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.
I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
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Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
#12> 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 se…
"UChicago is not known for being a party school"... lol
The unofficial motto is "where fun goes to die"
Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
#13Apple'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.
Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
#14townies 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 mo…
Save a VCR. Nobody makes them anymore, and the technology is not easily reproduced.
Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
#15Move 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.
Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
#16townies 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 mo…
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.
Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
#17This 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.
Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
#18I 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.
It's pretty common for there to be enterprising locals and students who pick this stuff up and then list it on FBMP and CL in September.
Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
#19townies 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 mo…
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…
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.
Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
#20Can confirm move-out day is very similar at Souther Methodist U. in Dallas.