Meanwhile in the UK, nobody really sells much of anything - I am skeptical that many people ever owned anything worthwhile in the first place - and it is against the law to pick up trash. Luckily, this doesn't apply on council estates because there's an unwritten rule that anything in the front lawn is first come, first served, sadly, all the good stuff ran out years ago and the best you can find now are rusty low-end P3 Celeron machines that don't work and aren't worth having anyway. Even those show up very rarely now. I can only imagine its worse elsewhere, because most of these are branded with a local organization's name, said organization practically threw them at you when we were all set to be the internet capital of the UK (Since then we've become a city with only a single, locally operated, ISP) to get everyone on the internet, so most homes owned one whether they used it or not. Even then it's technically double theft as we were meant to give them back (haha! suckers!) and in the laws eyes, you also stole it by removing it from the front lawn - this is why I knock on the door and ask. They look at you weird, they're like "Why are you asking me? It's there to be taken." but it removes the power of authorities to persecute you for taking it.
You can steal from the city dump, but you have to be very careful. Some of the workers take their job too seriously so will kick you in the shins and trip you up if you try to run off with so much as an old coffee mug.
Good luck finding anything on social media here too, people keep telling me about crappy facebook groups and websites and all you ever find is people selling prams, slightly broken plasma TVs and the odd strimmer.
Sunday markets sometimes yielded results, but the people there started charging way too much some years ago, they refuse to barter and get very aggressive if you even attempt it.
On the age thing, I seem to be from some weird missing half-way generation; I'm 25, so I'm only just too old to identify with the millennials, but I'm too young to be part of gen X. There seems to be about a 3-year span between the end of the 80s and start of the 90s where people born in that time don't fit into either generation's definition so much.
As for scrappers refusing sales for more money as they see it as a ripoff and whatnot... the general population is dumb and people like that are a prime example. I've had similar problems, most notably, builders refused to construct a workshop for me because I specified a larger size of wood for the frame than was necessary (4x4 versus 2x1). Their argument was that it was too expensive and no matter how much I explained to any of them that it was my money, so who cared? They'd just get payed more for having to go out of their way to put it together, they wouldn't have it and refused to work on it. The last guy got mad when he couldn't give me a valid reason and I questioned if the reason he didn't want to do it was because he prided himself on doing substandard work with barely-spec materials... He flipped his shit and it was hilarious. Morons.
"But it's wrong!" He said.
"So what?" I replied, "Is building this frame with 4x4 better than using 2x1?"
"No, it's wrong."
"Will it be stronger?" I asked.
"It... fuck you! I'm not doing it, it's too expensive!"
"Who's paying for this?"
"Fuck you! You're an idiot!" He yelled down the phone, "Nobody fucking does that any more, what the fuck is wrong with you?"
Dick.
