[matthewowen]

I live near UPenn. Some locals call the end of the academic year "Penn Christmas". I definitely see some resentment, but having made an international move in my life I have sympathy for it. You need to buy things to live, shipping that stuff when you move away is often very expensive and time consuming, so you condense your life down to a few suitcases and do the best you can.

[anyonecancode]

Once upon a time, this was a thing for pretty much the entire city of New York:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(New_York_City)

[nick__m]

It's still that way in Québec:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Quebec)

[BeFlatXIII]

Downtown Madison, WI, too.

[yieldcrv]

> Once the economic depression of 1873 was over, more housing was constructed, dropping the price of housing down, and subsequently people had less need to move as often.

oh there's precedent for this solution, what a concept

[moralestapia]

Amazing!

[joshvm]

Having been in this situation a few times as an adult, it's a mixture of stressful and cathartic figuring out exactly what's worth keeping, storing or giving away.

The best approach I've found is to standardize packing into 60L industrial Euro crates. They're inexpensive, very strong, practically waterproof (will survive both puddles and rain) and you can even air freight them at close to $100/box if the contents weigh under 32kg. Most of the expense in shipping is volume and people massively underestimate how much they own. If you can keep things compact and dense, ground/sea freight is inexpensive if you don't have to do it very often and there is no practical weight restriction.

Furniture only makes sense if you can re-claim 80+% of the void space in items like shelves, or if it completely flat packs, and if the cost of re-acquisition would be high. Shipping companies usually have minimum billable volume (say 2 cubic meters). I was able to send an apartment's worth of contents in the same volume that a couch would occupy.

For everything else, either buy quality used things that you can sell without much depreciation, or cheap used things that you don't mind thrifting afterwards.

[linkjuice4all]

The real Penn Christmas miracle was getting used tech (laptops/tablets/mp3 players/etc) that was export-controlled. Some students legally couldn’t bring that stuff back to their country and didn’t have time to sell it.

[BeFlatXIII]

How thorough were the customs inspections? Seems like an easy thing to sneak out.

[KennyBlanken]

In a city I lived in bedbugs were common enough that the health department spends all weekend on major move-out dates tagging furniture with bedbug PSAs.

[rconti]

It seems like move-out day would be the great volume of stuff with the lowest likelihood of bed bugs.

[throwanem]

Spoken like someone who's never seen how undergrads tend to live. Good God, I won't even walk near a mattress on the sidewalk around here.

[albedoa]

> "Penn Christmas"

There is a Wikipedia article for the Allston (Boston) version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Boston)

[mindslight]

The good stuff is in June when Boston College and other dorms move out for the year. The crap in Allston in September is from yearly tenants in off campus housing, was likely already second hand at least once, and is riddled with bugs. I guess Allston has gentrified, but I assume that just means the bed bugs now have credit cards too.

The weirdest thing about the original article is the author. Like yeah, you can get some great stuff in the trash. People value money wildly differently, and some people throw out practically new stuff. It boggles the mind. But it also boggles the mind that the author is still so focused on the retail prices of marked up "luxury" stuff, like they're still just solidly wed to the consumerist mindset. The used/dirty/soggy whatever can be fantastic, but it's certainly not worth anywhere close to its original retail price, especially accounting for your time to find, haul, clean, etc and how much comparable non-"luxury" brands would cost.

[bigyabai]

There's something perniciously funny seeing a yellowed Art of the Deal at the top of the giveaway bin. Really, no takers?

[madcaptenor]

As a Penn grad student I definitely looked at the piles of stuff the undergrads threw out hoping I could get something good from them. (I don't recall if I ever did.)

[foobarian]

As undergrad students in the 90s we couldn't forage after moveout day, but we did get tons of cool stuff from the CS building loading dock outbound trash heap. My God they were getting rid of some really strange 70s gear. One time we grabbed an old rackmount tape drive - it was enormous. We disassembled it for fun and the thing I remember the most was the cooling fan. It was a squirrel cage blower driven straight from mains power and it blew so hard you could not keep your hand on the exhaust. On. A. Tape. Drive.

[ykl]

About 15 years ago at this point a bunch of my friends/labmates and I salvaged enough discard PCs from the Levine Hall (Penn CS building) loading dock to assemble an entire small renderfarm, which we squirreled away in a corner of the graphics lab and used for learning and playing with RenderMan.