I have a fabulous leather collectable Mickey Mouse Wild One jacket and every time I wear it I get offers to buy it. At a studio party the other day I was offered $500 for it. The thing is that I only paid $80.00 for it at a street market. That’s the great thing about living in a very affluent part of Los Angeles or anywhere else for that matter. Really rich people throw away really cool stuff, often hardly used.
In San Francisco, where house prices are so high that if you earn less than $US100,000 a year you qualify for low income housing, the number of people, not only homeless, but people who almost anywhere else would be regarded as middle class, that scavenge for “terrific” trash is escalating. Trash pickers are going through not only markets but also trash bins discovering not only seldom worn designer clothes ( often still with Labels on them) but items like coffee machine, computers, lap tops, and Nike sneakers. They then sell the items they find to make/or supplement their living.
Matt Malone has a pretty good day job, earns a six-figure salary as a security specialist. He works a few hours a day “dumpster diving”, although he focuses on dumpsters behind retail stores. In a dumpster in back of an Office Depot, within seconds he’s found a box containing a complete Uniden Wireless Video Surveillance System—two cameras and a wireless monitor—which normally retails for $419. It’s a return, all in perfect condition, although it has been opened and repacked.
If he did it as a full-time job, he’s confident he could pull in at least $250,000 a year. In a few hours a week he has found vacuums, power tools, furniture, carpeting, industrial machines, assorted electronics, a lot of it is in perfect condition. The main insight he’s obtained from digging through our trash is that most people don’t place a lot of value in value anymore.
At OfficeMax he discovered “a whole bunch of printers, discontinued lines that were still in the boxes, in the dumpster behind the Emerson Electric warehouse he discovered several discarded motors, in the dumpsters at Home Depot, Harbor Freight, Big Lots, Sears, Best Buy, and a few others he found: building materials, power tools, HEPA filters, and a dizzying array of electronics.
Matt set up a weekly garage sale. The biggest revelation was what sold with the drive-by public. Initially, he would put all the cool stuff out front, computers, mini choppers, high-end printers—the big-ticket stuff. Instead, people flocked to “the small stuff”: the photo paper and toner he’d found at OfficeMax and Office Depot, the hand tools he’d found at Harbor Freight, the CDs from GameStop dumpsters, the assorted seasonal decorations from Pier 1 and Cost Plus dumpsters. He figured out that he had to sell the big stuff on Amazon or Craigslist. The small sales added up, collecting more than $3,000 in cash a week.
He made daily checks of the various malls and business parks closest to ascertain what days and times dumpsters were most likely filled with desirable items. He soon knew exactly when the trash was collected at every store and business so he could time his visits for when the dumpsters were fullest. He also learned to look for stores that were changing locations or, better yet, going out of business. Store remodels were also good targets. When Circuit City was closing he got brand-new stereos, GPS devices, brand new cameras, flatscreen TVs. It was all still in the boxes. Matt now operates several businesses he has built out of garbage.
There are people whose job is conducting what’s known as a “zero-knowledge attack”. That means digging through competitors and client’s trash to gain corporate intelligence. Many hacks and identity thefts come from information left in dumpsters. Often they can amass boxes full of documents, loaded with the confidential information on thousands of competitors and customers.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Wonderful saying, horrible way to find out you were adopted