On my way home from the store recently I found nine cents, a My Coke Rewards cap and two ice-cream bars.
About that last: While waiting for the light to change I saw a discarded plastic grocery bag on the ground. As a rule I pick these up for my sister to use when she walks her dog. This bag held one of those Klondike Bar six-packs, with four missing.
The supermarket register receipt indicated they’d been purchased only about 15 minutes earlier, and it was a chilly day. You bet I took them home.
If you feel you must say “eeewww,” go ahead. I’ll wait.
Feel better? Me too: I got two ice-cream bars.
Scavenging is frugal, whether you do it in an organized way (Freecycle, dumpster diving) or merely by keeping your eyes open. You’re probably not going to get rich but you may find something you need.
You’ll also be keeping things out of the landfill. If I hadn’t picked up those ice-cream bars they would have eventually melted, and in time the bag would (I hope!) have been picked up by a city sanitation worker. Or a dog owner.
This way I got two free desserts and my sister got a poop sack. Win-win!
A treasure hunt
I’m more of a dumpster wader than a diver, i.e., I paddle around the edges. I’ve also found my share of useful things next to trash containers: kitchen chairs, a bookcase, the shopping cart I use to haul home heavier groceries.
While walking I’ve found things like pens, screwdrivers, a partial roll of electrical tape, and books and magazines from piles left on street corners. Seattle residents like to recycle their belongings by putting them outside with “free” signs. Or possibly they don’t want to pay dump fees and hope someone will take the stuff off their hands.
I find My Coke Rewards points, of course, both caps and empty 12-pack boxes. Most days I’ll find money, usually in the form of coins although greenbacks occasionally go feral, too.
Best place I ever found change: under the cushions of a couch sitting on the sidewalk. Since the sign said “free,” I figured that prospecting for pennies was permissible.
Seek and ye shall find
One windy day I found a red nylon shopping bag blowing across the University of Washington campus. It’s imprinted with a “2010 U.S. Census” logo and it folds up to about the size of a wallet. Since it weighs practically nothing, it lives in my backpack.
The UW campus was also the site of one of my woo-woo moments. One day I was thinking that I needed to get a white sheet and some safety pins to make a dust cover for my daughter’s wedding dress, which she’d bought from a cancer charity well in advance of the nuptials.
Just after the thought formed, I saw a safety pin on the bricks of Red Square. An hour later, I found another one. And then another one.
By the end of that day I’d found five pins, which were enough to secure the sheet over the dress. Weird, huh?
I didn’t find the sheet, though. I paid $2 for it at a rummage sale.
Pack some Purell
Some of you might be appalled by the idea of picking items up off the ground. But as I’ve noted before, it’s not as though I carry these things home in my mouth.
Besides, I do keep hand sanitizer in my backpack. If I scavenge a quarter from the edge of a puddle and can’t find a place to wash my hands within a reasonable time, out comes the Purell.
Some might think it’s low-rent to be seen stooping to retrieve a pin. (Don’t they know that if you pick it up then all the day you’ll have good luck?) Or they’d be embarrassed to admit that the super-useful (and eco-friendly!) shopping bag was found on the ground.
To me, fishing a Hellboy comic out of a bag of free books is like finding money. It was in pristine condition and made a fun gift for my great-nephew, who insisted that we read it together during one of my visits. He referred to the character as “Heckboy” when his little brother was around, and I had a chance to explain to him that the concept of “changelings” might have arisen from physical characteristics associated with the genetic condition progeria. (You learn the damnedest things as a CHID major.)
A week after I rescued the mag, I walked by that corner and found the bag still there but sodden with rain. The few books left inside were ruined. Glad that I saved Heckboy from that fate.
Incidentally, I’ve eaten the Klondike bars and I haven’t died. Not once.
Readers: Do you scavenge? What’s your best find ever? What are your boundaries, if any?
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 60 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
@Karla: Ha! I hadn’t seen that commercial (don’t have a TV) but when I visit my friend in Alaska I’ll keep an ear stretched for the ad when she’s got the television on.
I don’t have trouble with picking up food, provided the seals are still firm…or you can cut off the bad parts on the fruit. I’ve gotten loaves of bread, packages of pasta, fruit and boxes of greens this way. Whatever we couldn’t eat, the dog (and at one point, the rabbits) got.
The nonfood items are even easier to decide on. I pulled a boxful of fancy shampoos, conditioners and hair treatments out of my daughter’s apartment house dumpster — some were partially used, but the brands were EXPENSIVE. Still luxuriating in them.
Garbage day is a great time to scout for stuff. One morning in Ann Arbor, MI, I spotted a backpack leaning against a garbage can, full of great stuff. As I began foraging through it, a college kid came flying out — he’d forgotten something and left his backpack outside while he went back in to get it! (Darn.)
@Cindy Brick: Check your e-mail, already — you won last week’s giveaway and I need your address in order to mail it.
I don’t really dumpster dive although I have picked up items from the trash on city-wide garbage day (like wood furniture etc.). I do pick up change on my walks around town (near a major college campus) and have found plenty of items over the years. I find cash of course (biggest has been a twenty) but also other things include:
cell phones (returned) and such, I have found textbooks ($$), bibles, many sealed airplane-size liquor bottles, food like packets of sunflower seeds, jerky, almonds, candy (I only keep sealed packages and wash the packages before I open them) , cans/bottles of beer & soda, mirrors, costume and real jewelry (normally with a broken clasp or the like, but gold is gold!), a working pocket watch, pens, glasses, various tools like screwdrivers, hammers, a saw, wrenches, a nice towel, endless gloves (I don’t pick those up), two working digital clock radios, mirrors of various sizes, and my favorite find: an old oscilloscope!
It is worth looking down now and then!
My friend and I dumpster/curb dive. Items not kept are sold at a yard sale when enough is gathered. Metal goes to a recycle center for cash. The yard sale money goes into savings account. We both have day jobs, but this is like found money. We both sell most of what we find – don’t need more stuff! My favorite find was a non- functioning metal stereo turntable. I removed all the unnecessary parts and the turntable is now repurposed on my hobby bench – heavy duty and smooth turning. Store bought of this caliber from an art store, for my purposes would have been $150. Limits: Must be a saleable item, not requiring too much cleaning/prep time, or an item I can use that can be repurposed. I check all jewelry metals for gold/silver content. No hoarding allowed.
@K Wilder: Sounds like a nice way to bring in extra cash. You should write that up for Budgets Are Sexy, which has an ongoing “side hustle” series. That site is at http://www.budgetsaresexy.com.
I’m so glad that you have so many different avenues to voice your knowledge. You impress me all the time. And yes, I’m sucking up a bit.
Years ago some friend of mine — they didn’t need to dumpster dive, as he was a full professor of zoology — discovered that grocery stores, like bakeries, throw out perfectly fine produce just because it’s a few days old. After fruits & veggies had been on the shelf for a few days, supermarkets would throw them out, unspoiled. Friends learned the store manager that if they arrived at a grocery store at the right time, on the right day, they could lift armloads of fresh produce out of the trash bin, for free. Since nothing else was put into that bin, they felt safe taking the stuff. They just washed it thoroughly…as we should all do with any produce.
Don’t know if this is still the case. But it could be something to look into.
I am a scavenger, too
One thing I always look out for is paper clips, as my husband is an English teacher and uses quite a few of them.
I figure if I’m going to pick up change off the ground, I might as well go a bit further and pick up something I see often (you might be surprised about paper clips!) and in that way, contribute to the general cause
@Angie: I pick up paper clips, too. Glad I’m not the only one.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
← Previous Comments