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Just realized the free table at my Cleveland laundromat says more about us than any store
I was folding clothes at the laundromat on West 25th last Tuesday and counted 14 items on their free table. Three mismatched socks, a half used bottle of detergent, two paperbacks with water damage, and a lamp with no shade. I go there every week and that table is never empty. People just keep leaving things instead of hauling them to a dumpster. It bugs me that half of it is actual trash, but the other half finds a new home every single time. Someone took the lamp within an hour. If we all had a spot like this on our block, how much stuff would never end up in a landfill? What is the strangest thing you have seen left on a free table?
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sarah2296d ago
That lamp with no shade really gets me because it shows the whole system works on timing more than anything. Half of what lands there is junk, sure, but the other half is stuff someone almost threw away and then someone else needed that same week. The weird part nobody talks about is that a free table is basically a tiny test of how fast a neighborhood moves things around. If a thing sits there two days it's trash, if it disappears in an hour it was treasure, and that line is always shifting. Around my way I've seen a single snow boot, a bag of fake flowers, and once a full set of encyclopedias that was gone by morning. My guess is the stuff people call trash on those tables says less about us than the fact that we have no other place to put it.
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