Wednesday, August 22
One man's trash is another's gold | csmonitor.com Mark (who didn't want his last name used) lives near Austin, Texas, and may be the king of dumpster divers.
He was a casual diver for years, finding clothes, dog food, microwaves - pretty routine stuff. But then he started finding computer equipment - high-end items that big corporations had chucked. He realized he was onto something.
He started selling 250-400 items per week on the online-auction site eBay. He's now turned the activity into a full-time business and has a network of 50 buyers. He dives from 4 a.m. until around 8 a.m. three days a week.
Mark recently found a bunch of Windows 2000 servers (1,000 to be exact) that usually retail for $800 dollars per unit. He thinks the company may have gone out of business before the servers were received, but he doesn't know for sure. He sold them for $90,000. He also found 23 units of IBM website-building software that retails for $10,000 per unit.
He was a casual diver for years, finding clothes, dog food, microwaves - pretty routine stuff. But then he started finding computer equipment - high-end items that big corporations had chucked. He realized he was onto something.
He started selling 250-400 items per week on the online-auction site eBay. He's now turned the activity into a full-time business and has a network of 50 buyers. He dives from 4 a.m. until around 8 a.m. three days a week.
Mark recently found a bunch of Windows 2000 servers (1,000 to be exact) that usually retail for $800 dollars per unit. He thinks the company may have gone out of business before the servers were received, but he doesn't know for sure. He sold them for $90,000. He also found 23 units of IBM website-building software that retails for $10,000 per unit.
