what a concept
The best approach I've found is to standardize packing into 60L industrial Euro crates. They're inexpensive, very strong, practically waterproof (will survive both puddles and rain) and you can even air freight them at close to $100/box if the contents weigh under 32kg. Most of the expense in shipping is volume and people massively underestimate how much they own. If you can keep things compact and dense, ground/sea freight is inexpensive if you don't have to do it very often and there is no practical weight restriction.
Furniture only makes sense if you can re-claim 80+% of the void space in items like shelves, or if it completely flat packs, and if the cost of re-acquisition would be high. Shipping companies usually have minimum billable volume (say 2 cubic meters). I was able to send an apartment's worth of contents in the same volume that a couch would occupy.
For everything else, either buy quality used things that you can sell without much depreciation, or cheap used things that you don't mind thrifting afterwards.
There is a Wikipedia article for the Allston (Boston) version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Boston)
The weirdest thing about the original article is the author. Like yeah, you can get some great stuff in the trash. People value money wildly differently, and some people throw out practically new stuff. It boggles the mind. But it also boggles the mind that the author is still so focused on the retail prices of marked up "luxury" stuff, like they're still just solidly wed to the consumerist mindset. The used/dirty/soggy whatever can be fantastic, but it's certainly not worth anywhere close to its original retail price, especially accounting for your time to find, haul, clean, etc and how much comparable non-"luxury" brands would cost.
Is it really that surprising? Places don't take a used mattress for the same reason they don't take used underwear - you may say it's "lightly used", but once it's out of the box, that guarantee is gone, and a used mattress is something that hardly anyone would be willing to buy. That is especially true since you can now buy a brand new mattress incredibly cheaply.
I used to do a lot of volunteering at a thrift store, and it was really eye opening to see which things had residual value. Some examples:
1. Unless it was a desirable higher-end piece (think something like a known midcentury modern company), we usually hated getting furniture. It's big, bulky, and unless it's like a showpiece, most people go to Ikea to buy cheap furniture.
2. You can barely give away china these days. We would get beautiful, perfect condition full sets of china, mark it down to like $30 for an entire 12-place set, and it would just sit there.
3. Most fast fashion is worthless (though I don't know, maybe the demise of Temu and Shein will change this). Nobody is going to pay even like $6 for a piece of clothing (which is essentially like the cost just to store/sort/sell stuff) when new it's like $10.
4. Electronics/small home appliances also depreciate especially quickly.
Our biggest money makers were mid-to-high end clothes, jewelry and bags, quality shoes, and artwork/home decorations.
It was also eye opening to see how many people donated plain garbage to assuage their guilt. Like I used the "people don't take used underwear" as an example, but yes, people would still donate it (which sucks - all that does is add to the costs of the charity you're donating to).
Chinaware sucks to actually use: it can't go in the dishwasher, it's smaller and less convenient than normal-sized dishes, and so on. Even if you want to spend lots of money on dishes, you're much better served buying nice stoneware at Crate and Barrel or something, it looks as good or better and is actually useful. Chinaware generally just sits there and takes up space; I wouldn't take any even if it was free.
And the thing is, it's not really a tragedy that nobody bothers with chinaware anymore. Chinaware was only ever a "keeping up with the Joneses" status-signalling purchase to show you'd made it as a middle-class household, and it's been replaced by other goods for that purpose. We're not losing out on some kind of heritage tradition here, it's just one set of shallow luxury goods getting replaced with another.
> You can barely give away china these days. [...] it would just sit there.
Most times I look, it's overpriced. Very much so. Price lower. Obviously?
> Most fast fashion is worthless [$6 for a piece that's new for $10]
Well duh? Price lower? Obviously?
Around here it feels like thrift stores have not noticed the revolution in pricing for online, delivered, made-in-china-but-not-only. What's happening? They seem desperate for the occasional buy by someone who doesn't know any better? Not cool. And a completely self-inflicted defeat. I see local stores receive floods of donations, have significant foot traffic - and priced to make soooo few sales.
Do they really make more money by shipping most donations to other countries - that they can ignore the reality of online, mass market, fast fashion pricing? How come these other countries can pay more money still - to compensate for the shipping cost? What's going on? Are these stores a front for something else? Some other way to pay the lease and employees?
Best (in terms of mass to value) dumpster dive find I had was a box of laser rubies.
Seems straightforward enough. Laptops are portable and contain things of personal value (configuration, if nothing else!). Or just might -- if you're dumping stuff because you don't want to deal with it, so why would you deal with searching through your laptop to look for photos or incriminating messages or whatever? Or opening it up to pull the hard drive? That's work!
Formerly, they'd also be as much value to the owner the week after classes end as they were the week before, but maybe that's changed now? Do people rely only on phones and not use laptops for anything other than school?
On the curb, I've found over 100 total tower/desktop PCs/Macs, countless printers/monitors/televisions, and even a few game consoles, but I don't recall any laptops nor smartphones.
I was thinking either laptops&phones are too easy to move, to easy to sell, they don't last long on the curb, or they're small enough to get tossed into the trash.
If you were opening trash bags in the dumpsters, and still didn't find any, I guess they're too easy to keep/move/sell.
You would think the 3 minutes it takes to realize your pressure washer nozzle is clogged and poke it with a stick a few times to clear it and get back to the job at hand is a better time value over stopping, going inside, searching for a new one to buy....
A lot of the time the stuff isn't even broken, it's just old. They definitely will go and buy a new one if the old one "looks rusty" or something.
i.e. buy a power washer each-ish time you need it compared to hiring somebody.
Apologies if this is just a typo but I am really confused by this wording - isn't "significant minority" an oxymoron? If you had to express this as a percentage how many wealthy people are you saying got this way?
Sure, maybe you have a landscaper for that. Your landscaper knows a guy who's happy to get paid $100 slap a new $50 Amazon carb on your snowblower and lecture you about not leaving ethanol in it for 2yr straight.
Shoe repair is hit-or-miss. I contacted one who said it would be a 2 month turnaround time.
I purchased an item from a church supply and noticed that it included a molded plastic insert that I'd be removing to clean once in a while. So I contacted the vendor and asked whether I could purchase some spare inserts. "well, our supply chains are challenged right now, and this is made in Italy..."
I advise my friends, if they're purchasing any electronics, like a notebook, you may as well bundle some accessories and spare parts right away, like an extra battery or power supply or the component that's most likely to go bad, because in 5 years when you need it, they'll be sold out.
In fact, in all of those markets I've listed above, I've purchased something, unbox it at home, only to find out that it is lacking accessories, isn't a complete set, or part of it is unfit for purpose, and in fact the manufacturer just gets things onto store shelves while incomplete, so they can sell you more things out of their catalog [iPhones without chargers; shipping beta software...]
I just finished carefully cleaning the sponge filter on my vacuum cleaner. One day I'll visit their website to see if there are any spare accessories still available for it. Good luck!
I'm dating myself a little bit here, but when i started my career, we had to wear fancy pants. The pants cost ~80 and dry cleaning was ~8 -- so 10 drycleans were a new pair of pants. Thats not even considering the time-cost of drop-off/pick-up which is especially hard if you have long hours.
So I'd just do a regular wash on the pants, despite warnings that "it would ruin the pants over time." I think if I could have the pants last more than 10 washes, I was already in the green.
Even crazier was how some co-workers would have khakis dry-cleaned. Thank the Lord we now have non-iron technical pants. All my problems have gone away.
Some people just cannot be bothered, and if they're wealthy they simply may not care about concepts like wasting money - doubly so if they grew up with money and have never had to ration it for basic items. This isn't a market in search of a tech solution, any more than people who put out working items on the street with a sign saying 'free' because they don't want to go through the hassle of conducting a transaction for pocket money.
Nowadays I leave unwanted but usable stuff by the trash room in my building, usually somebody will grab it, and if not it will get removed by the cleaning people eventually. I got a nice roller suitcase that way myself lol
My wife doesn't have a regular job so she has some time to deal with this - but her time is still valuable (there are plenty of other things do to - I don't see how dual income families can raise kids!)
Putting it out on the street is the least effort approach, but rightly most municipalities don't want unwanted items to persist their either.
1. We donate to an appropriate organization that tends to specialize in donations for the specific items we're donating. I.e. work clothing for university students.
2. We list an item for free, but pickup only. Confirm a day/time, and then said item is set outside for the individual to pick the item up. If they don't show, or something happens no big deal.I used to sell via gameflip and glyde, and that was pretty efficient; five minutes cataloging and listing the game and five minutes putting it in an envelope before my daily mail run. But these companies keep tripping over payment processing -- gameflip lost paypal, probably due to an infestation of scammers in the digital goods market?
So now I just post for sale ads on an internal company forum. But every time I come to the same conclusion. Having to personally deliver these flips the script. I seriously wonder if donating to a public library has a better ROI. They get a loanable asset, and I get a tax writeoff? But there seems to be many variables on how the writeoff is valued.
edit: or I need to set up coordination destination. Like "pickup at board game night only."
I can think of about 10 locations off the top of my head in my city, and there are probably more than that. I never throw away things that are in a usable condition - better to get a little money back and it feels better knowing someone else might use it. I’ve also bought quite a bit of 2nd hand stuff - bikes and skis for the kids, clothing, etc.
When living in the US I used to make use of a local consignment shop. Pawn shops are also pretty ubiquitous, although I never actually tried selling anything there. And there’s always Goodwill and Salvation Army if you just want to conveniently get rid of stuff and avoid waste. Goodwill (and other charities as well, I assume) can write you a donation receipt that you can use to claim a tax deduction (although I never bothered).
Right now I have an antique deli slicer with a brand new blade that needs a little TLC but should operate at least another 100 years once fixed up a bit. A dental clinic autoclave I just don't have room for, a bunch of old IBM model M keyboards, and a slew of various mid-range electronic items that still have plenty of use in them but not a lot of monetary value. I'd give them all away to a decent home - but I don't really have the time to spend on packaging them up and/or the items are too bulky to consider shipping. This is just a few things that have been sitting around my house collecting dust for at least a year.
Pawn shops here are pretty useless and Goodwill/SA are simply not interested in the vast majority of the items I have to get rid of. I'd love to de-clutter, but can't really bring myself to toss perfectly good stuff so it's down to pestering every guest I have over to take things if they have a use.
I can set it out for trash collection in the alley here and 9 times out of 10 someone will take it if it's a mainstream and obviously decent item. That or has value as scrap metal. But for the weirder stuff it's not a great method to ensure it won't just be scrapped and/or trashed as soon as a scrapper decides it's not worth their trouble.
I sell my old PC hardware, but there are shops for books, games, clothes, furniture, instruments, alcohol?!
I'm not sure how feasible it is in practice. In theory I think you'd at least need the following to be possible:
(a) Being able to leave them literally outside your door in a manner that anyone in the neighborhood can see (basically impossible without additional technology for a lot of people)
(b) Being able to put them literally outside your door without causing issues (also impossible for many people due to everything from fire codes to simply lack of room or your own potential of tripping on them)
(c) Being able to make sure that anyone who takes them pays for them appropriately (nobody is going to keep an eye on them for free)
Who wants to spend their last month in their house without a dining table? So the amount of time between making it available and "I need it gone" is very slim indeed
It couldn’t have been simpler, and they mailed me a check when the items finally sold after about a month.
This is really used to clear out houses of deceased relatives etc.
This doesn't resolve your problem of generally selling your used goods conveniently. But I always found it to be a really interesting service. Because it identifies that there is real practical difficulty in simply giving away a lot of goods, and the solution is to provide this complete service to make it easier.
I've been able to get the local branch of Habitat for Humanity to come to me with a truck to pick up some old furniture free of charge. The only downside was that they are not allowed to come into houses, so I was responsible for moving the furniture to the yard.
For buying stuff, the local thrift stores are good, and offer very low prices on everything. The only downside is you actually need to show up, and are limited to the items they have, so it is not an option if you have a specific thing in mind.
I remember doing a garage sale before moving years ago. We sold some stuff, but in reality nobody wants to give you anything for your stuff. I still remember a guy who came, pushing his way over asking brusquely, "Do you have any jewelry, watches, iphones or ipads?". When I said no, he left just as abruptly as he came.
Now goodwill is our preferred way. We found it is hard to get any sort of tax credit to work, so we don't even bother with receipts anymore.
Even if someone is breaking the rules and just refinishing furniture to resell, to be honest that benefits me because they are motivated to come get things fast, and my goal of not making trash is not only satisfied, but there is surplus enjoyment from being part of creating new value in an item.
It is a great case for more city style density (even in Brooklyn which is closer to 3-4 story walk-ups)
I had a friend in college that did literally this. Guy sold weed throughout his time there. While he was a senior, his supplier who had graduated a year earlier hooked him up with an internship at his company's trading desk. Went to work on Wall St after graduation.
I was always amused that the marijuana business was more important to his career after school than his studies (I think he was an environmental systems major). He's a commodities trader now, which is fitting.
i wonder if all this is becoming any less common with the rise of fb marketplace/offerup etc. hard to measure such an organic phenomenon, i guess.
* truly not meant as a slight against a population - just speaking anecdotally as someone who spent 13 years of my childhood and my entire adult life dumpster diving for fun and profit.
Meanwhile, my dad's VHS machine from the 80's works to this day, plus there is a service manual for it.
It's not really realistic to make this a moral issue, IMO.
If you mean why would "authorities" care, there's a lot of people that put what amounts to trash on the sidewalk and then move to a new apartment without cleaning it up, or else just ignore that they left it in front of their house until "someone else" takes care of it.
We have several times asked for a higher price just to weed out the non-serious people who will waste our time. We really just wanted to give it away to someone who would make good use of it, but charging too little lowers the odds of that happening.
That said we also have some china that’s been in my wife’s family for generations and we’re afraid to put that in the dishwasher. That effectively makes it decorative in our case.
I recently came across a furniture company that has an interesting offer that anything you buy new from them can be sold back to them (at like 20 cents on the dollar) or you can buy a little cheaper refurbished furniture from them.
$6k in labor for some part of the project vs $300 tools from harbor freight, who gives a fuck if the tool only lasts a few hours, I don't have time to sell it nor place to store it.
My riding mower is 19 years old. It's approaching Ship of Theseus levels at this point, but since the Kawasaki motor shows no signs of giving up the ghost, I'm hard pressed to spend the $2k+ it would take to replace it. If it costs me $75 each year in replacement parts, I could have it for another 10 years.
Another interesting thing is the size of the circuit board kept shrinking!
The usual failure mode of a VCR is the recording head gets dirty. It takes remarkably little dirt to render it non-functional. A bit of alcohol applied brings it back to working order.
I've noticed that the prices of VCRs in the thrift store hit a low of $5, but have been relentlessly creeping up. They're $25 now, and are rarely in stock. Get 'em while you can. Transfer your old family tapes to mp4 while you can.
That might be true, but it doesn't refute the idea that a) the value listed in the blog is quite possibly inflated, b) it makes financial sense for the students to throw out stuff like used shoes. Of course dumpster divers always find valuables, but it's also a fact that people moving out often give away valuables they can't take with them. There are even expat boards in Facebook where people give away things before moving abroad. In fact, there are businesses specialized in clearing out rentals for a fee, meaning people pay companies to take away stuff they use, including furniture and appliances, even when they are in perfectly good condition.
The rest of the list was things like used leggings, used pillow cases, used slippers, used bath mat, used pyjama bottoms. Those are worth basically nothing and the author was valuing them at what it would cost to buy new.
Literally nobody is buying a used bath mat. That is worth $0 not $22
Literally nobody is going to spend $128 on a pair of used leggings. Maybe you could sell them, but not for $128.
$96 for a 2 used pillow shams is also crazy.
The author's valuation of these items is literally insane.
I could stay I think up to 12 months after graduating. And it was entirely up to you when you wanted to graduate after fulfilling the criteria. I myself took the papers half a year after finishing my master's thesis, and then left the student apartment half a year after that.
No clue. I had a boyfriend at the time, so I stayed at his place. Other people did similar things. Or just slept on the sofa in the common area, while the students who stayed in the dorms would let them in through the main door.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/06/30/no-longer-the-plac...
Students are dealing with graduation, job placement, saying goodbye to friends, welcoming family coming in for graduation, etc. Honestly most people have better uses of their time then making a few hundred dollars on the second hand market, especially for the students most well off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentino_(fashion_house)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentino_(fashion_designer)
But within the houses system, Valentino sits somewhere specific. Hence I am being specific about The House of Valentino.
Valentino = Warhol.
They're pretty cool, I recommend learning about them, personally, I did a whole degree on it...won 4 Emmy awards being one...silly me...
When shopping for this sort of car look for private sellers. Used car dealers in this price range tend to be sketchy and none of them do any maintenance or repairs before the sale.
I had to sell a decent 15 year old car due to upgrading two years ago for less than $4K. It was a decently reliable car and I think they got a deal. With these, I think you can good deals if you don't mind the downsides. Reliable-ish, with one bigger problem (e.g. AC doesn't work, or has some crash damage), and no guarantee of how long it'll run or when it'll need bigger work (could be years and 50K+ miles, or sooner).
This is human, and fine. But I’m 100% certain this author is grossly overestimating the value of the junk they believe they are “saving” and how much of it they will actually use. This is the rationalizing of a budding hoarder.
The time pressure does these kids a huge service by forcing them to clear out stuff that doesn’t actually matter so they don’t feel the need to buy a 4,000 sq ft McMansion to store their college bean bag chair and every other piece of junk they’ve ever owned.
Ultimately, the authors children will run across these “salvaged goods” in a decades-untouched pile in her basement upon her death in about 66 years.
Or heating a 4,000 sq foot home for 60 years to store said items in unused piles and then having your children eventually throw those items away anyways when you die?
Realistically it's going to be 1 of those 2 scenarios.
I think you're going to be in for a shock... 2/3rds of the donations go right in the trash (they will optimistically call it salvage/recycling).
The furniture (i.e., "bean bag chair") I can totally understand why they'd discard it. The only thing that bothers me then is, will they buy a similar item for next year? Because if they will, then this stuff doesn't "doesn't matter" and therefore the problem actually exists, if only because it feeds into the mindless consumer attitude which leads to over production of goods that end up in landfills if not in someone else's hoard pile.
It just seems that some such organization never get to this.
Congrats on your Emmys. Not sure why your interests include something as mundane as shoes and arguing with opinionated idiot on the internet. You obviously have better things to think about.
But if you know how to check for quality materials and craftsmanship you can find really, really good clothes and furniture for unbelievably cheap.
The thing about fast fashion is, well, the clothes suck. They're more plastic than fabric, they fall apart, they look awful, they're not breathable, and on. You don't actually want to thrift those, because their lifespan is approximately 5 washes. Yes, it's that bad with some brands.
But if you can find nice cotton trousers or a great trench coat for 8-10 bucks you're golden. Just have them dry cleaned, press them, and you're going to be getting a piece of clothing that's higher quality than anything you can find in stores.
I found a great 3 piece brown tweed suit a bit ago. Miraculous all three pieces are there, dated somewhere in the 1970s. The construction was sturdy, the material was thick and rough, but everything was lined with viscose. The buttons were actually wooden, shaped like little hot buns. Multiple sets of them too, large ones for the pants and suit jacket and little tiny ones for the waistcoat. A suit like that made today would be at least 800 dollars. I got it for less than 50.
Point is, old stuff isn't low quality. Over the past 50 years, clothes have progressively gotten poorer in just about every metric. Yes, buying new cheap junk is sometimes cheaper than old stuff. That's because the new stuff is just so incredibly bad.
The stuff you're buying on Temu, Shein, H&M, whatever - is not competing with quality garments from decades past. They're not just not in the same category, there's many categories between them.
When I read things like this, I laugh when people think that it's possible to bring much manufacturing back to the US.
The thrift store I volunteered at was for an animal charity. After paying rent and some salaries, the general rule of thumb was that we were able to convert volunteer hours to profit at about minimum wage rates (and I mean ~$8/hr rates, not "living wage" rates).
So, to be honest, your post made me unreasonably angry. No, thrift stores are not a front, they're not stupid, and they have certainly noticed the cheap crap from Shein and Temu. The issue is that crap is produced incredibly cheaply - literal peasant wages and zero pesky things like environmental regulations.
So where I volunteered, we originally had standard prices for all non-designer clothes, e.g. $5 for short sleeve shirts and shorts, $7 for pants, etc. It would simply take much too much time to try to price everything individually. And, for most clothes, these were great deals. But when cheap fast fashion came along, we had a rule we would just throw away any of that shit. But every now and then something would make it onto the floor, and we'd have an irate customer basically say what you are saying, "How can you charge $7 for this pair of pants when they're like $10 new." So then we'd apologize, and explain that we usually threw that stuff away. People just couldn't understand that we couldn't sell it for less without essentially making the thrift store not turn a profit, even though the products were donated.
Let's also watch out how we think about enterprises. (1) The customer - most anyway - isn't concerned with the purpose of the thrift store, with whether it's making a profit, or even really with how the store gets the product. They are looking for the things they need, at a better price than otherwise. Some costumers are exceptions, sure. (2) The thrift store needs to make money to pay a few employees, the lease, and its sponsor if there is one (like this animal charity). Running a thrift store does not garantee that it will make this much money. (3) Even the people providing the stuff have a choice of places where they can do that, including putting it in the trash or listing for free on Craigslist & Co. They may want to favor the thrift store but if the thrift store makes itself sufficiently difficult or irrelevant, they will choose another way. (4) Even you volunteering for the thrift store as a way to donate to the animal charity have choices: You evaluate that volunteering your time provides about minimal wage to the animal charity. This may or may not be your best deal on how to convey money to that charity.
More generally these are fundamental points of economics: (a) wishing for things doesn't make them so. (b) The economy is the result of a lot of independent people thinking for themselves.
Not all of this is crap, far from it. I am selective - and get good results buying online (no choice - brick-and-mortar stock is sad and too uniform.)
But thing is, "incredibly cheaply" is the reality of the world. We can ignore it or we can live with it.
To reconcile with you: more freedom in pricing by whoever does that task might make sense. And some sections here do have a more interesting strategy where clothes are priced higher initially, then come down in price systematically week after week. Which the tableware departments never seem to use.
> we couldn't sell it for less without essentially making the thrift store not turn a profit, even though the products were donated.
And then you do have a problem also, because the result is no-sale, less-traffic and sending people to fast fashion, and Ikea.
We, via our government, could also insist on trading partners having and enforcing environmental standards and fair trade practices. But that means higher prices for which people will vote against, environment be damned.
Every item takes space, and space costs money. Space often costs quite a bit of money. If I'm paying $2000/m for a 750sqft apartment (not unreasonable for many metros), then every square foot costs me ~$3/month minimum (often quite a bit more because I also have to heat, clean, and organize it as well).
How many months of storage does it take to mean you're literally losing money by keeping an item?
For old shoes? Not that many... if you haven't worn a pair of shoes in a few years, you've likely spent more than $100 storing it.
For bad furniture? Not that many... it takes a lot of space. That crappy couch no one wants to sit on anymore can be costing you almost $100/month.
For that old bag you overpaid on and don't even like that much? Now you're just lighting more money on fire for every month you hang onto it.
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Mentally shifting the equation to a more realistic "opportunity cost" model for items is healthy. Posts like the top level article are, respectfully, a chock of bullshit. Those kids might have messed up when they originally overpaid for a luxury item, but I don't believe for a heartbeat they're messing up when they choose to let it go.
Go work in a place that takes donations, and you'll quickly see they do exactly the same calculus. Goodwill might take your whole bag of donations, but they will absolutely throw 70%+ of it away right off the bat.
They can't afford to try to reuse your crappy stuff for months, quietly losing money storing it.
The nicer consignment shops won't even pretend - they'll just flat out refuse to accept most of your junk. It's not even worth sorting through.
There is usually no opportunity cost though. Those shoes you keep around have no margin cost for the apartment until you need a bigger place.
I still have too much stuff and its a fraction of what my parents had.
(Perhaps this is more of an American thing?)
A bag will come in full of items. A small subset of that bag will be pulled out to go on shelves. The majority of the bag will be sent to "salvage" (trash/recycling).
Some folks have a curated selection of items they bring in that mostly get accepted, but usually the folks doing that just take it to a real consignment shop, or sell it on something like facebook marketplace.
Generally - a large portion of the donations are exactly this situation: used items in a big trashbag that come in after a move (or eviction [or death]).
They go in the trash. Where the owner probably should have put them a while back. I also don't like how much churn exists in our modern consumption economy - but it's not doing favors to pretend it doesn't exist. Much of our "stuff" is low cost, semi-consumable items that will end up trashed - by design. I don't like it either, but saying "Donate it" is like pretending recycling is going to solve plastic pollution.
I think the reality is that online marketplaces basically fill that gap, though.
Most folks who have items that they know aren't trash try to sell them themselves online these days (or best case - use things like "BuyNothing" groups).
But if you can't move it on facebook marketplace, the sad reality is that goodwill and the like are also probably going to put it in the trash if you donate it to them.
Even places like homeless shelters are very picky (exclusively "new" or "gently used" donations of specific items).
There's just a lot of work in "matching" used items to people who want/need those items, and most times the value of the item is lower than the value of that work (even when that work is heavily discounted by volunteers).