Dumpster Diving Woman Hits The 'Jackpot' When She Finds Thousands Of Dollars Worth Of Brand New Nike Clothes—'Why Don't They Donate Them'
Ella has dozens of videos showing off her dumpster diving halls. When she's done, she donates it all or resells them on her website.
TikTok Under the TikTok account “GlamourDDive,” a woman named Ella from Texas frequently posts about the insane things that she finds when dumpster diving around large retail stores.
She’s gotten over 1.2 million followers on TikTok and hundreds of thousands on YouTube and Instagram. Not only that, but she actually opened up her own online shop where she repurposes the items she finds — most recently, she went to the Nike dumpsters.
Ella found thousands of dollars worth of Nike apparel when dumpster diving.
Ella has been around the Nike block a few times in the last year or so — at least based on the posts she’s made on TikTok — and has come away with bags of brand-new Nike merchandise valued well in the thousands of dollars. Nike isn’t cheap.
The first video she posted was back in October 2022 where she thought she might have stumbled into an employee’s secret stash, but she quickly returned to the store to dumpster dive back in February, and more recently on April 8th.
“Another hidden jackpot dumpster diving at Nike,” she wrote in the overlaid text. “This big bag looks like it’s filled with a bunch of clothing. Everything still has tags on it. This is insane.”
After pulling the bag out and taking inventory of the items, it’s clear that she’s raking hundreds upon hundreds of dollars in clothes. Four jackets priced at $120, a Nike Tech fleece priced at $130, three hoodies, a couple of long-sleeve shirts, some sports bras, pants, and socks — just from the one bag. If we look at retail pricing, this easily goes over $1000.
But this isn’t the only time she’s gone to Nike, or even dumpster-dived at all. On her website, she resells a lot of the items she finds when dumpster diving, drastically lowering them from their retail price. Sometimes, she just donates them directly.
“Many products I find are donated including food, clothing, blankets, animal supplies, etc,” she writes. “I try to keep prices cheap and discounted in comparison to the retail price. However, shipping is added [to] the cart which may raise the price.”
While Ella’s cause is definitely noble, there’s a much deeper problem being showcased here, and many people in the comments pointed it out as well.
Someone, referring to the clothes, posed the question, ‘Why don’t they donate them?’
The simple answer is capitalism. In reality, the answer is much more complex, and there are a myriad of reasons why companies may choose to discard good, unsold products, but the bottom line is… it would hurt their bottom line.
According to fashion watchdog Diet Prada in October 2021, the destruction and discarding of unsold products benefit corporations in the form of a tax loophole. Damaged goods can become a tax write-off for these companies.
Even more startling is claims made by HuffPost in 2018 that many brands believe discounting, donating, or even giving away their clothes would burn their brand's image — so instead, they burn the clothes that they’re selling. The market value for clothes would go down if all you had to do was wait for them to become free, right?
It makes sense in the minds of people whose entire goal is to drive profit and income, but for those of us with a moral compass and sustainability in mind, it’s an awful practice.
“There is a huge excess of wasted goods thrown away every day by corporate America,” Ella writes on her website. “This only contributes to a build-up of pollution and waste that eventually ends up buried and left to rot in landfills.”
That’s why her ultimate goal is to “give back to families and animals that may not have the support or means to help themselves.”
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.