If you’re not interested in diving into one of these, go to the PennMOVES sale this Saturday.
It’s this time of the year again. As May 31st approaches and leases end, local graduate students are moving out and leaving a lot of stuff behind this week. Local residents fondly call it “Penn Christmas” since the move-out detritus often yields a tasty score or two, from Ikea furniture to designer clothes.
Hot spots for sidewalk finds are often near the large Dumpsters placed around the neighborhood (41st and Spruce, 45th and Pine, 43rd and Pine are a few). What doesn’t wind up in the Dumpster will often find its way to the PennMoves sale, which is this Saturday, June 2.
Clothes, furniture, kitchen items, electronics and many other items have been collected and sorted for the sale, which will be held at Penn’s South Bank at 3401 Grays Ferry Ave. Getting there early is the key. A $5 entry fee gets you in for the sneak preview from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. From 10 a.m.–3 p.m. you can get in for free but a lot of the good stuff might be gone. All items are sold “as is” with no returns accepted.
Free parking is available, and Penn Transit will provide free shuttle service to and from campus from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Shuttles will pick up riders at the Schattner Center at 240 S. 40th St. (at Locust) approximately every 20 minutes. They’ll bring you and some small items back, but the shuttle won’t haul big items like furniture and appliances.
PennMOVES is organizing the sale for the fifth year, in an effort to find a home for items Penn students leave behind at the end of the academic year. Proceeds will go to Goodwill Industries.
May 29th, 2012 at 12:01 pm
The amount of garbage tossed on the sidewalk with perfectly useful stuff that these kids leave on the sidewalk is sickening.
But I am comforted by the sad fact that when most of these students are finally done with the sheltered and parentally subsidized world of academia and enter into the “real world” that most of them will realize the value of a dollar and will not accumulate so much crap they don’t need. Student loan bills and rent have a way of crushing your dreams of affluence.
And before I sound preachy, I was probably just as bad as these kids when I was in college and when I see a pile of student litter on my neighborhood sidewalks I always feel a little guilty for the people left behind in the town where I went to college.
May 29th, 2012 at 12:12 pm
In the “real world”…it costs a ton more to move or ship this shitty ikea furniture home or to where their occupations take them than it does to throw it away and buy new stuff.
May 29th, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Crap they don’t need? They don’t need desks, lamps or beds? Are they supposed to sleep in a bare apartment for 4 years?
PennMoves is a great solution to the problem. Kudos.
May 29th, 2012 at 12:31 pm
I don’t care what the excuse is. It’s incredibly wasteful. And it’s tossed onto our streets and abandoned by these kids without an ounce of respect for the regular civilian neighbors left behind. And it’s not just crappy ikea furniture. I’ve seen bags of brand new womens jeans, sneakers, cases of unopened food and what looks like a years worth of garbage that they never made the effort to dispose of throughout the year.
May 29th, 2012 at 12:44 pm
If your mom or dad gave you the money to buy the stuff, it sure is much easier to just dispose of it the day you move out. And sure, why pay the cost to move something that your parents bought you?
Newsflash, I have a bed, furniture and other life’s essentials in my home too. When I move I take it with me. What I don’t want to take I put on craigslist or leave on the sidewalk, in small, neat piles a week or so before moving day to see if anyone wants to take them. If it’s not taken I make sure it gets picked up by the garbag collectors.
This is how grown ups behave. Tossing your garbarge and excess stuff at the last minute indiscriminantly into a huge pile outside your building is not.
May 29th, 2012 at 3:20 pm
Penn should average the cost of these materials per student and charge them for fully furnished rooms. Ban them from bringing their own furniture entirely. Penn needs money, right?
May 30th, 2012 at 6:21 am
Happy Curmudgeon, I agree. Unfortunately, most of these students live in privately owned apartments run by property management companies (not affiliated with UPenn). I used to work doing maintenance for one of the larger ones. They offered tenants the option of renting furniture, but most people didn’t take advantage of it. Most of the ones who did were international students, probably because going furniture shopping would be more of a hassle for them. It would be nice if the landlords could be required to rent apartments furnished with the basics (I know this is standard in Ireland, and probably in other countries as well), but these kids want their own stuff and the people who work in the leasing offices (mostly young and underpaid, by the way) would have to field tons of calls from snobby teenagers and their irate parents about why they couldn’t bring their own Ikea bed to sleep in for 6 months and then toss it on the curb.
On the upside, at least there are enough people in this neighborhood who scavenge and reuse this “trash” that a large part of it is kept out of landfills.
May 30th, 2012 at 6:43 am
Or maybe International student’s don’t suffer from over consumption the way us glutinous Americans do!
May 30th, 2012 at 8:58 am
It’s easy to fault students for naivete, but the real issue is that too many absentee landlords exacerbate the problem by failing to bring the student trash to the curb. The garbage festers in the heat (as the students have emptied their cabinets and fridges) only to be scattered to the wind by bums and pickers. It’s a public health issue that transcends youthful irresponsibility.
May 30th, 2012 at 9:27 am
Has anyone ever been to the Penn moves sale? I am moving this weekend & am in need of furniture, kitchen stuff, etc. Is it worth it? Although I will trash-pick, I do draw the line at climbing into a dumpster.
May 31st, 2012 at 2:22 pm
Penn Moves is not like picking through the dumpster. Stuff is organized and laid out, more like a giant yard sale.
As far as the stuff, IMO it is the International students dumping things at the last minute. A student from Florida may take a desk or a bag of clothes with them, but no one from Korea is going to ship an IKEA chair home.
May 31st, 2012 at 6:03 pm
Lisa Marie, if you really need stuff like furniture I would highly encourage you to pay the early admittance fee of $5 for entry on a first-come, first-served basis between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Bring a cart or flatbed or something you can use to transport stuff to your car.
I went last year and got there at 7:30ish – 1) we stood in line for almost two hours to get in because the line was already looped around the parking lot when we arrived and 2) by the time we got in mostly – not everything-was picked over. Wholesalers, thrift stores, E-bay fanatics, etc get there FIRST and buy up all the good stuff for re-sale. I would suspect that they had been camped out there before dawn. We saw a guy walk out with like 20 mini-fridges, loaded them right on his truck – cus they are selling them for like $25 bucks and who can beat that price?
It is decent stuff. But it is what dominates a typical college dorm – futons, mini-fridges, lotsa of IKEA, stuff like that.
June 1st, 2012 at 8:22 am
Uh Mike, the major apartment companies in the area are shells for Penn…
June 1st, 2012 at 9:48 am
Where do you get your information? Coffee shops and bars? Mulling over bong-hits?
The major apartment companies are not shells for Penn no matter how neatly that fits into your little paranoid conspiracies.
June 1st, 2012 at 10:07 am
thanks for the feedback! i was thinking of going early but now that i know my options are to camp out at dawn or spend hours in line, i may just pop over later & see what’s left.