When I was a kid we lived down the street from Warner's Candy Factory. You could smell the yummy from half a mile away, esp. in the summer. The smell changed depending on what they were making at the time, but it usually smelled of caramel. Their dumpsters were behind a rather short (10 feet, iirc) fence with no barbed wire. All the neighborhood kids would climb it and get into the dumpsters to retrieve much of the reject candy they threw away daily, and they threw away a lot - chocolate covered nuts, gummy worms, that sweet liquid in tiny wax bottles (remember those???). Sometimes the labels would be off-kilter, or they mislabeled the candy packages, etc.. In the heat of summer sometimes it would be semi-melted, but we didn't care. Poor inner-city kids aren't too picky. After a few years they installed a taller fence and put barbed wire around, but those were great years. I'm surprised I didn't develop diabetes...
Lol at the dumpster diving.
You're gonna love this.
I worked shifts for 4 decades. Sometimes after 4-12, I'd stop with a couple buddies for a couple beers and chicken wings or something.
One night I'm with 2 guys from work, one a current volunteer fireman. After a couple beers, the fireman says its a good night to dumpster dive. And he asks us if we want to go.
(Now this was a USW mill, everybody made nice money, nobody was hurting or had to dumpster dive.)
So my one buddy says to me 'we gotta see this' and we drive our fireman pal to the local Giant Eagle at 1AM, around behind the building where the dumpsters are.
He takes a burlap sack and dives the fuck in there. And sure as shit, cops show up lights flashing.
My buddy and I are sitting in car, cops come over wanting ID and reason why We're there. So we told them that our friend is dumpster diving and we're waiting for him to come out.
Both cops head to dumpster, climb up little ladder and shine in their lights. Then they see our fireman buddy and they start razzing him about being in a dumpster.
The cops and fireman are all buddies, small town and they all respond to the same calls half the time.
They let us go and the diver shows us his haul. 10 packs of expired hot dogs, 2 dozen cans with no labels (pot luck I guess), some expired bread and hot dog buns, ketchup, mustard with knife cuts in bottles and a bunch of other shit, all with a big smile on his face like he hit the lotto.
Following night at work, he gets on the company radio to inform us and everyone in our dept. at lunchtime that he has a few dozen hot dogs and sauer kraut at his station, 'come on over'.
We put a sign up, free Oscar Meyer dumpster dogs. Everybody ate them.