My dad does this and he got money. You be surprised what people will just throw away. Hell my sister lives in well off neighborhood. The amount of shit these people will put to the crub is crazy. Like my sister got all her tv free due to people getting new ones after year.
I had a job clearing out houses and apartments of people who had to move to a care home, or just died.
So many things are thrown away or donated in the aftermath and rush to clear out space. A lot of folks out there without family or kids but with stuff. Or sometimes it’s an estranged grandkid who flies in, signs something, and wholesale waves everything off to the dump before leaving.
Its disheartening what folks throw away. Works out for these folks I guess though…
I about have a panic attack when I have a can of beans (or whatever) and I take the label off and rinse to recycle it and I have the thought this has been done billions of times since at least the 1940s. How the hell do we still have cans. Now imagine the level of waste for everything else it really is insanity if you think of it.
Like I maybe fill 1 trash bag every 3 or 4 days. There are people filling multiple per day
I’m surprised society hasnt crumbled into a trash heap 30 years ago really.
My wife and I pick up tons of goodies off the neighborhood streets. After the hurricane last month we scored loads of stuff. One example, someone tossed a sweet grill. The part that holds the coal was mostly rusted through so I laid a piece of old grill (which I found kayaking!) over it. Perfect fit. After 30-minutes of clean up, I have the nicest grill I’ve ever had. Also scored 3 above-ground pool ladders! Kids were climbing in and out the hard way.
Sometimes we’ll weave through the hood hunting trash. Had a coworker do that with her husband. They lived on the edge of a bougie hood and they’d go out on trash days and load his little truck, then make an average $400 on her Saturday garage sales. “We take our neighbor’s trash and sell it back to them on the weekend.” They didn’t even keep the leftovers! Just gave it away and reloaded every week.
We’ve had people load us up at the flea market after we close our tables and look around. By 2PM everyone wants to leave and dump their stuff. One dude loaded my truck, TWICE, with shitloads of tools and goods for free. My kid was looking at a new gamer chair. “Hey man! You can have that for $1!” Wife: “I think he’s kidding.” Me, after piling up some stuff for myself at outrageous prices, “No he’s not.” She’s in the back room working in it now.
After the hurricane I powered 5 of my neighbor’s refrigerators. Hundreds and hundreds of feet of extension cords. Never paid a dime for them but for the occasional $2 replacement fitting.
Now I’m thinking of getting into dumpster diving full time. This area isn’t nearly as large or affluent as Nashville, but I bet I’d make more than being unemployed.
A person could put that much time, effort and work into a handyman business or other such service and make the same money.
This guy just likes digging through trash. Good for him.
He could also win the lottery instead.
Not really. Small businesses require trust and word of mouth to be successful, and the vast majority of them go bankrupt or simply stop existing within a year. Your drive and passion don’t really matter when you don’t have enough customers to pay for expenses.
They require relationships to be successful. The ones that fail hand out business cards and wait for the phone to ring instead of developing relationships.
Incidentally, it might be bad for business for this guy to let everyone know he’s selling them trash. That kinda goes against the trust thing.
To your second point, not really. Anything you could sell for $140k in a year would be untouched discarded stock; this is always trash by definition; then again everything on ebay and facebook marketplace is trash by definition.
I was all agreed until that last point! There’s a world of good stuff on FB and eBay. In neither case does the seller want a bad reputation made public. Not sure I’ve ever been burned.
Had a friend that would pick up free or stupid cheap washers and dryers. He’d fix them in his garage after work and flip 'em. Told me he made around $600 a week.
That’s good for him. But we are not going to normalize bottom feeding. Reign in the economy.
He’s putting in the work for the “reuse” part of reduce, reuse, recycle. Calling that bottom feeding is pretty short sighted, there’s no reason to just throw away functional items.
If you’re digging through trash you are a bottom feeder. It doesn’t matter how much money you make off it, you’re still bottom feeding.
That’s a really shitty take.
What a childish thing to say, and doubly so for typing it out. For shame. You poor thing.
Wahhh
Wish I was this certain about something.
No room for nuance or context?
Recycling centres, industrial composting from household food waste?
I don’t see many recycling centers digging through my neighbors trash.
Agh, a solid counter, i should have thought this through more thoroughly.
If you didn’t see it happen personally, it isn’t happening (obvious in hindsight)
That is my bad.
…wait…you don’t see many?
Implying a non-zero amount of occurrences when you did personally see a recycling centre going through your neighbours trash ?
…was it like a whole building transformer kind of deal or like a swarm of employees in uniform just sweeping over the adjacent land, clearing discarded re-usable materials, like recycling locusts?
Ok
Why do you look down on people who touch garbage as they work? PPE and bathing exist. It doesn’t taint someone or make them immoral to look through discarded items to find a new use for them.
Would you feel this way if he was just looking through Goodwill? Picking up ‘curb alert’ items (things discarded on the curb for trash pickup)? Is it the contact with a dumpster?
I think it’s more telling that you consider it a bad thing. I never said how I feel about it.
You called them “bottom feeders” twice and you believe that doesn’t have a negative connotation?
Shrimp are bottom feeders and you believe that doesn’t have a negative connotation?
Is English your second language? When you use “bottom feeders” to refer to people that has a negative connotation:
bottom-feeder
noun
bot·tom-feed·er ˈbä-təm-ˌfē-dər
1: a fish that feeds at the bottom
2: one that is of the lowest status or rank
3: an opportunist who seeks quick profit usually at the expense of others or from their misfortune
1 clearly doesn’t apply, these are people. 2 doesn’t make sense as an objection against them doing it unless you hold lower ranking people in contempt, and 3 also shows a negative view of them. If you didn’t mean any of these things you should choose a different phrase. You can also explain what you actually meant, if you didn’t mean for what you said to have any negative connotations.
Which way of making money is bottom feeding?
- $140,000/year dumpster diving
- Employment at Walmart and receiving SNAP subsidies to buy food
Conceivably you could do both, if you can hide the dumpster diving income from the welfare income verification.
The fact is he’s still climbing through garbage. Idc how much you make doing it, it’s literally bottom feeding.
Plus you’re missing the point entirely.
