There’s a belief that the tents left behind are taken by charities and given to homeless or those who need them. This has been debunked by organisers time and time again as not being true.
The problem is, that excuse used to wash. Now almost everyone knows it's not true.
People are just lazy. The issue here is that you can get tents dirt cheap nowadays from Amazon, temu etc. and there's no reason for these people not to just leave them to save carrying them back to the car. It's not exclusive to reading, it happens at most festivals sadly.
I had to look it up. Apparently the cheapest tent i can find in German Amazon is 20€. That's cheap af. But still, i can't stop and think that that's ~3-4 days of food for me alone.
When you're in a place you generally tend to get food from that place. Food is food, yes, but you can only buy what's offered and you can't decide your own prices. If you aren't the type to plan ahead and pack food for your trip, there aren't many options, are there?
The point is, if i pay enough money that i could afford food, i'm gonna make sure to use that thing until it falls apart. It's like an investment. It has to be worth it. I grew up with barely enough money to get basic necessities. So i'm quite careful about wasting money, despite the fact that i could nowadays afford at least 10 of those things.
And at least in the US, festival food is part of it. I always brought sandwich stuff to festivals, but foot long corn dogs -- and many other things; I just love a good corn dog -- are part of the fun. Now I want a corn dog.
In the UK 20€ is 1-2 hours of work on minimum wage. I don't condone leaving the mess, but I can certainly see people writing that amount off as just cost of entry.
Plus they are bulky and if you're only going to a festival once a year you might not want to store it.
Also, putting up a cheap ass tent is easy. Taking down a cheap ass tent is exponentially difficult.
One of the differentiators of "tent quality" is ease of breakdown and storage with the easiest tents costing more because they're better engineered for simpler deconstruction and minimizing size when stored.
Yes but a 20€ tent is a single-use item. It just won’t last. If it lasts the night, you already call that a victory. The real issue is that these items shouldn’t exist at all.
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u/crowhouse 10h ago
Why do so many people abandon tents?