For frugalists, bargain hunting is a lifestyle

Rebecca passes up pasta and a few other items, explaining that she prefers ready-made food because she doesn’t like to cook.

The granola isn’t her taste, either — she’s a self-described picky eater — but she can give it to her boyfriend.

She also passes up a bag of flavored potato chips, explaining, “I don’t like salt and vinegar.”

Climbing out of the Dumpster, Rebecca opens the gate again and heads out.

In 10 years of serious Dumpster diving, Rebecca says she’s never gotten sick eating food from the trash.

She has only occasionally been hassled by a store manager, but she will usually talk her way out of it by spinning a story that she recently lost her job. People sometimes lecture her, telling her eating out of a Dumpster isn’t good for her. She generally plays along with the spiel, “because most people assume that’s who you are — either homeless or mentally ill,” she says.

‘I hope that Starbucks has some decaf’
As she heads further into Seattle’s University District, Rebecca’s on the lookout for coffee.

“I hope that Starbucks has some decaf because I’m out of decaf,” she says.

But after rifling through several garbage bags, she only comes up with a pile of breakfast sandwiches. She feeds one to her dog.

In her escapades, Rebecca has found CDs, a $100 bill, an answering machine and a five-pound bag of coffee. It often amazes her to come across perfectly good things in the trash, and she will find herself speculating about what personal decision — a fight with a boyfriend, maybe? — would cause someone to throw out something like a CD.

Around the end of the school year, Rebecca will spend more time in the neighborhood near Seattle’s University of Washington to forage for things that people throw out when they move — art supplies, coffee makers, that sort of thing. She also likes to hit the fraternity houses.

“Good God,” she says, “they’ll throw out everything.”

251 million tons of trash
The same could be said for Americans in general. Americans produce about 4.6 pounds of waste per person per day — or nearly a ton a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

For many who get their essentials secondhand or for free, one motivation is that they are disgusted by such waste. But their lifestyle is dependent on the consumer culture that they reject.

If Americans didn’t demand pristine produce and bread baked fresh daily, there would be little for Dumpster divers to find. And if we didn’t lust for new couches long before the old springs had gone soft, and new jeans months before their current ones had developed holes, there would be little for thrift store aficionados and garage sale lovers to buy.

Frugalists say they there are plenty of places to find stuff, if you know where to look. They get things on the sidewalk, through Internet posts and at organized giveaway events.

Laura Thompson, 57, does most of her “shopping” in the bathtub, with a stack of catalogs that she never orders from. When she really needs something, she either goes to a thrift store or tries to find it for free. Recently she lamented that she needed a raincoat, and a friend who likes secondhand shopping gave Thompson the one she was wearing.

Thompson is most meticulous about one thing: paper towels. She’s had the same roll of Costco paper towels since March 2006, and she estimates that there’s still about an inch left. If a houseguest asks for a paper towel, they most likely will be turned down.

Thompson only uses paper towels for “icky” jobs, like getting oil off anchovies. She relies on rags and cloth napkins for most other needs. She does have a little bit of a cheat, though: If she goes to a restaurant and is given a stack of paper napkins, she will take those home and use them.

Thompson, who also lives in Seattle, has been trying to conserve paper towels for about 10 years, motivated by a combination of environmental activism and lifelong frugality.

‘Down to the underwear’
Jacqueline Blix and David Heitmiller once held high-powered telecommunications jobs and were self-professed yuppies. Then in the mid-1990s, they read a book called “Your Money or Your Life” and had a revelation: They could just stop working.

Since then, they have lived on investments, occasional sales of Blix’s crafts and, in recent years, Heitmiller’s part-time work as a handyman. They are so enamored of their simple lifestyle that the Seattle couple even wrote their own book about it: “Getting a Life.”

One day in early spring, Blix was dressed in a pink sweater, turquoise turtleneck, khaki pants and knit socks. Everything she was wearing had come from a secondhand shop, “down to the underwear,” she noted — except the socks, which were knit by a friend.

When Heitmiller asked his wife whether everything he was wearing had come from a secondhand shop, too, she looked him over quizzically and said she didn’t know what underwear he was wearing.