Over the years, I’ve taken my share of stuff off the free-for-all streets of New York. On good days in the East Village you could furnish an entire apartment. Of course, now that I’m moving out of the city, I have to let go of a lot of stuff. And what better way to do that than to replenish the very streets I live on?

A couple of weeks ago I dropped a particularly good stash out in front of my building. Bags of old books—including a nice old copy of Dubliners—a few kitchen essentials, and a somewhat functional $79 Radio Shack CD player. It’s time to give back to the Universe, I thought to myself in typical urban-hippie jargon. I put the stash at the foot of the tree outside my front door and went down the block to get a lemonade.

Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised at what I saw, when I returned an hour or so later. A selection of my former belongings was displayed with marketing-savvy precision along an orange blanket. It was a veritable shopping mall of thrift, staffed by the local, possibly-schizophrenic vagrant. Taped to the rollgate on the store behind the merchandise was a sign that read, Sale $1 Each.