> 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.
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.
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.
who 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Wired 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.
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.
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.
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?
I 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.
It 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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
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.
Is such a thing even to be had these days? I certainly own a decent $6k car, so I know it used to be possible. But I bought that car 14 years ago now, and it would surprise me if you can still get a decent car for that price after 14 years of inflation.
I bought a $4k car a couple of years ago. It’s had a few issues but nothing I couldn’t handle in my garage with fairly common tools. I’d say you can still get a very good car for under $10k and much less if you are handy with wrenches.
When shopping for this sort of car look for private sellers. Used car dealers in this price range tend to be sketchy and none of them do any maintenance or repairs before the sale.
Yes, I think the private party seller comment is right.
I had to sell a decent 15 year old car due to upgrading two years ago for less than $4K. It was a decently reliable car and I think they got a deal. With these, I think you can good deals if you don't mind the downsides. Reliable-ish, with one bigger problem (e.g. AC doesn't work, or has some crash damage), and no guarantee of how long it'll run or when it'll need bigger work (could be years and 50K+ miles, or sooner).
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.
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.
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
>> 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.
I'm dating myself a little bit here, but when i started my career, we had to wear fancy pants. The pants cost ~80 and dry cleaning was ~8 -- so 10 drycleans were a new pair of pants. Thats not even considering the time-cost of drop-off/pick-up which is especially hard if you have long hours.
So I'd just do a regular wash on the pants, despite warnings that "it would ruin the pants over time." I think if I could have the pants last more than 10 washes, I was already in the green.
Even crazier was how some co-workers would have khakis dry-cleaned. Thank the Lord we now have non-iron technical pants. All my problems have gone away.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
340 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadThis seems to assume that all students are “discarding” the same quantity of items each year. It also assumes that the only student donations that occur are ones that are tracked by their university. It’s hard to believe that it is true.
A place like UChicago is not known for being a party school; I doubt Balenziaga or Valentino items are in high demand. I would assume that people aren’t all that into fashion that goes out of style quickly, thus they probably aren’t throwing as much away. But maybe that’s just an “unfair” stereotype I have about UChicago students ;)
One thing I do know, however, is that up in the area of Northwestern, there is a strong tradition of donating things to churches and synagogues, who then hold rummage sales. There is even a “rummage sale season” and a circuit - every weekend there is a different set holding sales. It seems that any such donations here would not show up in any data that this author has collected.
This amount doesn't really surprise me. This has been happening ever since students were in dorms. Even in my little liberal arts school, people would dumpster dive for stuff in the dorms where the rich kids lived. The dedicated divers would even go around after Thanksgiving break and the end of fall semester, when the kids who were too into partying left (or were kicked out) and just left stuff behind that the RA threw out.
The unofficial motto is "where fun goes to die"
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/06/30/no-longer-the-plac...
this is a fully nonsensical response. hallucinatory, even.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Boston)
https://uwalumni.com/news/hippie-christmas/
I vividly recall every fall the crazy number of wrecks by fresh students after "Daddy gave me a Maserati" with no idea how to drive it -- always asian. And then in the spring a couple of the poorest international students would commit suicide when they flunked out and all their families savings back home were forfeit on the tuition.
Didn't have time to juggle craigslist no-shows and stuff. Wasn't worth the $150.
Meanwhile, my dad's VHS machine from the 80's works to this day, plus there is a service manual for it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They are engineered like consumables. Utter insanity. For over $100.
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.
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.
I think this is just a lack of planning and options for many students. Think about it - it's the end of the year, you've got a pile of exams to study for, and then a week or two later you've got to be out of the dorms. Many students don't have a car to haul things to Goodwill or sell them further afield, and nobody on campus wants to buy their stuff because everyone else is moving out at the same time. If they look into shipping the stuff, they find it's prohibitively expensive. So the only option available in the time they have is to trash it.
My impression is that only about half the population, at most, even pretends to care about environmentalism.
I never feel any guilt about taking things from the trash. About trespassing to somewhere you're not supposed to be? Sure. But if it's something that's 100% clear is in the trash and will be going to the landfill and not going to some charity reuse place or something, and I want it, I'm taking it.
You're rooting around in the trash. Humans know, or learn pretty quick, that trash is yucky.
At one point we upgraded to having an intern standing in the dumpster throwing stuff out to us as we directed him.
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.
How much time it took to figure that out, and what is the chance the thing would turn out unsalvageable?
I don't know how likely it'd be for something like that to turn out unsalvageable. I think that essentially everything at that level uses wooden enclosures, so it'd come down to whether the speaker bit is set into the wooden enclosure with screws or adhesive, and I don't know about the industry enough to know what the ratio is on that. Probably mostly screws. Then getting a compatible driver is probably guaranteed, at worst you have to replace both sides to keep them balanced.
So, yeah, a lot more just really rich students than there used to be, rich enough to think nothing of throwing out luxury goods, finding it more convenient than doing something else with them.
Then the increase of wealthy international students on top of that -- also richer than most students 20 years ago, and add on even less convenient to try to move anything back home or do anything else with it.
It is expected right? Our population has grown and we also have huge streams of foreign students...but the count of universities has largely been static. The class sizes are a bit bigger and the dorms accomodate more, but nowhere near in line with the demand. Naturally the prices have risen to meet the limited supply.
Not saying this is good, rather...we should be building more universities to stay in line with the general population
When shopping for this sort of car look for private sellers. Used car dealers in this price range tend to be sketchy and none of them do any maintenance or repairs before the sale.
I had to sell a decent 15 year old car due to upgrading two years ago for less than $4K. It was a decently reliable car and I think they got a deal. With these, I think you can good deals if you don't mind the downsides. Reliable-ish, with one bigger problem (e.g. AC doesn't work, or has some crash damage), and no guarantee of how long it'll run or when it'll need bigger work (could be years and 50K+ miles, or sooner).
- 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.
i.e. buy a power washer each-ish time you need it compared to hiring somebody.
$6k in labor for some part of the project vs $300 tools from harbor freight, who gives a fuck if the tool only lasts a few hours, I don't have time to sell it nor place to store it.
My riding mower is 19 years old. It's approaching Ship of Theseus levels at this point, but since the Kawasaki motor shows no signs of giving up the ghost, I'm hard pressed to spend the $2k+ it would take to replace it. If it costs me $75 each year in replacement parts, I could have it for another 10 years.
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.
Apologies if this is just a typo but I am really confused by this wording - isn't "significant minority" an oxymoron? If you had to express this as a percentage how many wealthy people are you saying got this way?
Sure, maybe you have a landscaper for that. Your landscaper knows a guy who's happy to get paid $100 slap a new $50 Amazon carb on your snowblower and lecture you about not leaving ethanol in it for 2yr straight.
Shoe repair is hit-or-miss. I contacted one who said it would be a 2 month turnaround time.
I purchased an item from a church supply and noticed that it included a molded plastic insert that I'd be removing to clean once in a while. So I contacted the vendor and asked whether I could purchase some spare inserts. "well, our supply chains are challenged right now, and this is made in Italy..."
I advise my friends, if they're purchasing any electronics, like a notebook, you may as well bundle some accessories and spare parts right away, like an extra battery or power supply or the component that's most likely to go bad, because in 5 years when you need it, they'll be sold out.
In fact, in all of those markets I've listed above, I've purchased something, unbox it at home, only to find out that it is lacking accessories, isn't a complete set, or part of it is unfit for purpose, and in fact the manufacturer just gets things onto store shelves while incomplete, so they can sell you more things out of their catalog [iPhones without chargers; shipping beta software...]
I just finished carefully cleaning the sponge filter on my vacuum cleaner. One day I'll visit their website to see if there are any spare accessories still available for it. Good luck!
I'm dating myself a little bit here, but when i started my career, we had to wear fancy pants. The pants cost ~80 and dry cleaning was ~8 -- so 10 drycleans were a new pair of pants. Thats not even considering the time-cost of drop-off/pick-up which is especially hard if you have long hours.
So I'd just do a regular wash on the pants, despite warnings that "it would ruin the pants over time." I think if I could have the pants last more than 10 washes, I was already in the green.
Even crazier was how some co-workers would have khakis dry-cleaned. Thank the Lord we now have non-iron technical pants. All my problems have gone away.
[0]: https://www.strugglecare.com/struggle-care#:~:text=You%20Can...
I'm only a little jelly.
I can’t say it was a great return on my time, but it did give me something to do and I ended up with a little pocket money and 6 Aerons for the family and our guest room computer desk.
If you want to do this, look for ones with a bad strut (or set a marketplace alert for Aerons under $150). They’ll seem really broken to most people, so they sell cheap, but it’s a pretty easy fix (just needs a HUGE pipe wrench* and a $30 strut [and optionally, a $20 set of Rollerblade wheels]).
* or a large pipe wrench and a black pipe “cheater” to fit over the handle.
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.