Freshman year at college, I wanted to try to make easy money.
In Fight Club, there’s a scene where Tyler’s girlfriend takes a bunch of clothes from a laundromat and sells them to a used clothing store.
Simple plan#
At the end of each semester at UC Berkeley, students donate their clothes at our dorm (Unit 2).
Plan’s to take the clothes and sell them to a local used clothing store called Buffalo Exchange.
These clothes are in the dorm lobby, so it’s very easy to get caught. To avoid this, I set an alarm for 3AM so nobody would see me taking the clothes.
As soon as I got out of my room, I could hear loud talking in my hall and a couple of drunk (unlikely pair) dormmates making out. I thought:
Fuck, how did I miss this?
It was the last days of the school year and most people in our dorm have moved out already. Because it is the last few days, people were clinging onto each other / staying up extra late, and foot traffic’s much more busy than normal.
This was on the 7th floor though, and luckily, when I took the elevator to the lobby nobody was there.
I took a shit ton of clothes.
The next at 10AM, I asked a friend if he could help me haul the clothes together as I stole too many. I promised to pay him a cut.
We got to Buffalo Exchange and waited 45 minutes before they got to us.
It was awkward because I stole too many women’s clothes and it was hard to explain to the lady sorting through the clothes where I got them. So the back story’s we lived in a big house and we drew the ‘short straw’ of donating everyone’s clothes.
Most of the clothes weren’t accepted and they donated it to charity. So it just ended up in the same place. But they did pay for some.
In total, I got $40.
As promised, I paid my friend. A fair amount is $20 for him. But I wanted to see if I could just pay him $10. He gladly accepted (I don’t know why).
I told my roommate about this and he called me an asshole. And I was. It wasn’t fair.
But capitalism isn’t fair, baby.
Bonus money#
The night before as I was frantically shoving women’s clothes into laundry baskets, I noticed something. People also donated used textbooks.
They were in a huge recycling bin. Right next to the pile of clothes I was stealing.
I shoved as many STEM ones as possible into the laundry baskets as well. I hid them underneath the clothes.
As it was end of the school year, I can’t sell these.
So I took them home for the summer and sold them at the beginning of the next semester.
I sold them with Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. People would meet me at campus and I’d deal them to books while they gave me $20-40 in cash or checks.
I netted around $160.
The textbooks have a tight window for selling, from when students return to campus until just before the first set of homework is assigned.
The ones I couldn’t sell once the semester got rolling, I recycled.
The lessons#
The much harder hustle of hauling heavy clothes only gave me $30 profit. The easier hustle of stealing books and selling them to the right market (college students) was way easier. And gave me 5X+ money. Both required no skill.
The former’s trying to arbitrage clothes nobody wants.
The latter’s trying to sell textbooks to a market that desperately needs them to get a degree.