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I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
- Kon-Peki 1y ago> 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 1y agoI 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 1y ago"UChicago is not known for being a party school"... lol The unofficial motto is "where fun goes to die"
- timewizard 1y agoWhy does fun go there to die?
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoIt'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-place-where-fun-goes-to-die-the-dean-who-changed-university-of-chicago-steps-down/ https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/06/30/no-longer-the-plac...
- vonneumannstan 1y agoIntense academics.
- delichon 1y ago[flagged]
- keybored 1y agoWhat activism do you object to?
- rtkwe 1y agoTheir mental caricature of the idle college lefty activist.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agowho are you addressing here? the $199 shipping was not in reference to the expensive shoes. where are you getting "protesters are just rich kids who throw away $900 sneakers"? this is a fully nonsensical response. hallucinatory, even.
- xivzgrev 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt'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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bee_rider 1y agoDid you keep one? (To hold the beer)
- pknomad 1y agoThis 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 1y agoInsanely 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.
- bpodgursky 1y agoI'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.
- NoImmatureAdHom 1y agoIn 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Boston)
- duffyjp 1y agoHippie Christmas at UW Madison. I used to snag all kinds of stuff as a student. https://uwalumni.com/news/hippie-christmas/ https://uwalumni.com/news/hippie-christmas/
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agotownies 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 1y agoSave a VCR. Nobody makes them anymore, and the technology is not easily reproduced.
- alnwlsn 1y agoThose 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoMy 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.
- aidenn0 1y agoI 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 1y agoApple'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 1y agoYou will learn to think different like everyone else.
- suzzer99 1y agoI went through several pairs of crappy wireless headphones until I gave in and got airpods, which just work.
- mrguyorama 1y agoFor a year, and then the internal battery is useless. They are engineered like consumables. Utter insanity. For over $100.
- suzzer99 1y agoI've been wearing my AirPods pro since Covid with no issues.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoWired headphones also just work, don't need to be charged, and are much cheaper. AirPods are a strict downgrade from normal wired headphones, and it is insane to me that people are willing to pay for them.
- suzzer99 1y agoExcept when they get stuck in the treadmill and yank the cord out of the headphone. Wired headphones for working out and jogging are a nightmare.
- deleted 1y ago
- tdeck 1y agoMove 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoYeah, 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?
- ForOldHack 1y agoI kicked what looked like an empty card board box, and found two laptops w/ chargers, Retail $1800, Wiped their hard disks, updated all the software, put student software on it, and gave them away to other students. 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.
- tdeck 1y agoIt makes me happy that at least some of this stuff is getting saved. All the resources and labor being put into these things should not be going to waste.
- josefritzishere 1y agoCan confirm move-out day is very similar at Souther Methodist U. in Dallas.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago> 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 1y agoI 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 1y ago> 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- in_cahoots 1y agoDo 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 1y agoAt 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 1y ago> 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.
- cmontella 1y agoLol 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 1y agoMe 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 1y ago>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 1y agoWhen 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 1y agoIt 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 1y agoDepends 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 1y agoWhen 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 1y agoLooked 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoWorks 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 1y ago> 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 1y agoI 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.
- elzbardico 1y agoLots of defects in speakers are actually serviceable for a reasonable cost. For high-end speakers, I think it is worth trying.
- jrochkind1 1y agoThere 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 1y agoOn 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.
- TuringNYC 1y ago>> 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. 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
- jccalhoun 1y agoI 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 1y agoThat 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.
- alnwlsn 1y agoIt'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 1y agoBecause 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 1y agoIt'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 1y agoThat'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 1y agoIt'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.
- suzzer99 1y agoIn 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 1y agoSame in San Antonio.
- ghaff 1y agoPretty 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 1y agoEven better, put a price on it, then it will be "stolen" for sure.
- karaterobot 1y agoCollege 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 1y agoI 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't%20Save%20the%20Rainforest%20if%20You're%20Depressed&text=If%20you%20must%20use%20paper,your%20job%20is%20to%20survive. https://www.strugglecare.com/struggle-care#:~:text=You%20Can...
- bluGill 1y agoI 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 1y agoHere'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_finally_happened_to_me/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OfficeChairs/comments/1kvcr18/it_fi... I'm only a little jelly.
- sokoloff 1y agoI 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 1y agoThe holy grail would be a discarded thumb drive with somebody's bitcoin wallet.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- James_K 1y agoIt 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoSo 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 1y agoMost 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoThat 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.
- dml2135 1y agoHonestly I don’t remember the exact price so I may be exaggerating the cost disparity… but I am not exaggerating the pile of fridges so the disparity was certainly there.
- SoftTalker 1y agoMy 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 1y agoThe rich have too much money. Period.
- DaSHacka 1y agoWell, that's kinda what being "rich" means...
- matthewowen 1y agoI 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 1y ago> "Penn Christmas" There is a Wikipedia article for the Allston (Boston) version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Boston) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Boston)
- bigyabai 1y agoThere's something perniciously funny seeing a yellowed Art of the Deal at the top of the giveaway bin. Really, no takers?
- mindslight 1y agoThe good stuff is in June when Boston College and other dorms move out for the year. The crap in Allston in September is from yearly tenants in off campus housing, was likely already second hand at least once, and is riddled with bugs. I guess Allston has gentrified, but I assume that just means the bed bugs now have credit cards too. 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.
- KennyBlanken 1y agoIn 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.
- dfxm12 1y agoI 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 1y agoYour 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 1y agoYeah, 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.
- elzbardico 1y agoAnd the funny thing is that for all that money they are usually terribly badly dressed. Thousand dollar outfits that make you look like a clown.
- cogogo 1y agoBoston 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 1y agoNot 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 1y agomaybe 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 1y agoSome universities (or student groups) run stores or donation centers just to pass furniture from one class to the next.
- bityard 1y agoThe 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.
- neilv 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throwforfeds 1y agoMy 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 $20 bus that may or may not catch on fire. That's all to say, I'm guessing for many of these rich kids they're not thinking twice about throwing out a table or some slides their parents bought for them.
- gruturo 1y agoWeird. An international first class ticket is extremely easy to change, likely at no additional cost - so he'd lose approximately 0$ 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 1y agoI'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 1y agoI 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 1y agoAll 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoI 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 1y ago> 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 1y agoI 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.
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- nmeofthestate 1y agoFriend 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoWhen 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 1y agoI 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jghn 1y agoEvery 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 1y agoWhenever 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 1y ago> 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."
- yodsanklai 1y agoIt'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.
- Tyr42 1y agoI didn't have a car as a student. It would be hard to manage that goal as a student.
- dkga 1y agoA 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 1y agoCollege 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 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).
- bawolff 1y ago> 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). 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.
- justinc8687 1y agoI 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoThis 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 1y agoMy 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 1y agoI 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 1y agooi wei why OP complain? why?
- jaco6 1y ago[dead]
- meerab 1y agoThis 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.
- ezconnect 1y agoWait till he see how Koreans throw away so much usable stuff.
- bawolff 1y ago> The first tracks the prices and brands of the items that I kept, donated, or sold. The total value came to around $6,000, not including several items I couldn’t find prices for. 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.
- damion6 1y agoYou'd be surprised at what you find during moving season. Chinese students for example can't import laptops back home, plus they've had a taste of freedom and can't let them be scanned. In my spare time one summer I was making like $40 an hour with a full time job. $4000 handbag can't be travelled with, sold. Etc
- bawolff 1y agoYeah, i think the most shocking thing is this person only found 6 grand replacement cost (not actual value) worth of stuff. That sounds shocking low to me.
- Beijinger 1y agoWhy should they not be able to import a laptop or a $4000 handbag? 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.
- calmbonsai 1y agoWhile entertaining, this is nothing novel for anyone who's been to college during move-in/move-out days. 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.
- paulcole 1y ago> Why Did It Make Me Feel So Terrible? Because you get too wrapped up in things that don’t really matter at all?
- ab_testing 1y agoGood thing she posted. By next year, Duke will remove access to the chute.
- ProllyInfamous 1y agoMy favorite "digging through the trash" story was twenty years ago, when I discovered dozens of pounds of medical school studyguides (as a then- pre-med, about to begin studying for the MCAT). Literally $thousands$ in textbooks. 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. ---- 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.
- Aziell 1y agoThis really resonated with me. Seeing those things casually thrown away didn't just feel like waste. It felt like some kind of emotion was being tossed out too. 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.
- blitzar 1y agoWhere are the capitalists? Rent a warehouse (or a distributed network of peoples garages), store from the end of term to start of term and sell it all back to them.
- newccount 1y agoThe true value of these luxury goods is likely closer to that appraised by those undergrads than by the author - i.e trash. Literally billions of dollars of unsold inventory are burnt and destroyed by Luxury brands to avoid marking them down to their correct market value. Cartier's parent company alone destroyed "400 million GBP" of watches in 2 years[1]. Why would you destroy billions of dollars of merchandise if they were actually worth that. I went down the rabbit hole recently after the LVMH tiktok scandal, and given the nature of modern supply chains and mass manufacturing, i believe the bulk of luxury clothing and accessories are likely made in Asia ( China, Bangladesh ) and Eastern Europe. Then they use various techniques to obfuscate the country-of-origin. I cant shake off the impression that the luxury goods market is mostly smoke and mirrors of artificial scarcity, paid celebrity endorsements and potemkin factories. [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/may/18/richemont-destroys-nearly-500m-of-watches-in-two-years-amid-buyback-policy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/may/18/richemont-d...
- motorest 1y ago> The true value of these luxury goods is likely closer to that appraised by those undergrads than by the author - i.e trash. 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 $1k on shoes bother with getting tens of dollars back by selling used sneakers?
- Supermancho 1y ago> https://www.thepoke.com/2019/09/29/americans-cant-believe-kate-middleton-wore-the-same-coat-4-times-9-very-british-reactions/ https://www.thepoke.com/2019/09/29/americans-cant-believe-ka... Punchline: This is a great idea. It sure would save me a lot of money on coats. I'm gonna bet used Valentinos, in my size, are still gonna be at least 200$. I'm not a shoes guy, but I know they are worth something.
- JR1427 1y agoIt's only worth $6k if it can be sold for $6k.
- ap11071 1y agoI once helped clean up after a festival in the UK—a relatively small venue that hosted around 10,000 people. It was incredible to see £450 tents, used for just three nights, simply abandoned. Among the most surprising finds were £300 Rab sleeping bags still in their original packaging (apparently the weather had been too warm to need them) and cash scattered across tent floors. Walking through the aftermath felt like browsing an outdoor gear store virtually anything you could want was there, barely used after just three days.
- nkotov 1y agoWhen we immigrated to the US, my siblings and I used to dumpster dive as kids and we were surprised how much stuff Americans were throwing out. Our first year, we managed to get a couple TVs, old game consoles, old computers. All still very usable. We obviously cleaned them up and took them home and managed to get a couple more years of use out of them.
- datavirtue 1y agoI always like buying used older things and restoring them. Especially cars. In comparison, buying new things is really boring to me. There is no hunt.