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The Best Place to Start Your Holiday Shopping
It’s not where you might think.
Giving the perfect gift is hard. But I can help you nail it this year. Unlike the catalogs, flyers, emails, texts, and commercials you’ve been bombarded with since Halloween, I’m not going to recommend an item or a store. I’m not going to give you a list of gadgets or books to buy.
But I am going to give you a killer recommendation for where you should go to start your holiday shopping.
Grab a coffee, hit the road, and head to your local dump. I’m often told that I should say “Transfer Station” or “Recycling Center”, but I think “Dump” more accurately reflects what people do there, so I’m sticking with it.
When you get to the dump, just hang out and watch for a while. See what happens.
I got hooked on checking out the dump after I took a group of students for a tour of our local state-of-the-art dump — er — transfer station. We had a tour guide who took us behind the scenes for a look at all the moving parts.
When we went around to the back of the building, there were enormous concrete bays where workers drove around pieces of equipment like bobcats and mini-excavators. It looked like a scene from a Lego movie or a children's’ book about construction sites.
