Dumpsters and Pretzels

So there's this thing called dumpster diving... have you heard of it?  If you haven't, I'd recommend watching the documentary "Dive" which is on Netflix.  Super interesting and a very intriguing activity... A friend of mine told me about it, to which I was like "whhhhaaat?"  But after I watched the documentary I was convinced, and totally wanted to do it too!  The idea is that every store cleans out their merchandise at the end of the day/week, but much of this food, products etc is perfectly fine and consumable.  So there will be full bags of packaged food just sitting in the top of dumpsters, food that hasn't even reached it's "sell by date".  Or other stores throwing away "defective" items that are perfectly fine to use but maybe not "salable".  So if you go after the store has closed and before the garbage trucks come (around midnight)...you could potentially have a ton of free stuff!  Now I realize some people may be disgusted at the thought of eating out of dumpsters... but I really don't find anything wrong with it, as long as the items are packaged and in a bag.

So we decided to give it a try!  We went out at 12:00am, hit about 8 grocery stores... with no luck!  None had food in their dumpsters...so we aren't sure if it was the wrong night to go or what.  So it was pretty discouraging!  But we had a lot of fun...sneaking around in the middle of the night is not a normal activity for a few suburban moms.  We had heard that Staples was a good store to check, so we went to their dumpsters.  Success!  In the first Staples we went to we found some random office supplies (all brand new in packages) and a safe (which was too heavy for us to get!).  At the second Staples we hit a jackpot!  Pens, pencils, and Sharpies galore!  We found tape, markers, folders, binders, coin counters, a calculator, headphones, wallets, an iPad cover, disks, and labels.  All of it was new, not even dented in the packages.  I'm not sure why they threw it out, but we were excited to find it!  So after we split it up, we each had a bulging garbage bag full of goodies.

We did find three big jugs of pretzels (sealed and unopened)... which was good because we were very hungry at 4am!