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Comment by automatwon | Hacker News Reader

I live in a microstudio condo building in SoMA, San Francisco. Rent is ~$2000. It's always surreal to see this old lady with an asian "carrying pole" in the elevator. There's no rent control here or government sponsored housing of sorts. Either the lady makes a lot of money doing this (doubtful), or some generous person is letting her live for free (these are ~100 square feet microstudios, barely space to roommate), or she's doing this as a hobby, or I just lack imagination. (For context, we're 10 feet away from a Whole Foods, and Uber's self driving garage).

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Most of them probably live with their children, so they do not pay the rent.

For Most of the old people collecting bottles, when they were young, China is very poor and have to work very hard to get enough food. I guess they are in the habit of hard working.

Do something and get some reward, even it is so small, is very different form do nothing.

In the article, "June" get a way to communicate with the neighborhood, and the people are kind to her. In this kind of mutual kindness, She feel her life.

She is probably doing it because she likes the work. She feels good earning a bit of money even if she doesn't really need it. The sense of fulfillment is probably worth a lot more than the actual monetary value. Lots of us derive happiness from work or from feeling useful.

I know at least one old timer (early eighties) that gets really happy when heading over to exchange his bag of aluminum cans. He lives in his daughters home and he doesn't really need money. My thinking is that it makes him happy to earn a bit of money completely on his own, at his age.

Indeed they live with family and the can money go to gambling at all those Chinese seniors clubs. A woman who used to clean out the cans here now hires other women to do it and runs a little recycling empire that ends up on the Mahjong table.

There's also a culture of no waste from that generation my friend's grandmother was more than wealthy but refused to eat with plates snacking with newspaper plates she made and grew a large crop of food in their front yard selling it to corner stores every year. She also would dig out clothing out of trash bins, wash and slice up the fabric to sew different clothes she also sold but didn't need to being fairly wealthy.

I used to live in the Inner Richmond and there was a can collecting couple who drove a brand new Honda CRV and lived in an amazing old brick building. I suspect some of the bottlepickers do it for lack of having any other hobbies.

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