I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

The 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&#x27;s parent company alone destroyed &quot;400 million GBP&quot; 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.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2018&#x2F;may&#x2F;18&#x2F;richemont-destroys-nearly-500m-of-watches-in-two-years-amid-buyback-policy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2018&#x2F;may&#x2F;18&#x2F;richemont-d...</a>

A few „anthropological“ impressions from this text.<p>First, why do people throw away tennis shoes, unopened food etc? Why not take with them on to their next destination?<p>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&#x2F;need come and collect them. Only if anything is really unwanted, you take back and throw away.<p>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)

I live near UPenn. Some locals call the end of the academic year &quot;Penn Christmas&quot;. 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.

Not surprising. I remember being an undergrad when my BA was ending. I was out-of-state, my nearest relative was several hours away, and I basically only had enough space to pack up from my room whatever could fit in my car. I don&#x27;t think I threw out <i>much</i>, but there were definitely some things that were resigned to the bin because I simply didn&#x27;t have anywhere else to put them. For example, I&#x27;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&#x27;d probably pay more in shipping costs than the cost of the blender; so what purpose was there to hang onto it?<p>It was also a surprising PITA to get someone to take my gently-used mattress. Most places (Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc) didn&#x27;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&#x27;t already packed up at that point as well and take what they wanted--the bed frame, some lamps, etc.

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&#x27;t bring with me, and then the next day seeing everything had just been bagged up and dumped into 2 large dumpsters.

I live near a major university town and one of the highlights of my year is move-out week. At dusk, a friend and I go dumpster diving at the apartments around campus. You definitely wear gloves and clothing you don&#x27;t mind throwing out afterward, but MOST of the garbage is cleaner than you&#x27;d think.<p>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&#x2F;organizers, tools, sports equipment, batteries (new in box), etc. Oh, and alcohol. So much alcohol.<p>There is lots more that I typically don&#x27;t bother with because I have no use for, things like furniture, vacuums, lamps, &quot;items of a personal nature,&quot; etc. Basically anything you can imagine fitting into an apartment, you are likely to find in the dumpster.<p>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&#x27;re willing to take the time to find it, and possibly get a little dirty.

I went to the local state school, and had an apartment off campus. At the end of the school year, we&#x27;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.<p>In the first dumpster, you should get a couple of backpacks, rucksacks, and a broom handle (to aid in digging). We&#x27;d find all kinds of things. Books we&#x27;d resell, lots of porn, lots of perfectly good clothing. It was great.<p>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.<p>Dumpster diving in college towns is definitely something the townies do.

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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s not just students. Where I live (admittedly wealthy) people throw away <i>everything</i> they can&#x27;t be bothered to do the slightest bit of maintenance on. I have found, and made functional:<p>- a snow blower<p>- various weed eaters<p>- vacuum cleaners<p>- a generator (higher capacity than the one I already had)<p>- a log splitter<p>- pressure washers (nozzles usually clogged with dirt)<p>- a chainsaw<p>- multiple typewriters (the Selectric I kept, the others I sold)<p>- a boat motor<p>- a sump pump (bottom was clogged with sand)<p>We&#x27;ve all seen those &quot;saved from the garbage&quot; restoration videos on youtube and wondered just how &quot;garbage&quot; that stuff was. Believe it, it happens.

&gt; 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.<p>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.<p>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 ;)<p>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 did this once. I was a RA, and there must&#x27;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.

&gt;it also feels mildly wrong to take it<p>I never feel any guilt about taking things from the trash. About trespassing to somewhere you&#x27;re not supposed to be? Sure. But if it&#x27;s something that&#x27;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&#x27;m taking it.

All kinds of nice things appear in a college dorm&#x27;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&#x27;s worth.<p>When I was in college I found a perfectly working DVD player in a dumpster on move-out day, and I wasn&#x27;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.

I wonder what we need to do to make buying and selling used items convenient. My experience has been that the bid&#x2F;ask spread is too large, and liquidity too low to be practical. And if you&#x27;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&#x27;t found a workflow that works. (I&#x27;m in an apt building near the one listed in the article; more of a young-professionals&#x2F;mixed vibe though.)<p>For transient university housing as in the article, I imagine the dynamic shits due to the volume of temporary items being cycled through.

I remember that my school rented out mini-fridges to students. It was about $150 to rent a dingy, used fridge for the year. The cost to buy a similar fridge was about $100. So of course, students would buy fridges, then discard them at the end of the year. Piles and piles of mini-fridges.

My friend is a professor at NYU and, to make a long story short, one of his international students messed up their scheduling and tried to get my friend to change their final meeting time because his flight home for the summer cost &gt;$10k and he didn&#x27;t want to change it. Like, that&#x27;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.<p>That&#x27;s all to say, I&#x27;m guessing for many of these rich kids they&#x27;re not thinking twice about throwing out a table or some slides their parents bought for them.

&gt; 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.<p>So this person spent several days digging in trash to scavenge items that would be worth a total of $6000 new.<p>But these aren&#x27;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.<p>[Also saying that a pack of 60 disposable cups cost $18 seems sus to me].<p>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.

College students may have no concept of how much stuff costs when their parents buy it. But to be fair, I&#x27;m in my 40s, and throw out a lot of expensive stuff too. When you&#x27;re moving house, you&#x27;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&#x27;ve accumulated. I may believe the underlying reasons justify my behavior, but I can&#x27;t judge anyone else for doing the same thing on the biased assumption that their reasons are less defensible.

So many campaigns for recycle… but not enough on the two more important pieces - Reduce and Reuse.<p>Over the years I have refurbed some furniture which is a fun hobby in addition to being environmentally helpful.<p>I think it’s also worthwhile to pay for higher quality items that are made well and last. A nice pair of leather boots can get repaired for minimal cost and mine have lasted over a decade of very hard wear.

When I 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.

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 &#x27;adult&#x27; videos only 5 years prior... 8 hour vhs bootlegs with 3-4 &quot;films&quot; each. but that was 2007ish and VCRs were mostly gone by then.

I lived near UC Berkeley for many years and I would often take a random afternoon to drive around the student neighborhoods near the end of the term to snag a couple free things like air fryers, microwaves, or TVs for free. People would reliably leave them out on the curb for the taking as they packed up to head back home, since they weren&#x27;t practical to take on a flight or long journey. I&#x27;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&#x27;t even care to go through that motion or waited too long to pack and realize they couldn&#x27;t bring it.<p>Never went through the dumpster or got any &quot;luxury&quot; goods (probably wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t see any signs to say otherwise.<p>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.

In Boston move in &#x2F; out day (Sept. 1) is called &quot;Allston Christmas&quot;. The students leave TONS of stuff.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Moving_Day_(Boston)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Moving_Day_(Boston)</a>

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&#x27;t actually practice it.

In LA you just leave anything you don&#x27;t want that still has value on the curb and it&#x27;s gone within a few hours. It&#x27;s a very efficient system.

Here&#x27;s a lucky bastard who managed to snag a Herman Miller Aeron chair for $10 off a student moving out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;OfficeChairs&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1kvcr18&#x2F;it_finally_happened_to_me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;OfficeChairs&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1kvcr18&#x2F;it_fi...</a><p>I&#x27;m only a little jelly.

I used to live in some apartments near the university of washington. Every june whole apartments worth of stuff would end up in the &#x27;free pile&#x27; whenever the international students would move out.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t tell if it&#x27;s kids that communing outside of the neighborhood to school or potentially some &#x27;travelling nurses&#x27; working at the nearby hospital, but the eating is good.

Apple&#x27;s Airpods Max headphones appear to be the official uniform of University of California students. We&#x27;ve been visiting and I swear they outnumber normal headphones.

Works even if you&#x27;re not in a college town. I once pulled a $4000 set of speakers out of my building&#x27;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&#x27;t even need a soldering iron. You can get some crazy stuff if you&#x27;re in the right building. Really sucks seeing it go to waste when it isn&#x27;t something you can take, I always have to fight myself to leave some things behind.

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.<p>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.<p>I don’t know if the kids that threw them away were lazy or they just didn’t know about buy back, but the books easily brought me $100 for a couple hours of morning dumpster diving.

I 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.<p>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).

My older brother was a student at U of Michigan. Back in the late &#x27;80s, he salvaged a blue Gibson Destroyer copy from the end of the year purge. We&#x27;re both still playing guitar to this day.<p>When I was in college at Michigan State, the local pizza joints (Hungry Howies and Gumby&#x27;s) had a &quot;collect 10 tabs, get a free pizza&quot; 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.

This really resonated with me. Seeing those things casually thrown away didn&#x27;t just feel like waste. It felt like some kind of emotion was being tossed out too.<p>Sometimes the guilt doesn&#x27;t come from picking something up. It comes from realizing that we&#x27;re getting used to throwing things away. Not just stuff, but effort, relationships, and even the part of us that once tried to live with intention.

I spent many years curb-shopping student discards in Cambridge, MA. It&#x27;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.<p>I think much of it is a combination of jet-setting affluence, and of international students, who might not be affluent, but who can&#x27;t take it with them, and are too busy to sell it.<p>The sad thing to a curb-shopper is the knowledge that most on-campus discarded stuff never makes it to the curb, other than &quot;Allston Christmas&quot;.<p>The other day, when there were a lot moveouts happening (when you can actually &quot;pahk yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd&quot;) 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.)<p>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 &quot;Harvard students!&quot;<p>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.

When I was a freshman and sophomore I bought a lot of second hand furniture at ~70% off from people who were graduating and moving. I thought I would do the same when I graduate, but no, it took a certain type of personality and executive function to deal with disparate buyers, haggling prices and scheduling pickups amidst the busy graduation and commencement season. Not everyone could properly get rid of their fancy furniture. If one grows up in a middle class family where money isn&#x27;t tight, often throwing it all away is just the easy way to avoid hassle and the mental toll.<p>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.

It&#x27;s pretty sad people throw away stuff when it&#x27;s possible to give it away to charity. Well, maybe it&#x27;s not convenient to donate stuff around their universities?<p>I personally never throw away anything that could be useful to someone. There are organizations around me that accept almost anything.

I 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.

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.

While entertaining, this is nothing novel for anyone who&#x27;s been to college during move-in&#x2F;move-out days.<p>Quite simply, it&#x27;s not worth people&#x27;s time&#x2F;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.<p>FWIW, some universities offer convenient &quot;bulk disposal&#x2F;donation&quot; sites on-campus and some clubs&#x2F;sororities&#x2F;fraternities volunteer to help managing the logistics.

When 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.

Boston is a town with a ton of students and many of them live in Allston. Leases are almost all 1 yr starting Sept 1st. It’s called “Allston Christmas” because of all the goodies left on the curb.

This is a scene in almost every college dorm. Mom of three college going kid here! There is a mad dash at end to empty out the dorm rooms.

Lol this was my favorite thing to do at CMU. Except it wasn&#x27;t luxury goods, it was all the textbooks and computer equipment they would leave behind.

&gt; Why Did It Make Me Feel So Terrible?<p>Because you get too wrapped up in things that don’t really matter at all?

This is not limited to academia. The very first computer I ever touched, came out of a dumpster where my father worked at the time. Guess they were undergoing a tech refresh, and this financial institution had some apparently rather lax media destruction policies.

The dollar amount may be higher but the phenomenon is nothing new. In undergrad I remember scavenging a bunch of lumber to make a bad frame. In grad school the end of the spring semester was a time for me to go drive around the undergrad apartments looking for stuff.

I get leaving tables behind, but why so much shoes&#x2F;clothes? I used to live near an Ivy league school and this was a thing there too, but it was all furniture. People weren&#x27;t throwing things away that fit in a carry on (unless they were knock-offs, I guess)!

I used to work for a carpet cleaner in Madison, WI. 8&#x2F;15 was always &quot;hippie christmas&quot; as we&#x27;d call it. You&#x27;d find all sorts of goodies. One of my friends even found a fully functional moped in a dumpster before. Good times!

Friend of a friend works in student accommodation (UK). Apparently Chinese students leave massive amounts of high end stuff when they go home. They&#x27;re from rich families and can&#x27;t&#x2F;have no need to transport the stuff back to China.

My favorite &quot;digging through the trash&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;t want to be burnt out all the time.<p>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 &#x2F; ACA).<p>----<p>Decades later, I still have several boxes of 1&quot;x3&quot; 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.<p>----<p>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&#x27;t listen (and there certainly are happy physicians), but if you&#x27;re attempting this career &quot;to help people&quot; and&#x2F;or &quot;make money,&quot; there&#x27;re hundreds of easier ways to accomplish both.

I had a friend whose parents had pole barn on their property about an hour&#x27;s drive from our university. He would scavenge furniture in the spring, then sell it in the fall. Gas was under $1&#x2F;gal. back then, so costs were pretty low.

I went to a state school but end of the year I would walk through all the dorms and collect text books to sell back to the bookstore. They were all worth at least a dollar and there was a chance you&#x27;d get a pricey one.

The dumpersterdiving subreddit is interesting, I see people eating food, me personally no, I can see canned food would be an exception or jar<p>EEVBlog&#x27;s dumpster diving videos pulls computers with xeon processors ha

&gt; <i>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><p>I&#x27;m frankly surprised other dumpster divers didn&#x27;t get there first. I used to cruise around my university&#x27;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 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.<p>We got tons of high end, brand new electronics. Laptops, desktops, audio equipment, etc. Whatever we didn&#x27;t keep we would sell.<p>Kids don&#x27;t give a shit. Their parents bought all of their stuff and it&#x27;s just too annoying to deal with moving it. If it won&#x27;t fit in their car&#x2F;luggage they won&#x27;t take it. It&#x27;s too much effort for them to sell it.

Good thing she posted. By next year, Duke will remove access to the chute.

The holy grail would be a discarded thumb drive with somebody&#x27;s bitcoin wallet.

It&#x27;s only worth $6k if it can be sold for $6k.

Can confirm move-out day is very similar at Souther Methodist U. in Dallas.

I 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.

Where 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.

The rich have too much money. Period.

Wait till he see how Koreans throw away so much usable stuff.

oi wei why OP complain? why?