A fellow named John McTighe used to sell a manual on junk removal. He called it The Ultimate Buying And Selling Kit. His concept wasn't to be a junk hauler. It was to clean out garages and homes of chattel and resell it.

I remember one story about a vacuum cleaner. The owner of the house had him clean out his garage. John picked up a vacuum cleaner along with some other "junk" and also received $25 from the home owner for cleaning his garage. He was getting paid to haul off stuff so he could resell it and make even more money. Schwwweeeettt...

John sold that particular cleaner for somewhere around $100. John never took anything to the dump/landfill because that wasn't his gig.

Regardless, he is living proof that the phrase junk removal business can have more than one meaning. Oh yeah, that was before Craigslist or the Internet. Thanks to technology we now have an organized well manicured junk list called CL.

I could tell you stories about picking up washers, dryers and refrigerators and selling them to two used appliance stores. Sometimes I'd also get paid for hauling them away by the owner and sometimes I wouldn't. Didn't make a whole lot of difference given I was always paid by the stores or the scrap dealer.

I almost always worked alone so I didn't have to share any of the revenue. Back then the norm was around $300 to $500 a week for this type of manual labor.

Gotta love American ingenuity...