[HN Gopher] I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke stu...
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I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
Author : drvladb
Score : 170 points
Date : 2025-05-27 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (indyweek.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (indyweek.com)
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > Looking at the data, Duke's per-undergraduate donation rate
| (about 4.9 pounds) is comparable to that at other wealthy private
| universities like Princeton (7.6 pounds) and Georgetown (6.1
| pounds). Duke actually outperforms some schools with similar
| student demographics like the University of Chicago (0.8 pounds)
| and Northwestern (0.9 pounds). Most large public universities
| hover around one pound per student.
|
| 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.
| sybercecurity wrote:
| I assume that "donation" also doesn't include graduates giving
| things to returning students. No way to even track that.
|
| 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.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| "UChicago is not known for being a party school"... lol
|
| The unofficial motto is "where fun goes to die"
| timewizard wrote:
| Why does fun go there to die?
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| It's known as one of the toughest schools to have ever
| existed. The dean who set the tone for the last few decades
| recently left and the current generation of student don't
| seem to appreciate the 'rigor' so we'll see if it stays
| that way.
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/06/30/no-longer-the-
| plac...
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Intense academics.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| I did this once. I was a RA, and there must've been at least 6
| mini fridges left behind. I was staying for the summer, so I
| cleaned the ones that were salvageable and sold them on
| Craigslist. Earned some easy beer money.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| It's pretty common for there to be enterprising locals and
| students who pick this stuff up and then list it on FBMP and CL
| in September.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Did you keep one? (To hold the beer)
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| In Boston move in / out day (Sept. 1) is called "Allston
| Christmas". The students leave TONS of stuff.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Boston)
| duffyjp wrote:
| Hippie Christmas at UW Madison. I used to snag all kinds of
| stuff as a student.
|
| https://uwalumni.com/news/hippie-christmas/
| pknomad wrote:
| This is not surprising to me a graduate of a school with a
| similar profile to Duke. The student body is composed of highly
| wealthy domestic students but also insanely wealthy international
| student body.
| ty6853 wrote:
| Insanely wealthy international student seems to be a pretty
| common component of the competitive STEM universities.
|
| 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.
| kevinsync wrote:
| There's some kind of 6-converging-storylines movie script in
| here somewhere.
| jldugger wrote:
| Kinda already been done and is highly, highly rated:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots
| pknomad wrote:
| new nouveau riche
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I'm a middle class American and I admit to leaving behind
| decent furniture (a bed, etc) just because I was busy with
| finals and had a hard deadline to be somewhere else for an
| internship or a job.
|
| Didn't have time to juggle craigslist no-shows and stuff.
| Wasn't worth the $150.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| townies in university cities have been dumpstering during move-
| out week since time immemorial. i remember finding an entire
| complete set of MS Office 9x on floppies in a dumpster when i was
| in 5th grade :) among many other things over the years. even once
| found what would have been a treasure trove of 'adult' videos
| only 5 years prior... 8 hour vhs bootlegs with 3-4 "films" each.
| but that was 2007ish and VCRs were mostly gone by then.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Save a VCR. Nobody makes them anymore, and the technology is
| not easily reproduced.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Those 2000s VCR's made near the end were pretty crappy
| though. We used VHS well beyond when everyone else threw
| theirs out - it was a cheap way to record TV. We would find
| one, it would last 8-10 months, and then break. I must have
| taken apart dozens of them, it was a fun thing to do as a
| kid.
|
| Meanwhile, my dad's VHS machine from the 80's works to this
| day, plus there is a service manual for it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I have several VCRs I picked up at thrift stores for a few
| bucks. The interesting thing is the fundamental mechanism
| in them is all the same. The electronics boards change, the
| box changes, but the machine is the same. I'd swap parts
| from one brand to another to keep them working.
|
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| My parents did (and still do this) at a little ivy in the
| northeast. I got some good stuff including an introductory
| Grateful Dead CD (this was ~35 years ago). My dad would joke
| that all the graduates would throw away their tie-dye shirts
| and go to work on wall street (not completely a joke). Now we
| have an entire closet filled to the brim with used water
| bottles and I have to periodically clean through tons of stuff
| including very old jars of tomato sauce.
|
| 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.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| on one hand, i hate how wasteful the culture around move-out
| day is *. on the other hand, i benefited from that behavior
| pretty successfully. i guess it's only waste if people don't
| pick it up and reuse it - and i'm happy to do so.
|
| 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.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| How much goes on FB Marketplace depends on how economical
| the student is. Most students will only consider this for
| their biggest ticket items.
|
| 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.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| oh, absolutely. but the barrier to advertising resale to
| a large group is a lot lower than when i was a kid (we
| had a local free classifieds paper, rip The Echo, but you
| had to mail in your listings). i'm just curious if
| there's any meaningful difference in the amount of
| "direct" secondhand sales of stuff that would have
| otherwise gone in the trash for dumpster divers to pick
| through and resell.
| dml2135 wrote:
| > My dad would joke that all the graduates would throw away
| their tie-dye shirts and go to work on wall street (not
| completely a joke).
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Well, a big part of the university value proposition is to
| start building your network. Sounds like he did that.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I had a friend whose parents had pole barn on their property
| about an hour's drive from our university. He would scavenge
| furniture in the spring, then sell it in the fall. Gas was under
| $1/gal. back then, so costs were pretty low.
| wnissen wrote:
| Apple's Airpods Max headphones appear to be the official uniform
| of University of California students. We've been visiting and I
| swear they outnumber normal headphones.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| You will learn to think different like everyone else.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I went through several pairs of crappy wireless headphones
| until I gave in and got airpods, which just work.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| For a year, and then the internal battery is useless.
|
| They are engineered like consumables. Utter insanity. For
| over $100.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I've been wearing my AirPods pro since Covid with no
| issues.
| tdeck wrote:
| Move out waste is a huge thing. At my alma mater in 2014 they had
| some program where you could leave things in the common room and
| they would be collected and supposedly donated. I remember
| spending extra time cleaning my (good quality) things that I
| couldn't bring with me, and then the next day seeing everything
| had just been bagged up and dumped into 2 large dumpsters.
| lsllc wrote:
| The problem is that move-out happens in May, but move-in
| happens in late Aug/early Sept. So there's lots of useful stuff
| being discarded in May (beds, desks, bookcases, in-window A/C
| units etc) that would likely be in demand in Sept but have long
| been sent to the landfill by then.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Yeah, maybe the University could have thrift stores come in
| at the end of May and collect stuff they think they could
| sell to incoming students in the fall?
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Can confirm move-out day is very similar at Souther Methodist U.
| in Dallas.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _You don't really have to do any digging--most of the stuff
| I've gotten was sitting on top of discarded furniture. But you do
| have to rush. After I took the Lululemon haul upstairs, I
| returned to find city waste workers loading things into a garbage
| truck, off to a landfill._
|
| 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.
| knowitnone wrote:
| I live in a uni town and when graduation comes around(pretty
| soon), there are all kinds of goodies on the sidewalk and
| trashbins. LCD TVs, clothing, furniture, food, bikes, etc.
| Everybody talks about evironmentalism execept they don't actually
| practice it.
| tdeck wrote:
| > Everybody talks about evironmentalism execept they don't
| actually practice it.
|
| 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.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Do colleges not store stuff for students who will be back in
| the fall? My undergraduate school did this (and had a large
| contingent of students doing research over the summer), so
| graduation day just meant that furniture was mostly moved
| around and snatched up by other students, or even stayed in
| place as the students changed dorm rooms.
| tdeck wrote:
| At my school there was a service you could pay for that
| charged by the box, however when I graduated I had to leave
| a lot of stuff behind (granted I didn't have any $900
| furniture).
| dml2135 wrote:
| > Everybody talks about evironmentalism execept they don't
| actually practice it.
|
| My impression is that only about half the population, at most,
| even pretends to care about environmentalism.
| fortran77 wrote:
| But most likely that half is well-represented in college
| undergraduates.
| bluGill wrote:
| Everyone cares. They will often convince themselves that some
| things don't matter (global warming) or that their part is
| insignificant, but everyone cares in some way/time/form.
| cmontella wrote:
| Lol this was my favorite thing to do at CMU. Except it wasn't
| luxury goods, it was all the textbooks and computer equipment
| they would leave behind.
| dm03514 wrote:
| Me too :) - state university in early 2000s , would take the
| textbooks from the trash walk them over to the textbook
| exchange and pocket ~$100 for ~3 hours of work
| nancyminusone wrote:
| >it also feels mildly wrong to take it
|
| 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.
| timewizard wrote:
| When I find people recycling out of our trash bins I just
| remind them that I have to ask them to leave because it's a
| liability issue. Then I let them know what our office hours
| actually are.
| tantalor wrote:
| It is a feeling of disgust, not guilt.
|
| You're rooting around in the trash. Humans know, or learn
| pretty quick, that trash is yucky.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Depends on the trash. A co-worker and I would regularly grab
| prototype machines out of our dumpster. Thousands of dollars
| of quality electromechanical hardware (motors, precision
| linear slides, pneumatic cylinders, mini-compressors &
| solenoid valves, etc.) and big sheets of 6061 aluminum for
| the taking. Company _had_ to throw it out and tell us not to
| take back out in order to take the write off.
|
| At one point we upgraded to having an intern standing in the
| dumpster throwing stuff out to us as we directed him.
| ben1040 wrote:
| When I graduated 20+ years ago I scoured trash rooms on campus
| before my card access got shut off. I paid probably six months of
| rent by taking what I found and selling it on ebay.
| dm03514 wrote:
| Looked forward to move out day at state university in early
| 2000s. The university would rent dumpsters and place in the
| common outdoor areas. The dumpsters had the end door that would
| open so it was easy to walk inside of them without climbing.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| The charitable take is that kids moving out from school have a
| ton of things they need to think about and deal with so taking
| optimal care of probably too many possessions may not be at the
| top of the list.
| saulrh wrote:
| Works even if you're not in a college town. I once pulled a $4000
| set of speakers out of my building's trash room - Boston Dynamics
| floor speakers, Polk Audio subwoofer - and I was just in a random
| apartment building in the bay area. Turned out the tweeter on one
| of the speakers needed replacing but that was like a $40 part on
| eBay and ten minutes of work with a screwdriver, didn't even need
| a soldering iron. You can get some crazy stuff if you're in the
| right building. Really sucks seeing it go to waste when it isn't
| something you can take, I always have to fight myself to leave
| some things behind.
| lostmsu wrote:
| > Turned out the tweeter on one of the speakers needed
| replacing
|
| How much time it took to figure that out, and what is the
| chance the thing would turn out unsalvageable?
| saulrh wrote:
| I had those speakers for a few years before _someone else_
| noticed it, lol. The other tweeter worked just fine, and the
| speakers as a whole were so good that even without the
| dedicated hardware for higher frequencies it was still better
| in those ranges than what I 'd been using.
|
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| There are more rich people in the US than when some of us middle-
| aged people were younger, the distribution of wealth has gotten
| much more uneven, while the numbers of rich have gotten larger.
|
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| On our current trajectory, as time moves forward, you will need
| to be more and more rich to attend university. Even more so for
| universities like Duke, compared to, say, NC State or UNC.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I definitely remember walking through the dorm parking lot when
| I was in grad school and noticing that at least half of the
| cars were much nicer than the car I was driving.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That is still the case for me, and has been throughout my
| life. I've never thought spending a lot of money on a car
| made any sense at all.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| It's a little mind-boggling when you compare a decent $5K
| car to a $60K one, and realize you could have a 12-car
| fleet for that one car.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| It's not just students. Where I live (admittedly wealthy) people
| throw away _everything_ they can 't be bothered to do the
| slightest bit of maintenance on. I have found, and made
| functional:
|
| - 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.
| ty6853 wrote:
| Because it is cheaper to buy a new one than pay someone to fix
| most of those. A fairly significant minority of wealthy people
| got that way because they have no free time to do those things
| themselves.
| lesuorac wrote:
| It's also often cheaper to treat many durable items as
| disposable.
|
| i.e. buy a power washer each-ish time you need it compared to
| hiring somebody.
| ty6853 wrote:
| That's exactly what I did when I built my house.
|
| $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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| It's mainly this, and the comfort level with tools.
|
| 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.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Sure, but these people aren't wealthy enough that they still
| need to buy these machines (vs paying for a service to come
| in with their own stuff). I'm sure being able to afford new
| is a factor, but I also see a breakdown in _ability_ to do
| basic repairs.
|
| 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.
| dkarl wrote:
| Often, when something breaks, I think I might enjoy tinkering
| with it and trying to fix it, but it feels like a luxury I
| can't afford. Hiring someone to fix it is a luxury that I can
| sometimes afford. It's one of those things that feels right,
| but you're also aware that it's a flex because you're
| embodying moral values celebrated by your social class, which
| people below your social class happen to not be able to
| afford to embody. But it's definitely a weaker flex than
| being able to take the time to fix it myself.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| That, and that you have to have tools on hand to fix
| something, which most people don't. For the majority of
| people, it's probably limited to three of the lowest
| quality screwdrivers you've ever seen, a pair of scissors,
| and one or two of those allen wrenches that come with IKEA
| furniture.
| noboostforyou wrote:
| > A fairly significant minority of wealthy people
|
| 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?
| nemomarx wrote:
| A quarter or third of a group would be a significant
| minority, I think? it just means non negligible really
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Mowers out front of Lowes were $2k on up yesterday...
|
| 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.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Generally, when I go into the sporting goods store, I look
| around at everything mechanical that may need maintenance,
| and I get the sense that whatever I chose, after the season
| is over, the company will discontinue the model, and spare
| parts will be unobtainable, and I wouldn't find a shop with
| the tools or knowledge anyhow.
|
| 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!
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| A co-worker was telling about a student he knew who would never
| do laundry and just constantly buy new clothes while getting
| rid of the worn ones.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I knew someone like this back in college, too. Absolutely
| wild.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| I'm currently working on a house project that would otherwise
| cost 20-30k. I am willing to buy and throw away a $500 tool.
| Now imagine you're working on a million dollar project (like
| your son's international Ivy League education).
| josefresco wrote:
| Our town has a "swap shop" at the transfer station where people
| bring in items not quite "trash worthy" to offer for free to
| the community. It's quite popular.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| In LA you just leave anything you don't want that still has value
| on the curb and it's gone within a few hours. It's a very
| efficient system.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Same in San Antonio.
| ghaff wrote:
| Pretty much everywhere. I have a bigger junk haul in process at
| the moment. But, living well off a busy exurban road well
| outside of Boston, if I drive or drag something big to the end
| of the driveway and give it a free sign, it'll be gone within a
| few hours.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Even better, put a price on it, then it will be "stolen" for
| sure.
| karaterobot wrote:
| College students may have no concept of how much stuff costs when
| their parents buy it. But to be fair, I'm in my 40s, and throw
| out a lot of expensive stuff too. When you're moving house,
| you're often tired and anxious, and thinking more about the
| burden of hauling crap around than you are with the price of
| replacing it. For me, I actually appreciate the forcing function
| imposed by the size of a moving van or a storage space, it works
| better than Marie Kondo to help get rid of stuff I've
| accumulated. I may believe the underlying reasons justify my
| behavior, but I can't judge anyone else for doing the same thing
| on the biased assumption that their reasons are less defensible.
| dgunay wrote:
| I had a bad habit of accumulating stuff that had some abstract
| value (may come in handy in the future, is a good deal, etc),
| and letting go of a lot of it was hard in part because of guilt
| surrounding environmentalism. Even something that I had no
| attachment to whatsoever felt extremely difficult to get rid of
| because it needed to be disposed of ethically. The idea "you
| can't save the rainforest if you're depressed"[0] was helpful
| to me in breaking out of this mentality.
|
| [0]: https://www.strugglecare.com/struggle-
| care#:~:text=You%20Can...
| bluGill wrote:
| I have realized that I won't give things up and so I avoid
| getting things without some surety that I will really want it
| around for decades. There are a lot of neat toys in the world
| that I honestly wouldn't have time to enjoy them all anyway
| so better to focus on ones I really will enjoy.
| morkalork wrote:
| Here's a lucky bastard who managed to snag a Herman Miller Aeron
| chair for $10 off a student moving out:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/OfficeChairs/comments/1kvcr18/it_fi...
|
| I'm only a little jelly.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I spent a little time chasing broken Aerons (often a bad gas
| strut ($30) or a bad seat ($125-160)) and selling them onward
| fixed for $350-400 at the start of COVID. A broken Aeron would
| go for $100-150 (very occasionally free) and people were buying
| working ones like crazy as remote took off.
|
| 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.
| ourmandave wrote:
| The holy grail would be a discarded thumb drive with somebody's
| bitcoin wallet.
| James_K wrote:
| It is rather depressing to be reminded of the scale of cultural
| shift that needs to take place in order for us to live even
| somewhat sustainably. I get what the degrowth people are on
| about, now. It certainly seems that we should do more with less.
| nappy-doo wrote:
| I went to the local state school, and had an apartment off
| campus. At the end of the school year, we'd go dumpster diving,
| and get all the stuff thrown out. We would take orders from
| people before going - generally things like TVs, VCRs, tapes,
| books for classes, etc.
|
| 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.
| bryanmgreen wrote:
| So many campaigns for recycle... but not enough on the two more
| important pieces - Reduce and Reuse.
|
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most of the things on the list look like things most people
| would choose to have. Maybe a cheaper version, but few would
| choose to do without some version of the thing.
| dml2135 wrote:
| I remember that my school rented out mini-fridges to students. It
| was about $150 to rent a dingy, used fridge for the year. The
| cost to buy a similar fridge was about $100. So of course,
| students would buy fridges, then discard them at the end of the
| year. Piles and piles of mini-fridges.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That sounds like a terrible plan on your school's part (which
| is your point, I know).
|
| Rent them for $95 for the year and the school probably makes
| more money and definitely creates less waste and less
| inconvenience for students.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| My school did that too, but the rental was substntially cheaper
| than the cost of buying one. There was a deposit too, to
| encourage returning them, which may have encumbered more money
| than a new one cost but if you returned it clean it was cheaper
| than buying and you didn't have to deal with it over the
| summer.
|
| Mini-fridges are so cheap now it probably doesn't make much
| economic sense to rent one.
| jerome-jh wrote:
| The rich have too much money. Period.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Well, that's kinda what being "rich" means...
| matthewowen wrote:
| I live near UPenn. Some locals call the end of the academic year
| "Penn Christmas". I definitely see some resentment, but having
| made an international move in my life I have sympathy for it. You
| need to buy things to live, shipping that stuff when you move
| away is often very expensive and time consuming, so you condense
| your life down to a few suitcases and do the best you can.
| albedoa wrote:
| > "Penn Christmas"
|
| There is a Wikipedia article for the Allston (Boston) version:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Boston)
| bigyabai wrote:
| There's something perniciously funny seeing a yellowed _Art
| of the Deal_ at the top of the giveaway bin. Really, no
| takers?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| In a city I lived in bedbugs were common enough that the health
| department spends all weekend on major move-out dates tagging
| furniture with bedbug PSAs.
| rconti wrote:
| It seems like move-out day would be the great volume of stuff
| with the lowest likelihood of bed bugs.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| As a Penn grad student I definitely looked at the piles of
| stuff the undergrads threw out hoping I could get something
| good from them. (I don't recall if I ever did.)
| foobarian wrote:
| As undergrad students in the 90s we couldn't forage after
| moveout day, but we did get tons of cool stuff from the CS
| building loading dock outbound trash heap. My God they were
| getting rid of some really strange 70s gear. One time we
| grabbed an old rackmount tape drive - it was enormous. We
| disassembled it for fun and the thing I remember the most was
| the cooling fan. It was a squirrel cage blower driven
| straight from mains power and it blew so hard you could not
| keep your hand on the exhaust. On. A. Tape. Drive.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| Once upon a time, this was a thing for pretty much the entire
| city of New York:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(New_York_City)
| moralestapia wrote:
| Amazing!
| nick__m wrote:
| It's still that way in Quebec:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Quebec)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > Once the economic depression of 1873 was over, more housing
| was constructed, dropping the price of housing down, and
| subsequently people had less need to move as often.
|
| oh there's precedent for this solution, what a concept
| linkjuice4all wrote:
| The real Penn Christmas miracle was getting used tech
| (laptops/tablets/mp3 players/etc) that was export-controlled.
| Some students legally couldn't bring that stuff back to their
| country and didn't have time to sell it.
| joshvm wrote:
| Having been in this situation a few times as an adult, it's a
| mixture of stressful and cathartic figuring out exactly what's
| worth keeping, storing or giving away.
|
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I get leaving tables behind, but why so much shoes/clothes? I
| used to live near an Ivy league school and this was a thing there
| too, but it was all furniture. People weren't throwing things
| away that fit in a carry on (unless they were knock-offs, I
| guess)!
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Your last sentence is the answer. These kids are buying so much
| it won't fit into a carry on.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, for me, lightening the load is only about clothing to
| the degree that I've accumulated too much over time and
| there's a bunch I just don't wear. It's not recent purchases
| unless something just didn't work out for some reason.Having
| to basically move back into the house because of a kitchen
| fire though and some furniture definitely won't come back in
| because I had it essentially because I had it. But don't
| really use it effectively or it's too bulky.
| cogogo wrote:
| Boston is a town with a ton of students and many of them live in
| Allston. Leases are almost all 1 yr starting Sept 1st. It's
| called "Allston Christmas" because of all the goodies left on the
| curb.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Not surprising. I remember being an undergrad when my BA was
| ending. I was out-of-state, my nearest relative was several hours
| away, and I basically only had enough space to pack up from my
| room whatever could fit in my car. I don't think I threw out
| _much_ , but there were definitely some things that were resigned
| to the bin because I simply didn't have anywhere else to put
| them. For example, I'm pretty sure I threw out a cheap but
| perfectly functional blender (maybe in the $40 range). The reason
| being: what was I going to do with it? My parents had a blender;
| whoever I was staying with in the short-term had a blender; if I
| wanted to mail it back home I'd probably pay more in shipping
| costs than the cost of the blender; so what purpose was there to
| hang onto it?
|
| 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| maybe the Uni could arrange with thrift stores to come in
| around the end of the Spring semester and collect used items
| they think they can sell to the incoming students in the fall?
| neilv wrote:
| Some universities (or student groups) run stores or donation
| centers just to pass furniture from one class to the next.
| bityard wrote:
| The reason you can't give away a mattress is bedbugs. If you
| know what to look for, a bedbug-ridden mattress can easily be
| avoided. And you can also buy protective breathable covers that
| keep the bedbugs either in or out. But most people don't know
| what to look for, or don't want the liability of being wrong.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > It was also a surprising PITA to get someone to take my
| gently-used mattress.
|
| 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).
| creer wrote:
| Thrift store pricing: It's disappointing.
|
| > 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?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Thrift store pricing: It's disappointing.
|
| 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_.
| creer wrote:
| > The issue is that crap is produced incredibly cheaply
|
| 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.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| I spent many years curb-shopping student discards in Cambridge,
| MA. It's not only in late May, but year-round. By convention,
| many people just set out reusable things beside the trash on the
| curb, and the things disappear.
|
| 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.
| naet wrote:
| I lived near UC Berkeley for many years and I would often take a
| random afternoon to drive around the student neighborhoods near
| the end of the term to snag a couple free things like air fryers,
| microwaves, or TVs for free. People would reliably leave them out
| on the curb for the taking as they packed up to head back home,
| since they weren't practical to take on a flight or long journey.
| I'm sure some people tried listing them on craigslist for a
| couple days when they started packing and then abandoned them
| instead when nobody bit, and some people probably didn't even
| care to go through that motion or waited too long to pack and
| realize they couldn't bring it.
|
| 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.
| throwforfeds wrote:
| My friend is a professor at NYU and, to make a long story short,
| one of his international students messed up their scheduling and
| tried to get my friend to change their final meeting time because
| his flight home for the summer cost >$10k and he didn't want to
| change it. Like, that's clearly an international first class
| flight, for a 19 year old. My ass was lucky to catch a $20 bus
| that may or may not catch on fire.
|
| That's all to say, I'm guessing for many of these rich kids
| they're not thinking twice about throwing out a table or some
| slides their parents bought for them.
| gruturo wrote:
| Weird. An international first class ticket is extremely easy to
| change, likely at no additional cost - so he'd lose
| approximately 0$ out of those 10k. It's a phone call, and if
| you're a 19yr old whose family can afford it, most likely it
| isn't even you having to make that phone call.
| throwforfeds wrote:
| I'm guessing he didn't want to tell his family he messed up,
| his professor was unavailable for the rest of the summer, and
| he might get a low grade in the class for missing the final
| project. He had been given 2 months to schedule this final
| review.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I went to a state school but end of the year I would walk through
| all the dorms and collect text books to sell back to the
| bookstore. They were all worth at least a dollar and there was a
| chance you'd get a pricey one.
| csense wrote:
| All kinds of nice things appear in a college dorm's dumpster on
| move-out day -- especially if said college attracts a lot of non-
| local or international students who will be flying. Selling takes
| a lot of time and planning ahead, shipping also requires time
| (you have to box it up and take it to the post office or FedEx)
| -- and it might cost more than the item's worth.
|
| 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.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I used to live in some apartments near the university of
| washington. Every june whole apartments worth of stuff would end
| up in the 'free pile' whenever the international students would
| move out.
|
| 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.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| The dollar amount may be higher but the phenomenon is nothing
| new. In undergrad I remember scavenging a bunch of lumber to make
| a bad frame. In grad school the end of the spring semester was a
| time for me to go drive around the undergrad apartments looking
| for stuff.
| bityard wrote:
| I live near a major university town and one of the highlights of
| my year is move-out week. At dusk, a friend and I go dumpster
| diving at the apartments around campus. You definitely wear
| gloves and clothing you don't mind throwing out afterward, but
| MOST of the garbage is cleaner than you'd think.
|
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| > _For some reason, I have yet to find a laptop_
|
| 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.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I went to the university of Durham in the U.K. - I paid my
| tuition, rent, and living expenses every year by just
| collecting the stacks of discarded textbooks, and selling them
| on at a 30% discount from the university bookshop's prices to
| the next year's undergrads. My only cost was paying (cheap)
| rent on a house under a railway bridge that I turned into an
| amazing fire hazard over the summer.
|
| Best (in terms of mass to value) dumpster dive find I had was a
| box of laser rubies.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| Friend of a friend works in student accommodation (UK).
| Apparently Chinese students leave massive amounts of high end
| stuff when they go home. They're from rich families and
| can't/have no need to transport the stuff back to China.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| I was stationed out in Monterey CA for a while and the
| combination of wealthy civilians + loads of young temporary
| military personnel (+ a fat BAH for some of them) led to an
| absolute treasure trove of craigslist finds if you had access to
| a pickup truck.
|
| 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).
| kccqzy wrote:
| When I was a freshman and sophomore I bought a lot of second hand
| furniture at ~70% off from people who were graduating and moving.
| I thought I would do the same when I graduate, but no, it took a
| certain type of personality and executive function to deal with
| disparate buyers, haggling prices and scheduling pickups amidst
| the busy graduation and commencement season. Not everyone could
| properly get rid of their fancy furniture. If one grows up in a
| middle class family where money isn't tight, often throwing it
| all away is just the easy way to avoid hassle and the mental
| toll.
|
| 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.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I wonder what we need to do to make buying and selling used items
| convenient. My experience has been that the bid/ask spread is too
| large, and liquidity too low to be practical. And if you're
| giving something away, no one will take it. No explanation; just
| observations. I want to not throw things out and buy new, but
| haven't found a workflow that works. (I'm in an apt building near
| the one listed in the article; more of a young-
| professionals/mixed vibe though.)
|
| For transient university housing as in the article, I imagine the
| dynamic shits due to the volume of temporary items being cycled
| through.
| jghn wrote:
| Every time I've tried either selling something or giving
| something away, I came away finding that the hassle was totally
| not worth the time. Which obviously is easy to happen with
| giving something away. But even when selling, if for instance I
| sell something for $50 but put in an hour or two of my time,
| I'm still in the hole.
| ericmay wrote:
| Whenever we give things away, we do one of two things:
| 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.
| jldugger wrote:
| > when selling, if for instance I sell something for $50 but
| put in an hour or two of my time, I'm still in the hole.
|
| 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."
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Yeah liquidity is a big one. last I moved out of a house I
| didn't want to bother finding a buyer for my furniture
| (probably been worth 500 total max even waiting for someone who
| wanted to pay) so I ended up putting it in my yard the last day
| of my lease with a free sign and posted a photo to craiglist,
| dining table chairs office furniture... And that's the day I
| learned a 7 foot sleeper sofa can fit comfortably in the back
| of your standard family minivan
|
| 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
| freetime2 wrote:
| When I moved, I sold some furniture with a local consignment
| shop [1]. I sent them pictures, and they gave me estimates.
| They even sent a truck to pick up the furniture, with the
| transportation cost coming out of the final sale proceeds.
|
| It couldn't have been simpler, and they mailed me a check
| when the items finally sold after about a month.
|
| https://thehomeconsignmentcenter.com/location/
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| freecycle.org
| elif wrote:
| Look into "buy nothing" groups. We have given away about a
| dozen things we once cared about with like an 80%+ certainty
| it's not going to a landfill.
|
| 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.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I do the same. We list it for free pickup on Freecycle or
| similar sites. If someone is just reselling it I honestly
| don't care. All I care is that it's not in my house, I didn't
| spend any time or money, and someone is likely using it.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| also, the dump is not free, and dump pickup especially is not
| free.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| We don't have to do anything, Craigslist already exists and
| works great. I've bought stuff from departmerting college
| students, the transaction is as simple as showing up and saying
| 'hi, are you X? Great, here's $50, thanks for The Thing'.
|
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| Literally giving things away for free frequently costs more
| in time and sanity though.
|
| Putting it out on the street is the least effort approach,
| but rightly most municipalities don't want unwanted items to
| persist their either.
| bluGill wrote:
| My wife often sells things we are done with. If half the
| people who arrange a meeting to buy something show up she is
| doing well. Many times she has listed something for $10, has
| someone say "I really want this, will you take $20" - then
| not show up to meet. (we are always first come first serve,
| but if the first person offers $20...)
|
| 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!)
| freetime2 wrote:
| In Japan "recycle shops" are ubiquitous. There's a chain called
| "Off House" that will buy just about anything, and also
| operates branches that specialize in used books, electronics,
| outdoor goods, etc. There's another chain called "2nd Street"
| with a few branches nearby. They'll appraise your items on the
| spot - usually takes 15 minutes or so during which I'll browse
| the store - and pay cash. They typically buy for about 50% of
| what they intend to sell for, which is quite fair IMO.
|
| 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).
| canpan wrote:
| The shops are the game changer. Theoretically you could earn
| more doing online auctions. But why the hassle?
|
| I sell my old PC hardware, but there are shops for books,
| games, clothes, furniture, instruments, alcohol?!
| fmstephe wrote:
| In New Zealand, where I live, the Salvation Army (charity
| second hand shop) offers a service where they will come and
| clear out a house for you. They will take everything and
| dispose of the trash and keep and resell anything of value.
|
| 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.
| dataflow wrote:
| > I wonder what we need to do to make buying and selling used
| items convenient
|
| 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)
| ufmace wrote:
| In my opinion, never mind that stuff, it's enough of a hassle
| just getting good quality pictures of the thing, figuring out
| exactly what it is and what a wild guess of a "fair" price
| would be, writing up some sort of description, dealing with
| questions and appointments from potential customers. It makes
| it not worth the time and bother unless you're pretty sure you
| can get a few hundred bucks for it. Modulo of course how rich
| or poor you are right now and how much free time you have etc.
| m463 wrote:
| I think craigslist is pretty close. That said it takes time and
| effort, and a little bit of opening up to the general public.
|
| 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.
| sylens wrote:
| In my experience it's sellers who have an unrealistic view of
| what their stuff is worth. When I sell on Facebook Marketplace
| or Craigslist, I price my stuff to sell quickly. I'm not trying
| to recoup my entire investment
| yodsanklai wrote:
| It's pretty sad people throw away stuff when it's possible to
| give it away to charity. Well, maybe it's not convenient to
| donate stuff around their universities?
|
| I personally never throw away anything that could be useful to
| someone. There are organizations around me that accept almost
| anything.
| dkga wrote:
| A few ,,anthropological" impressions from this text.
|
| 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)
| thephyber wrote:
| College students (undergrads) aren't full adults yet. They are
| transitioning from living under the protection of their parents
| to living on their own.
|
| 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 pitting ("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).
| slibhb wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's common in the US too.
| sokka_h2otribe wrote:
| The students live on campus, so the majority of folks are
| getting rid of items at the same time. Different than when
| people live in a city and not everyone is moving at once
| coderatlarge wrote:
| this is how i furnished my grad school apartment way back
| when. fellow students helped carry furniture multiple blocks
| away.
| bluGill wrote:
| Every year my city does a clean up day - put anything on the
| curb and they will take it away (hazardous waste needs to go
| to a special collection location not the curb). All the
| scrappers know that day and will be driving around trying to
| beat the trash trucks to anything good and as a result most
| of the "trash" doesn't get to the dump.
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| My city does this monthly in what is known as bulk trash
| day. This isn't an uncommon thing. There are people that
| know these schedules and drive around to collect things
| before the city arrives to collect. Acting like this is a
| new concept seems for someone seems very strange to me--
| however far up the thread this strangeness started
| amalcon wrote:
| _> First, why do people throw away tennis shoes, unopened food
| etc? Why not take with them on to their next destination?_
|
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| How is this something the police are concerned with? I mean
| municipal authorities, maybe, but police? Wouldn't be the
| case in most of Europe at least.
| akerl_ wrote:
| In most places just dumping stuff in space you don't own
| isn't allowed.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Somewhere there is a line between setting an unopened box
| of high-end sneakers on the street and putting a rusty
| mattress frame on the street, and dumping like the latter
| situation is illegal.
| neltnerb wrote:
| If you mean, why police would ever be involved, the answer
| is that there are a lot of police and not a lot of
| municipal workers walking around. The only way municipal
| workers would do anything here is if a resident of the area
| contacts them with 311 to inform them. And even then it can
| take months (if ever) if it's something like a blocked
| sidewalk or broken bollards rather than something
| _important_ like a pothole.
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Who's your target audience for those items left on the curb?
| Everyone just left town.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| me! not everyone who lives in a college town goes to the
| college.
| Reasoning wrote:
| Can confirm it's common in the upper Midwest as well. My
| college apartment was furnished mostly with stuff we got from
| curbs. Never heard of the police taking issue with it.
| roadbuster wrote:
| Undergraduate tuition at Duke starts at $65,000 USD/year. It
| shouldn't come at any surprise that a lot of spoiled kids who
| are funded by the International Bank of Mommy & Daddy are
| apathetic and wasteful.
|
| 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"
| bluGill wrote:
| > Undergraduate tuition at Duke starts at $65,000 USD/year.
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Then why not just lower the tuition by 40%?
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| i wonder if universities can write off the "loss" of
| granting scholarships for inflated tuition rates? that
| said, scholarships come from all over, so if you're
| getting scholarships from outside the school itself, the
| school is getting all that money.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Because the really rich and international do pay full
| cost which means they can lower it for lower income
| students.
| LanceH wrote:
| Really rich isn't that high a bar, you'll find out when
| it comes to tuition.
| MisterTea wrote:
| These are people far disconnected from reality and honestly
| dont give a damn about anything but projecting their wealth.
| Why else would they spend $400 on something as mundane as
| slippers? They are shallow and careless.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| This is one possible hypothesis, yes.
| susiecambria wrote:
| The $395 Balenciaga slides really stood out to me, too.
| monocasa wrote:
| > First, why do people throw away tennis shoes, unopened food
| etc? Why not take with them on to their next destination?
|
| 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.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I realize that students don't think this way, but they could
| do a few things before the end of the semester. They usually
| find the time to get drunk or go to Starbucks for a hit of
| caffeine.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Starbucks is a lot easier to swing by then trying to get
| boxes to haul things away. Also in my experience the dorms
| don't let you bring by rented trucks or vehicles in the
| loading zone unless it's your assigned move out time slot,
| so you can't really do that mid semester. you could carry
| things by hand slowly somewhere, but it's going to be much
| more cumbersome.
| monocasa wrote:
| I mean, you're looking at almost a month out or so given
| the extra stress of the end of the semester with finals and
| projects. And the semester is only five months or so to
| being with.
|
| It's not really realistic to make this a moral issue, IMO.
| joezydeco wrote:
| They're also studying for finals and working on end-of-
| semester projects. And yeah, they're still kids and time
| management is a thing you learn at this age. But the last 3
| weeks of a semester go by incredibly fast.
| atonse wrote:
| So the solution could be top down:
|
| - 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| This happens at every university on move out day, especially if
| they have a lot of international students that need to fly out
| of the country.
|
| >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.
| ajb wrote:
| Yeah. Given that they all move out on the same day, the most
| economically efficient way is to organise the reuse
| collection centrally, as some unis mentioned in the article
| do.
|
| 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)
| p3rls wrote:
| The stigma is more about going through peoples' trash and being
| poor than reusing things. Environmentalism/repurposing etc, as
| long as its cleanly done, can be pretty high status otherwise.
| stego-tech wrote:
| > Second, why not just put on the street so that other people
| can come and collect items?
|
| 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!
| DFHippie wrote:
| This is commonplace where I live in Vermont, to the point where
| sometimes things are taken which you didn't mean to give away.
| You put "free" on it -- or don't, see above -- put it by the
| curb, and it's gone within the hour.
|
| 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.
| creer wrote:
| So, it's surprising at first, but as others mention, it seems
| like a roughly functioning system: The students are rushed by
| the university to move, move, move. They do what they can which
| is not much for many, who don't yet have their life in order.
| Buying too much, too expensive, not downscaling in time, etc,
| why so surprising? Some universities have a decent system in
| place for temporarily holding that stuff for other students.
| For the rest, the locals - individuals and business can come
| and do the sorting.
|
| 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.)
| mr3martinis wrote:
| Many apartment buildings have policies about where trash can be
| left, including at move out, otherwise there's always trash
| around building entrances for the maintenance staff to clean
| up. Also, the Durham area is pretty suburban, so this apartment
| complex might not have much pedestrian traffic or even a
| sidewalk. It's wasteful, but this is likely the situation.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I've recently moved from apartment that I lived in for 10+
| years. I can understand that.
|
| 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)
| justinc8687 wrote:
| I used to work for a carpet cleaner in Madison, WI. 8/15 was
| always "hippie christmas" as we'd call it. You'd find all sorts
| of goodies. One of my friends even found a fully functional moped
| in a dumpster before. Good times!
| ge96 wrote:
| The dumpersterdiving subreddit is interesting, I see people
| eating food, me personally no, I can see canned food would be an
| exception or jar
|
| EEVBlog's dumpster diving videos pulls computers with xeon
| processors ha
| nyc_data_geek1 wrote:
| This is not limited to academia. The very first computer I ever
| touched, came out of a dumpster where my father worked at the
| time. Guess they were undergoing a tech refresh, and this
| financial institution had some apparently rather lax media
| destruction policies.
| RyanOD wrote:
| My older brother was a student at U of Michigan. Back in the late
| '80s, he salvaged a blue Gibson Destroyer copy from the end of
| the year purge. We're both still playing guitar to this day.
|
| 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.
| chneu wrote:
| I lived near Oregon State for years after I went there. Every
| year end we would go to all the dorms with our trucks and tell
| folks to toss their shit in our truck instead of the dumpsters.
|
| 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.
| ConanRus wrote:
| oi wei why OP complain? why?
| meerab wrote:
| This is a scene in almost every college dorm. Mom of three
| college going kid here! There is a mad dash at end to empty out
| the dorm rooms.
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