I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students
327 comments
·May 27, 2025newccount
motorest
> 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 $1k on shoes bother with getting tens of dollars back by selling used sneakers?
CrimsonCape
I got plantar warts from a climbing gym, and now I make all efforts to never get them again. You should be cautious before wearing used shoes and make all efforts to scrub and wash the shoe interior before wearing. Plantar warts is the HPV virus and cannot be killed with antibacterial methods, bleach, and requires like 30 minutes of rolling boil to destroy the virus. The best you can do is physically scrub and rinse the virus away from where it might find skin contact.
To answer your question, the cost of a used shoe could be the cost of time, despair, and anxiety spent treating a transmissible disease.
Supermancho
> https://www.thepoke.com/2019/09/29/americans-cant-believe-ka...
Punchline: This is a great idea. It sure would save me a lot of money on coats.
I'm gonna bet used Valentinos, in my size, are still gonna be at least 200$. I'm not a shoes guy, but I know they are worth something.
motorest
> 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.
That might be true, but it doesn't refute the idea that a) the value listed in the blog is quite possibly inflated, b) it makes financial sense for the students to throw out stuff like used shoes. Of course dumpster divers always find valuables, but it's also a fact that people moving out often give away valuables they can't take with them. There are even expat boards in Facebook where people give away things before moving abroad. In fact, there are businesses specialized in clearing out rentals for a fee, meaning people pay companies to take away stuff they use, including furniture and appliances, even when they are in perfectly good condition.
duckmysick
> the LVMH tiktok scandal
Can you tell us more about it?
s1artibartfast
An alternative is that $1k simply isn't a lot of money to some people. I came to this realization in college when I had some very wealthy housemates who would occasionally treat expensive items as disposable single use
dkga
A few „anthropological“ impressions from this text.
First, why do people throw away tennis shoes, unopened food etc? Why not take with them on to their next destination?
Second, why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items? This is very common for example here in Switzerland - you put unwanted things ranging from old kid toys to books to furniture on the sidewalk with a sign saying „gratis - zum mitnehmen“ (free to take with you) and people who want/need come and collect them. Only if anything is really unwanted, you take back and throw away.
Third, I was surprised the author felt bad. A sign that there is unfortunately some stigma in re-using things. She is actually doing very nice work by collecting them and trying to give them a new lease of life for herself or others (she mention she donated some of the items)
monocasa
> First, why do people throw away tennis shoes, unopened food etc? Why not take with them on to their next destination?
At my wife's alma mater, the way move out in the dorms worked was that you had 24hrs after your last final and then had to be gone. That didn't really leave a lot of time for a lot of people that had maybe two checked bags and a carry on to work with, and had spent the previous time focused on studying for their finals.
atonse
So the solution could be top down:
- give 2-3 extra days for students to move out.
- maybe partner with a few moving/freight companies? you’d bring them a lot of customers and they could provide a good rate.
pembrook
But it’s a “solution” to a nonexistent problem. The vast majority of stuff people own sits unused for decades but gets moved around to whatever home you’re living in out of irrational loss aversion.
This is human, and fine. But I’m 100% certain this author is grossly overestimating the value of the junk they believe they are “saving” and how much of it they will actually use. This is the rationalizing of a budding hoarder.
The time pressure does these kids a huge service by forcing them to clear out stuff that doesn’t actually matter so they don’t feel the need to buy a 4,000 sq ft McMansion to store their college bean bag chair and every other piece of junk they’ve ever owned.
Ultimately, the authors children will run across these “salvaged goods” in a decades-untouched pile in her basement upon her death in about 66 years.
cardamomo
Better yet, offer to store a reasonable amount of students' belongings over the summer. My college offered this my first couple years but stopped by the time I graduated in 2010.
cloverich
They dont want a bunch of students hanging around with no school and extra time on their hands. Agree its way to short, as someone that had to deal with it, but also understand the trade off they were making at the time.
anal_reactor
> 24hrs after your last fina
Generous. When I was taking part in student exchange I had to be gone from the dorms a week before one of my finals.
distances
How does that even work, you just travel back for the exam?
I could stay I think up to 12 months after graduating. And it was entirely up to you when you wanted to graduate after fulfilling the criteria. I myself took the papers half a year after finishing my master's thesis, and then left the student apartment half a year after that.
xhkkffbf
I realize that students don't think this way, but they could do a few things before the end of the semester. They usually find the time to get drunk or go to Starbucks for a hit of caffeine.
nemomarx
Starbucks is a lot easier to swing by then trying to get boxes to haul things away. Also in my experience the dorms don't let you bring by rented trucks or vehicles in the loading zone unless it's your assigned move out time slot, so you can't really do that mid semester. you could carry things by hand slowly somewhere, but it's going to be much more cumbersome.
joezydeco
They're also studying for finals and working on end-of-semester projects. And yeah, they're still kids and time management is a thing you learn at this age. But the last 3 weeks of a semester go by incredibly fast.
monocasa
I mean, you're looking at almost a month out or so given the extra stress of the end of the semester with finals and projects. And the semester is only five months or so to being with.
It's not really realistic to make this a moral issue, IMO.
jgerrish
I just got a pair of new shoes to me, previously owned by another. I'm glad they were left behind, different items mean different things to people at different stages of their life.
Like at this stage? I'd love to find a quiet place to run.
But in the meantime, I'm not studying for finals or having a kid. Just buying plant-based mayonnaise like a boring adult and scraping lizard crap out of cages in what some could see as a patronizing metaphorical cholesterol or dendrite decaying act of desperate cleansing against time.
So yeah, if the kids at Duke can buy new shoes and time doesn't matter to them, and there's a high likelihood they'll be reused and it's all by choice? Cool.
Choices are good.
directevolve
I live in Portland. Walk around certain neighborhoods, and you’ll see items out on the street - mostly garbage. Broken couches, broken tables, broken appliances, that sort of thing. Typically, items with remaining utility are exchanged via Goodwill or an online tool like Buy Nothing.
My guess is that the college does not want to allow students to dump their mostly-garbage on the neighbors.
At the same time, wealthy students who will throw out items of value may feel they have better things to do than separate out items to donate. That’s especially true if they wait until the last minute.
Overall, separating items to donate from one’s trash is a way to avoid paying to dispose of trash at the dump and a way to perhaps be charitable or environmentally conscious. I’m not convinced it’s all that effective as an altruistic move. If the college sets up a place to dump for free, I’m not at all surprised many people take advantage of it without another thought.
RajT88
I do not even live in Portland - I live on the edge of a suburban area where people skew pretty conservative. I see the same thing - people who want to get rid of perfectly good stuff, and do not want it to go to waste. Even I do this occasionally if I cannot be bothered to repair a thing - it goes out a bit before garbage day and is usually soon gone.*
*Unless it is an old non-wide LCD monitor. Nobody wants those...
paulcole
I live near Ladds Addition and the free piles are the worst. 90% of it is pure crap that just sits out for weeks.
People put it out to feel good about themselves.
Once I saw a bunch of random wires with a label, “FREE - great for art projects.” It’s like thanks for letting me know I was going to knock on doors until I found the right person to make an offer to.
cgio
When I put out any electrical/electronic device here in Australia, the only thing that gets picked up, is the wires, snipped from the devices; I still don’t know why. Recycling would not make sense at this scale I think. And in the process, they destroy the device for anyone who might have a use for it.
amalcon
> First, why do people throw away tennis shoes, unopened food etc? Why not take with them on to their next destination?
It's very possible for the cost of transport to exceed the value of the goods, especially if one is flying to one's next destination.
> Second, why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items?
This I can't help with. As far as I have seen, this is a common practice everywhere in the northeast US. The police don't always love it, but that doesn't really prevent people from doing it.
Reasoning
Can confirm it's common in the upper Midwest as well. My college apartment was furnished mostly with stuff we got from curbs. Never heard of the police taking issue with it.
zem
common practice in san francisco too. i always feel good when i see something that was just taking up space in my house and not being used has been picked up and rehomed.
baxtr
How is this something the police are concerned with? I mean municipal authorities, maybe, but police? Wouldn’t be the case in most of Europe at least.
neltnerb
If you mean, why police would ever be involved, the answer is that there are a lot of police and not a lot of municipal workers walking around. The only way municipal workers would do anything here is if a resident of the area contacts them with 311 to inform them. And even then it can take months (if ever) if it's something like a blocked sidewalk or broken bollards rather than something important like a pothole.
If you mean why would "authorities" care, there's a lot of people that put what amounts to trash on the sidewalk and then move to a new apartment without cleaning it up, or else just ignore that they left it in front of their house until "someone else" takes care of it.
jdminhbg
Somewhere there is a line between setting an unopened box of high-end sneakers on the street and putting a rusty mattress frame on the street, and dumping like the latter situation is illegal.
akerl_
In most places just dumping stuff in space you don’t own isn’t allowed.
bawolff
Where i live, people tend to use the word "police" as a catch all for any type of enforcement including by-law officers.
dylan604
Who's your target audience for those items left on the curb? Everyone just left town.
GuinansEyebrows
me! not everyone who lives in a college town goes to the college.
Suppafly
This happens at every university on move out day, especially if they have a lot of international students that need to fly out of the country.
>Second, why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items?
Often they are, but most of the people already have their own stuff and limited space for additional stuff. When I lived in a dorm, anything larger items you didn't want you could put on the 3rd floor lounge area and the school would donate or dispose of them. Any other students were free to take that stuff, but unless you had preplanned to have a truck or uhaul, you could only take so much.
ajb
Yeah. Given that they all move out on the same day, the most economically efficient way is to organise the reuse collection centrally, as some unis mentioned in the article do.
More generally, it's dumb that it's so much more work to give something away than to trash it - or even buy it in the first place. Our logistics for buying stuff is incredibly efficient, for reusing we're stuck in the 15th century - everything done artisanally (and with free guilt-labour)
thephyber
College students (undergrads) aren’t full adults yet. They are transitioning from living under the protection of their parents to living on their own.
Throwing away things that could be sold could be a matter of (1) frustration/exhaustion with the end of the semester, (2) no place in their car / plane luggage for extra items, (3) indifference of kids who don’t know the value of a dollar (the Ballenciaga slides are literally the most expensive version of a slide you can buy — I usually get mine for less than $10).
On the street might be a better solution, but in the US you can be fined for 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
> 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.
disconcision
as a minor clarification balenciaga slides in good condition would probably be more like $100-250 used, though your point still holds
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creer
So, it's surprising at first, but as others mention, it seems like a roughly functioning system: The students are rushed by the university to move, move, move. They do what they can which is not much for many, who don't yet have their life in order. Buying too much, too expensive, not downscaling in time, etc, why so surprising? Some universities have a decent system in place for temporarily holding that stuff for other students. For the rest, the locals - individuals and business can come and do the sorting.
Same thing happens on Craigslist: You can post an item for sale for a fair price - and it may take days or weeks - or you can post it free and it will gone in hours (to someone who will resell it perhaps but whatever.)
gosub100
> or you can post it free and it will gone in hours
you'll have a dozen people immediately claim it and ask you to hold it for them, but actually getting rid of the item is another story. maybe 1/4 or less actually take it. I recommend donating to a thrift store (even one of the "evil" ones where the CEO makes $600k) or posting it in proper category, putting $1 for the price, and saying "free" in the item description. As opposed to using CL's "free" category.
stego-tech
> Second, why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items?
Boston does this! The locals refer to it as “Allston Christmas”, it takes place every September 1st, and it’s a great time to scavenge furniture and appliances, even computers and electronics.
My big concern remains bedbugs, personally. As a renter myself, I don’t have the facilities to disinfect and kill off any pests that might’ve hopped on between the old apartment and the curb, which narrows my selection considerably. Still, lots of students and locals partake in the yearly turnover tradition and walk away with new room furniture sets!
micromacrofoot
this is also just where the trash goes for pickup though, and indeed they have extra garbage pickups on moving day
roadbuster
Undergraduate tuition at Duke starts at $65,000 USD/year. It shouldn't come at any surprise that a lot of spoiled kids who are funded by the International Bank of Mommy & Daddy are apathetic and wasteful.
From: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
"The median family income for a Duke student is $186,700. A significant portion of Duke students, 69%, come from families in the top 20% of earners, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Additionally, only 1.6% of students come from low-income backgrounds"
bluGill
> Undergraduate tuition at Duke starts at $65,000 USD/year.
Does it? I don't know anything about Duke, but a lot of colleges I know of tell your tuition is around that price. However dig deeper and you discover it is almost impossible to not get scholarships thus making the real price cheaper. I know of one school near me that automatically gives everyone a 40% scholarship, then they look at your background to figure out if you qualify for anything more.
dylan604
Then why not just lower the tuition by 40%?
gosub100
why are you asking instead of verifying the claim yourself?
matthewowen
I live near UPenn. Some locals call the end of the academic year "Penn Christmas". I definitely see some resentment, but having made an international move in my life I have sympathy for it. You need to buy things to live, shipping that stuff when you move away is often very expensive and time consuming, so you condense your life down to a few suitcases and do the best you can.
joshvm
Having been in this situation a few times as an adult, it's a mixture of stressful and cathartic figuring out exactly what's worth keeping, storing or giving away.
The best approach I've found is to standardize packing into 60L industrial Euro crates. They're inexpensive, very strong, practically waterproof (will survive both puddles and rain) and you can even air freight them at close to $100/box if the contents weigh under 32kg. Most of the expense in shipping is volume and people massively underestimate how much they own. If you can keep things compact and dense, ground/sea freight is inexpensive if you don't have to do it very often and there is no practical weight restriction.
Furniture only makes sense if you can re-claim 80+% of the void space in items like shelves, or if it completely flat packs, and if the cost of re-acquisition would be high. Shipping companies usually have minimum billable volume (say 2 cubic meters). I was able to send an apartment's worth of contents in the same volume that a couch would occupy.
For everything else, either buy quality used things that you can sell without much depreciation, or cheap used things that you don't mind thrifting afterwards.
anyonecancode
Once upon a time, this was a thing for pretty much the entire city of New York:
yieldcrv
> Once the economic depression of 1873 was over, more housing was constructed, dropping the price of housing down, and subsequently people had less need to move as often.
oh there's precedent for this solution, what a concept
moralestapia
Amazing!
linkjuice4all
The real Penn Christmas miracle was getting used tech (laptops/tablets/mp3 players/etc) that was export-controlled. Some students legally couldn’t bring that stuff back to their country and didn’t have time to sell it.
BeFlatXIII
How thorough were the customs inspections? Seems like an easy thing to sneak out.
madcaptenor
As a Penn grad student I definitely looked at the piles of stuff the undergrads threw out hoping I could get something good from them. (I don't recall if I ever did.)
foobarian
As undergrad students in the 90s we couldn't forage after moveout day, but we did get tons of cool stuff from the CS building loading dock outbound trash heap. My God they were getting rid of some really strange 70s gear. One time we grabbed an old rackmount tape drive - it was enormous. We disassembled it for fun and the thing I remember the most was the cooling fan. It was a squirrel cage blower driven straight from mains power and it blew so hard you could not keep your hand on the exhaust. On. A. Tape. Drive.
ykl
About 15 years ago at this point a bunch of my friends/labmates and I salvaged enough discard PCs from the Levine Hall (Penn CS building) loading dock to assemble an entire small renderfarm, which we squirreled away in a corner of the graphics lab and used for learning and playing with RenderMan.
null
KennyBlanken
In a city I lived in bedbugs were common enough that the health department spends all weekend on major move-out dates tagging furniture with bedbug PSAs.
albedoa
> "Penn Christmas"
There is a Wikipedia article for the Allston (Boston) version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Boston)
mindslight
The 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.
bigyabai
There's something perniciously funny seeing a yellowed Art of the Deal at the top of the giveaway bin. Really, no takers?
AdmiralAsshat
Not surprising. I remember being an undergrad when my BA was ending. I was out-of-state, my nearest relative was several hours away, and I basically only had enough space to pack up from my room whatever could fit in my car. I don't think I threw out much, but there were definitely some things that were resigned to the bin because I simply didn't have anywhere else to put them. For example, I'm pretty sure I threw out a cheap but perfectly functional blender (maybe in the $40 range). The reason being: what was I going to do with it? My parents had a blender; whoever I was staying with in the short-term had a blender; if I wanted to mail it back home I'd probably pay more in shipping costs than the cost of the blender; so what purpose was there to hang onto it?
It was also a surprising PITA to get someone to take my gently-used mattress. Most places (Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc) didn't want it, which I can understand. I know several of my roommates ended up just dumping theirs. I called around some churches and they finally put me in touch with a family that lived in a trailer park nearby who were happy to come and collect it. I let them survey pretty much everything else in my room that I hadn't already packed up at that point as well and take what they wanted--the bed frame, some lamps, etc.
hn_throwaway_99
> It was also a surprising PITA to get someone to take my gently-used mattress.
Is it really that surprising? Places don't take a used mattress for the same reason they don't take used underwear - you may say it's "lightly used", but once it's out of the box, that guarantee is gone, and a used mattress is something that hardly anyone would be willing to buy. That is especially true since you can now buy a brand new mattress incredibly cheaply.
I used to do a lot of volunteering at a thrift store, and it was really eye opening to see which things had residual value. Some examples:
1. Unless it was a desirable higher-end piece (think something like a known midcentury modern company), we usually hated getting furniture. It's big, bulky, and unless it's like a showpiece, most people go to Ikea to buy cheap furniture.
2. You can barely give away china these days. We would get beautiful, perfect condition full sets of china, mark it down to like $30 for an entire 12-place set, and it would just sit there.
3. Most fast fashion is worthless (though I don't know, maybe the demise of Temu and Shein will change this). Nobody is going to pay even like $6 for a piece of clothing (which is essentially like the cost just to store/sort/sell stuff) when new it's like $10.
4. Electronics/small home appliances also depreciate especially quickly.
Our biggest money makers were mid-to-high end clothes, jewelry and bags, quality shoes, and artwork/home decorations.
It was also eye opening to see how many people donated plain garbage to assuage their guilt. Like I used the "people don't take used underwear" as an example, but yes, people would still donate it (which sucks - all that does is add to the costs of the charity you're donating to).
Analemma_
> You can barely give away china these days. We would get beautiful, perfect condition full sets of china, mark it down to like $30 for an entire 12-place set, and it would just sit there.
Chinaware sucks to actually use: it can't go in the dishwasher, it's smaller and less convenient than normal-sized dishes, and so on. Even if you want to spend lots of money on dishes, you're much better served buying nice stoneware at Crate and Barrel or something, it looks as good or better and is actually useful. Chinaware generally just sits there and takes up space; I wouldn't take any even if it was free.
And the thing is, it's not really a tragedy that nobody bothers with chinaware anymore. Chinaware was only ever a "keeping up with the Joneses" status-signalling purchase to show you'd made it as a middle-class household, and it's been replaced by other goods for that purpose. We're not losing out on some kind of heritage tradition here, it's just one set of shallow luxury goods getting replaced with another.
SmellTheGlove
We got china for our wedding and at some point we just decided to use it regularly like our other dishes. So far it’s been more durable than our crate and barrel stuff that we also got for our wedding, and we put it in the dishwasher too!
That said we also have some china that’s been in my wife’s family for generations and we’re afraid to put that in the dishwasher. That effectively makes it decorative in our case.
creer
Thrift store pricing: It's disappointing.
> You can barely give away china these days. [...] it would just sit there.
Most times I look, it's overpriced. Very much so. Price lower. Obviously?
> Most fast fashion is worthless [$6 for a piece that's new for $10]
Well duh? Price lower? Obviously?
Around here it feels like thrift stores have not noticed the revolution in pricing for online, delivered, made-in-china-but-not-only. What's happening? They seem desperate for the occasional buy by someone who doesn't know any better? Not cool. And a completely self-inflicted defeat. I see local stores receive floods of donations, have significant foot traffic - and priced to make soooo few sales.
Do they really make more money by shipping most donations to other countries - that they can ignore the reality of online, mass market, fast fashion pricing? How come these other countries can pay more money still - to compensate for the shipping cost? What's going on? Are these stores a front for something else? Some other way to pay the lease and employees?
const_cast
Thrift store pricing is pretty good IMO. At least real thrift stores - those more curated vintage stores are, obviously, going to be higher priced.
But if you know how to check for quality materials and craftsmanship you can find really, really good clothes and furniture for unbelievably cheap.
The thing about fast fashion is, well, the clothes suck. They're more plastic than fabric, they fall apart, they look awful, they're not breathable, and on. You don't actually want to thrift those, because their lifespan is approximately 5 washes. Yes, it's that bad with some brands.
But if you can find nice cotton trousers or a great trench coat for 8-10 bucks you're golden. Just have them dry cleaned, press them, and you're going to be getting a piece of clothing that's higher quality than anything you can find in stores.
I found a great 3 piece brown tweed suit a bit ago. Miraculous all three pieces are there, dated somewhere in the 1970s. The construction was sturdy, the material was thick and rough, but everything was lined with viscose. The buttons were actually wooden, shaped like little hot buns. Multiple sets of them too, large ones for the pants and suit jacket and little tiny ones for the waistcoat. A suit like that made today would be at least 800 dollars. I got it for less than 50.
Point is, old stuff isn't low quality. Over the past 50 years, clothes have progressively gotten poorer in just about every metric. Yes, buying new cheap junk is sometimes cheaper than old stuff. That's because the new stuff is just so incredibly bad.
The stuff you're buying on Temu, Shein, H&M, whatever - is not competing with quality garments from decades past. They're not just not in the same category, there's many categories between them.
hn_throwaway_99
> Thrift store pricing: It's disappointing.
When I read things like this, I laugh when people think that it's possible to bring much manufacturing back to the US.
The thrift store I volunteered at was for an animal charity. After paying rent and some salaries, the general rule of thumb was that we were able to convert volunteer hours to profit at about minimum wage rates (and I mean ~$8/hr rates, not "living wage" rates).
So, to be honest, your post made me unreasonably angry. No, thrift stores are not a front, they're not stupid, and they have certainly noticed the cheap crap from Shein and Temu. The issue is that crap is produced incredibly cheaply - literal peasant wages and zero pesky things like environmental regulations.
So where I volunteered, we originally had standard prices for all non-designer clothes, e.g. $5 for short sleeve shirts and shorts, $7 for pants, etc. It would simply take much too much time to try to price everything individually. And, for most clothes, these were great deals. But when cheap fast fashion came along, we had a rule we would just throw away any of that shit. But every now and then something would make it onto the floor, and we'd have an irate customer basically say what you are saying, "How can you charge $7 for this pair of pants when they're like $10 new." So then we'd apologize, and explain that we usually threw that stuff away. People just couldn't understand that we couldn't sell it for less without essentially making the thrift store not turn a profit, even though the products were donated.
bityard
The reason you can't give away a mattress is bedbugs. If you know what to look for, a bedbug-ridden mattress can easily be avoided. And you can also buy protective breathable covers that keep the bedbugs either in or out. But most people don't know what to look for, or don't want the liability of being wrong.
bcrosby95
We gave away our mattress to a non profit. They sent some people out to inspect it ahead of time. They said needed it ASAP for someone who was moving away from an abusive relationship - it was supposedly going directly from our house to the place she was being put up.
UncleOxidant
maybe the Uni could arrange with thrift stores to come in around the end of the Spring semester and collect used items they think they can sell to the incoming students in the fall?
neilv
Some universities (or student groups) run stores or donation centers just to pass furniture from one class to the next.
bityard
I live near a major university town and one of the highlights of my year is move-out week. At dusk, a friend and I go dumpster diving at the apartments around campus. You definitely wear gloves and clothing you don't mind throwing out afterward, but MOST of the garbage is cleaner than you'd think.
Usually the trash is pretty well picked-through by the time we get to it, but every year, we drive off with a pickup truck full of stuff. Common items I typically find are: clothing (especially coats), backpacks (which sometimes have money and other valuables in the small pockets), food (unopened), bathroom supplies, cleaning supplies, notebooks, bins/organizers, tools, sports equipment, batteries (new in box), etc. Oh, and alcohol. So much alcohol.
There is lots more that I typically don't bother with because I have no use for, things like furniture, vacuums, lamps, "items of a personal nature," etc. Basically anything you can imagine fitting into an apartment, you are likely to find in the dumpster.
For some reason, I have yet to find a laptop or anything particularly in line with my other hobbies, but the general day-to-day stuff is quite plentiful if you're willing to take the time to find it, and possibly get a little dirty.
sfink
> For some reason, I have yet to find a laptop
Seems straightforward enough. Laptops are portable and contain things of personal value (configuration, if nothing else!). Or just might -- if you're dumping stuff because you don't want to deal with it, so why would you deal with searching through your laptop to look for photos or incriminating messages or whatever? Or opening it up to pull the hard drive? That's work!
Formerly, they'd also be as much value to the owner the week after classes end as they were the week before, but maybe that's changed now? Do people rely only on phones and not use laptops for anything other than school?
neilv
> 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
I went to the university of Durham in the U.K. - I paid my tuition, rent, and living expenses every year by just collecting the stacks of discarded textbooks, and selling them on at a 30% discount from the university bookshop’s prices to the next year’s undergrads. My only cost was paying (cheap) rent on a house under a railway bridge that I turned into an amazing fire hazard over the summer.
Best (in terms of mass to value) dumpster dive find I had was a box of laser rubies.
tdeck
Move out waste is a huge thing. At my alma mater in 2014 they had some program where you could leave things in the common room and they would be collected and supposedly donated. I remember spending extra time cleaning my (good quality) things that I couldn't bring with me, and then the next day seeing everything had just been bagged up and dumped into 2 large dumpsters.
lsllc
The problem is that move-out happens in May, but move-in happens in late Aug/early Sept. So there's lots of useful stuff being discarded in May (beds, desks, bookcases, in-window A/C units etc) that would likely be in demand in Sept but have long been sent to the landfill by then.
UncleOxidant
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?
nappy-doo
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.
jrochkind1
There are more rich people in the US than when some of us middle-aged people were younger, the distribution of wealth has gotten much more uneven, while the numbers of rich have gotten larger.
So, yeah, a lot more just really rich students than there used to be, rich enough to think nothing of throwing out luxury goods, finding it more convenient than doing something else with them.
Then the increase of wealthy international students on top of that -- also richer than most students 20 years ago, and add on even less convenient to try to move anything back home or do anything else with it.
dfxm12
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.
TuringNYC
>> 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
I definitely remember walking through the dorm parking lot when I was in grad school and noticing that at least half of the cars were much nicer than the car I was driving.
SoftTalker
That is still the case for me, and has been throughout my life. I've never thought spending a lot of money on a car made any sense at all.
apt-apt-apt-apt
It's a little mind-boggling when you compare a decent $5K car to a $60K one, and realize you could have a 12-car fleet for that one car.
alnwlsn
It's not just students. Where I live (admittedly wealthy) people throw away everything they can't be bothered to do the slightest bit of maintenance on. I have found, and made functional:
- a snow blower
- various weed eaters
- vacuum cleaners
- a generator (higher capacity than the one I already had)
- a log splitter
- pressure washers (nozzles usually clogged with dirt)
- a chainsaw
- multiple typewriters (the Selectric I kept, the others I sold)
- a boat motor
- a sump pump (bottom was clogged with sand)
We've all seen those "saved from the garbage" restoration videos on youtube and wondered just how "garbage" that stuff was. Believe it, it happens.
ty6853
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.
dkarl
Often, when something breaks, I think I might enjoy tinkering with it and trying to fix it, but it feels like a luxury I can't afford. Hiring someone to fix it is a luxury that I can sometimes afford. It's one of those things that feels right, but you're also aware that it's a flex because you're embodying moral values celebrated by your social class, which people below your social class happen to not be able to afford to embody. But it's definitely a weaker flex than being able to take the time to fix it myself.
alnwlsn
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.
alnwlsn
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.
lesuorac
It's also often cheaper to treat many durable items as disposable.
i.e. buy a power washer each-ish time you need it compared to hiring somebody.
ty6853
That's exactly what I did when I built my house.
$6k in labor for some part of the project vs $300 tools from harbor freight, who gives a fuck if the tool only lasts a few hours, I don't have time to sell it nor place to store it.
HeyLaughingBoy
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.
noboostforyou
> A fairly significant minority of wealthy people
Apologies if this is just a typo but I am really confused by this wording - isn't "significant minority" an oxymoron? If you had to express this as a percentage how many wealthy people are you saying got this way?
nemomarx
A quarter or third of a group would be a significant minority, I think? it just means non negligible really
potato3732842
Mowers out front of Lowes were $2k on up yesterday...
Sure, maybe you have a landscaper for that. Your landscaper knows a guy who's happy to get paid $100 slap a new $50 Amazon carb on your snowblower and lecture you about not leaving ethanol in it for 2yr straight.
AStonesThrow
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!
monkeyelite
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).
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josefresco
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.
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ujkhsjkdhf234
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.
TuringNYC
>> 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.
ryandrake
I knew someone like this back in college, too. Absolutely wild.
fewdaysto2025
[dead]
Kon-Peki
> 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
I assume that "donation" also doesn't include graduates giving things to returning students. No way to even track that.
This amount doesn't really surprise me. This has been happening ever since students were in dorms. Even in my little liberal arts school, people would dumpster dive for stuff in the dorms where the rich kids lived. The dedicated divers would even go around after Thanksgiving break and the end of fall semester, when the kids who were too into partying left (or were kicked out) and just left stuff behind that the RA threw out.
FuriouslyAdrift
"UChicago is not known for being a party school"... lol
The unofficial motto is "where fun goes to die"
timewizard
Why does fun go there to die?
FuriouslyAdrift
It's known as one of the toughest schools to have ever existed. The dean who set the tone for the last few decades recently left and the current generation of student don't seem to appreciate the 'rigor' so we'll see if it stays that way.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/06/30/no-longer-the-plac...
vonneumannstan
Intense academics.
xivzgrev
I did this once. I was a RA, and there must've been at least 6 mini fridges left behind. I was staying for the summer, so I cleaned the ones that were salvageable and sold them on Craigslist. Earned some easy beer money.
potato3732842
It's pretty common for there to be enterprising locals and students who pick this stuff up and then list it on FBMP and CL in September.
bee_rider
Did you keep one? (To hold the beer)
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pknomad
This is not surprising to me a graduate of a school with a similar profile to Duke. The student body is composed of highly wealthy domestic students but also insanely wealthy international student body.
ty6853
Insanely wealthy international student seems to be a pretty common component of the competitive STEM universities.
I vividly recall every fall the crazy number of wrecks by fresh students after "Daddy gave me a Maserati" with no idea how to drive it -- always asian. And then in the spring a couple of the poorest international students would commit suicide when they flunked out and all their families savings back home were forfeit on the tuition.
kevinsync
There's some kind of 6-converging-storylines movie script in here somewhere.
jldugger
Kinda already been done and is highly, highly rated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots
pknomad
new nouveau riche
bpodgursky
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.
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'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-d...