Local merchants: Are they pack rats?
June 8th, 2008 by Justin Richards in WhatnotJust got back from dumpster diving in downtown Sarasota, to no great avail. We walked the alley behind all the shops on Main Street, but most of the bins were filled with nothing but soda cups, cardboard, or some kind of glowing white ooze that upon opening the lid made us feel lifeless but yet strangely at peace. Either that or they were empty.
If you have any advice on dumpster diving in Sarasota, if you’ve had any success or failure, post your thoughts in the comments below.
The only worthwhile items we found were a yellow rose and, outside the construction area behind the Creative Loafing 
office, an entire toilet. The rose smelled lovely, but it was mostly dead. The toilet was too heavy to lift. But anyway, you ask, what would we do with a toilet? We would move it into our utility closet, which we’ve recently converted into a jail cell. (We’d caught one homeless person too many stealing our newspaper.)
June 9th, 2008 at 2:28 am
I used to dumpster dive donuts all the time from Dunkin Donuts in south Sarasota. They usually put the donuts in their own clean bag and the donuts were at most a day old. Bradenton Donuts was also a good place to go. Excess donuts were occasionally dropped off at the New College free table.
I’ve gotten plenty of computer peripherals (keyboards, mice, cables, etc.) from behind Best Buy near Bee Ridge Road, including a USB optical mouse I use to this day. On one particular dive, I discovered that Best Buy was violating its own customer data protection policies by throwing away boxes with reams of customer credit card transaction data! (I never reported this to their corporate HQ, but maybe I should have.)
Office Depot has a pretty good dumpster for some office items if you’re lucky.
Barnes & Noble throws away lots of books and magazines with the covers ripped off. Those are in recycle bins separate from the trash, so they’re clean too.
Blockbuster once threw away bags and bags of DVD cases which were very useful.
Most grocery stores have compactors so you’re out of luck, although my friends and I found a lot of snack food one time at a store that didn’t have a compactor. It was clean and wasn’t even out of date yet. (Most grocery stores throw out products a few days or even a week before the expiration date.)
Happy diving!
June 9th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Thanks, donuts! I’m going to try out Barnes & Noble. Why would anyone throw away books? If they don’t have covers, whatever. Don’t they know there are kids starving (for knowledge) somewhere?