He stopped at #3361 and unlocked the padlock. A musty odor emerged. He looked inside. The unit was crammed with birdcages, cedar chests, old paperbacks, barstools and Art Deco lamps.
“I think I’ll make good money off this locker, which isn’t bad, since I bought it for $140,” Michael said. “Copper is at $6 a pound right now, so I can sell the lamps to the scrap yard. It’s all about squeezing every dollar out of the locker.”
While some teenagers hang out after school, playing Fortnite or shooting hoops, Michael has taken up a more enterprising hobby. He buys abandoned storage lockers at bargain prices from public lien auctions with the aim of selling their contents for profit. It began two years ago, when he watched a rerun of “Storage Wars.” He has been on an urban treasure hunt since.
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Life and history lessons in a storage locker
High school student Michael Haskell buys abandoned storage units, discovery profit, history, and life lessons. He stopped at #3361 and unlocked the padlock. A musty odor emerged. He looked inside. The unit was crammed with birdcages, cedar chests, old paperbacks, barstools and Art Deco lamps. “I think I’ll make good money off this locker, which…
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The story of seafoam green
There’s a reason seafoam green is so commonplace in mid 20th century industrial design. What caught my eye as a designer, as with most industrial plants and control rooms of that time, besides the knobs, levers, and buttons, was the use of a very specific seafoam green, seen here on the reactor’s walls and in the control…
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Bruce Springsteen covers Purple Rain
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Hospital janitor becomes a doctor
Match day for doctors is always a big deal. When a doctor is placed at a hospital in which she was a janitor? Inspiring. For about a decade, Shay Taylor-Allen walked the halls of Yale New Haven Hospital pushing a janitor’s cart. She mopped patient rooms, disinfected surfaces and emptied the trash. Soon, she’ll walk…
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Web design museum
The web is old enough to host a website dedicated to designs of major websites,
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Complexity and simplicity
Any experienced software engineer or architect understands the nature of trade-offs versus complexity and simplicity. The culture and software development often rewards the complex solution over a simple one because there is a narrative to something complex. Or as with something simple, it’s simply “this was done.” Picture two engineers on the same team. Engineer…
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The AI assault on the last of the open web
Anil Dash breaks down the potential end game for the open web, the internet of the 90s and early 2000s. The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep…
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Red roof Pizza Hut locations
Red roof Pizza Hut locations taste like nostalgia, and a cure for the DoorDash blues. What’s crazy, is that even the corporation that owns Pizza Hut doesn’t even know how many of these locations still exist. Once a common sight across the country, these old-school, low-slung buildings had largely disappeared as the restaurant chain modernized…
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How much does it cost to hire a college mascot for a wedding?
This is the hard hitting journalism we need: how much does it cost to hire a college mascot for a wedding? Last offseason, we asked, Does anyone object to having a Mascot at this Wedding?since we saw Goldy the Gopher at a wedding. We created a spreadsheet with all the mascot costs and broke it down…
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Rosalía performing Berghain at the 2026 BRIT Awards