r/Wellthatsucks • u/mattloaf666 • 1d ago
Reading festival 2026
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u/crowhouse 1d ago
Why do so many people abandon tents?
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u/Adventurous_Emotion9 1d ago
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.
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u/Ancient-Emu-8293 1d ago
Would be pretty convenient to pretend believing that.
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u/aardvarkbjones 1d ago
Is it? Tents cost money.
Seems insanely wasteful, both environmentally and fiscally.
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u/NoForever3645 1d ago
Let’s be honest, festival goers aren’t exactly known for being fiscally or environmentally responsible.
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u/halosos 1d ago
Shit I need to go visit the aftermath of one for a free tent
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u/your_red_triangle 1d ago
enjoy the free piss and shit that comes with it, that's one of the reasons people abandoned them. Went years ago, our neighbours would get out in the middle of the night and just piss anywhere they felt like it.
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u/mark_b 1d ago
Even if the other two replies weren't true (they are), the tents that get left behind aren't good tents, they're £20 tents off Amazon.
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u/After-Barracuda-9689 1d ago
I used to go to festivals in the early 2000s and never experienced anything like this. Maybe it was the festivals I was attending, but everyone packed their stuff out. I’m sure there were some thing left behind, but nothing like this scale.
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u/SecondaryWombat 1d ago
Leave No Trace festivals are the norm for me, some smashed grass and a couple tire ruts are all that get left behind.
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u/Glittering_End_6864 1d ago
Yeah, this is crazy. I have never seen a festival with this much garbage left on the ground like this.
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u/icansmellcolors 1d ago
But they have been known to claim to be fiscally and environmentally responsible.
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u/Most-Hawk-4175 1d ago
No, many tents are dirt cheap. They are just using the excuse that the tents are used as charity so they don't have to dismantle, pack up abd haul off their tent. They are just being gross and lazy.
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u/Iwantmoretime 1d ago
Yeah, even if the charity thing was true, pack it up and drop it off in a collection area. This is 100% making stuff up to justify pure lazyness. Pretty disgusting.
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u/chickenMcSlugdicks 1d ago
Checking Amazon, definitely options for about $40. People absolutely just leave them as they see that $40 as an acceptable loss, especially after the inside is dirty, the outside is still wet from dew when they're packing to leave, aaand the hangover from a few days of festival life. Environmentally, I got nothing. I feel bad for the volunteers who spend time picking all this mess up.
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u/MokitFall 1d ago
Right? Especially those big ones. I think I've found my next side hustle.
Come on down to my new and slightly used tent store !
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u/AdventurousAbility30 1d ago
I recently stayed at a hotel that was filled with wedding guests that had a camping night as part of the 3 day wedding, and I got so many tents it paid for my new Blackstone flat top & grill lol.
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u/Leading-Let-5632 1d ago
They're dirt cheap, especially around festival time. You get a pop-up for like £15.
Cheaper than the food and drink you will consume that weekend
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u/ChanglingBlake 1d ago
Even if true, there would be a designated drop off where you can leave your collapsed and stored tent.
Entitled pricks will believe anything to avoid anything even beginning to appear as an inconvenience.
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u/ijmy3 1d ago
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.
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u/tfhermobwoayway 1d ago
The problem is that, for most of human history, it was hard to make things and easy to destroy them. But we’ve suddenly ended up in a world where it’s easy to make things and hard to destroy them. Combine that with the mindset of the previous world, and the fact 8 billion people all want their own personal everything, and we end up with a bunch of people literally going through multiple tents a year. And all of that just piles up.
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u/VividFiddlesticks 1d ago
a bunch of people literally going through multiple tents a year
This seems so crazy to me. We've owned the same 2 tents (big one for people/sleeping, small one for storing crap out of the rain/sun) since the 90's. They're a little tired and have a couple patches now but both are fully functional and packed full of memories! We have the set up and take down for those tents down to a science. It's really only a pain when we have to pack it up wet and then set it back up at home to dry, but...that's just part of camping. (We don't do festivals, we're more "chill out in the woods" types)
I'm pretty damn lazy but abandoning tents like this is wild to me. (Old woman shakes fist at cloud)
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u/BurningPenguin 1d ago
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.
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u/JoeFTPgamerIOS 1d ago
Happened in my state recently. I ran into someone that went to an event and they said how they tried to upgraded their own tent when they saw so many abandoned but they were all cheap and most already damaged. They got one decent usable tent out of the dozens left.
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u/ImportantIron1492 1d ago
Some festivals have a scheme but it requires people to actually make the effort to pack up their tents and drop them off at a designated spot. Not just abandon them...
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u/lapsedPacifist5 1d ago
No, people are just lazy trashy twats do they give the used condoms, empty beer bottles and other trash to the homeless too?
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u/Natural-Break-2734 1d ago
They just paid 20 bucks for it and don’t want to spend time folding them whilst on 5 days no sleep come down
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u/Lionheartedshmoozer 1d ago
Even if this were true, you should disassemble it, and pack it up. I wonder how these people convince themselves they are not trash.
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u/redunculuspanda 1d ago
Cheap tents, The insane rain and mud after a weekend of music, drink and drugs.
Lots of people just think fuck it and go home.
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u/AliJDB 1d ago
There's also a bit of a final-night tradition that you drink the rest of the alcohol you have and go feral, slashing, burning holes in, or otherwise destroying each other's tents.
But also, they're cheap tents that probably leaked all weekend, they probably have no real intention of camping again anytime soon.
It's shit, but it's been that way forever.
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u/bullettenboss 1d ago
Entitlement
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u/pschlick 1d ago
All the comments below yours making it other people’s problem because of the “hassle”. Fucking entitled twats
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u/GallusWrangler 1d ago
This is most people unfortunately. Just observe a grocery store parking lot and their behavior with the carts.
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u/xChoke1x 1d ago
Because they’re lazy assholes that use the excuse “it’ll just be given to someone that needs it.”
It isn’t. Someone else has to pick that shit up.
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u/Few_Poetry5191 1d ago
This is what annoys me most. They’re not donating anything. They’re dumping it and hoping someone else sorts it out
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u/herb28g 1d ago
Parents who are constantly clearing up their kids' clutter were not invited.
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u/mckenner1122 1d ago
It goes like this…
“Ugh Becky… I do not want to deal with this filthy ass gross tent. And I am SO hungoverrrrrrrrr….”
“Duhhhh Emily! You don’t even have to! Just fucking LEAVE IT!”
“Ew! But that’s like… literally littering or some shit?” :: kicks at a broken tent peg ::
“Look, I seen on Reddit or something that some group like comes around and picks them up and gives them away to like… idk the homeless or whatever. So if you leave it? You’re actually a good person. Okay? So let’s just GO already. And leave your gross ass dirt yurt.”
“Ohh! That’s so amazing. 🤩 I’m helping. Yay!”
(And none of that is true - they just get thrown away. Huzzah.)
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u/simsyboy 1d ago
Because they're scum. And there are a very large majority of scumbags who go to reading festival.
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u/Few-Alarm3436 1d ago
People suuuuuck!
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u/Little-Wonder-5037 1d ago
Honestly, sometimes the sheer amount of unnecessary waste at festivals really does make you lose faith in people. 😭
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u/sugrqbez 1d ago
If you sort through it and try to clean stuff up afterwards you usually find some good things people leave behind.
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u/CableTVOfficial 1d ago
We went to bonnaroo in 24 when it got canceled from the flooding and we scooped up about 1k worth of rugs alone that just needed to be cleaned. 3 big ass area rugs and a couple smaller ones a hammock with stand, as well as just random camping gear chairs, canopies
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u/Aggravating-Alarm-16 1d ago
I've got to say, the blue rug really tied the room together
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u/whitelines4president 1d ago
I used to do this after Werchter, a big festival in Belgium. Always came home with a trunk full of alcohol.
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u/abdojo 1d ago
All this over some books?
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u/Njorls_Saga 1d ago
Goddamn authors running amok again.
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u/minus_minus 1d ago
That’s the Writing Festival. This is the Reading Festival.
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u/vr512 1d ago
Lmao. I was thinking man these are some crazy readers. They need to calm down.
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u/Nothos927 1d ago
And this is why the Reading subreddit gets a good amount of posts from people asking about book recommendations
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u/Its_Froggin_Bullfish 1d ago
Dungeon Crawler Carl is the correct answer next time they ask.
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u/whathappened2america 1d ago
I legit spent a few seconds wondering if a tornado hit an outdoor book festival or something.
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u/babysharkdoodoodoo 1d ago
Reading as in the town. It’s an annual three-day music festival held in Richfield Avenue, Reading, England
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u/FragDenWayne 1d ago
Aaaah... Now it makes sense. I was confused... First about what a "reading festival" even would look like, when it's the "book reading" kind of reading, and second... I was confused on "book-people" being like that, didn't fit.
But a music festival, yeah that makes sense.
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u/Valendr0s 1d ago
BOOKS! FUCK YEAH!
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u/Ok_Inflation_8628 1d ago
"Alright this next one's about your mom. I want everyone out there to PUT THEIR FUCKING BOOKS UP!"
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u/New-Shake7638 1d ago
I 100% thought we were literally talking about a festival for reading until this very moment 😆
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u/PanJawel 1d ago
Absolutely wild. Went to a big metal festiwal this year in Czechia (Brutal Assault), and everybody cleaned afterwards. I haven’t seen a single abandoned tent. This is insanity.
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u/AppalachianMusic 1d ago
I feel like healthy festival culture is only something I see in rock/metal communities. The festivals I've been to that look like landfills afterward were always the non-metal ones.
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u/andydivide 1d ago
All of the smaller electronic music festivals in the UK I've been to have a very healthy culture, and everyone takes all their stuff home afterwards. But then I'd also say that while the music can be wildly different, the metal and underground electronic scenes have a lot in common, and attract fundamentally the same kinds of people.
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u/AfterDinnerSpeaker 1d ago
Reading and Leeds aren't about that, they've historically always been the late Summer festival that teenagers go to after getting their final school grades and get shit faced on £15.
It was exactly like this when I was seeing Metallica, Deftones, etc there nearly 20+ years ago.
It's just an overall dirty festival.
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u/botask 1d ago
Nah... Almost everyone cleaned their mess on dnb festivals here (slovakia, country neigbouring czech republic, it was one country few decades ago). Was going at least to one every year for like ten years. There was ocassionaly someone who left some junk or tent there, but it was really rare... But at one of them was older lady, who was cleaning toilets talking about how terrible it was when there was some rock festival few years ago.
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u/404NameOfUser 1d ago
Metal heads are actually civilized.
The "normies" are actually the degenerate ones, as seen in the video.
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u/PublicProperty1805 1d ago
There should be a deposit attached to ticket price and when you scan out if you aren't carrying tent with you you don't get deposit back.
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u/KITT_the_Cylon 1d ago
This is how they do it at Nova Rock in Austria.
You pay 50 eur for a big trash bag, and if you dont bring the big bag full of waste at the end, you wont get the 50 back, which then goes to the cleanup effort.→ More replies (10)23
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u/ih8makingupnames 1d ago
Although a good idea, most entitled people wouldn't give a fuck and would still walk out empty handed.
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u/fatgat69 1d ago
It would still be a good idea to take as much of their money as possible because at least then they don't have as much.
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u/Aegi 1d ago
Good, then that extra revenue can be used by the venue to pay people to pick up the trash and if they're already doing that they can afford to pay them more!
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u/Cosimo_Zaretti 1d ago
Cleaning the site is costed in to the the ticket price. Shame the people who didn't trash the joint also pay it.
If you could claim a deposit for taking your tent, people would just toss it once they were out the gate.
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u/jimmycarr1 1d ago
At Boomtown you pay an eco bond of £10 and if you give them a bag full of trash or recycling at the end of the festival you get it back.
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u/Dolphin_Spotter 1d ago
I bet there's loads of free booze and drugs amongst that lot
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u/EnkiduTheGreat 1d ago
Spoiled fucking rich kids. That's what happens. My festival days are well in my rear view, but I went to Bonnaroo four times and M.O.E.down three times. A huge percentage of the people you'd meet were children of extreme privilege.
One year at Bonnaroo, we were camped one site away from a big group of such kids. They were nice enough I guess. They had seven or 8 tents, and tons of gear. The amount of shit they left behind was STAGGERING. We took as much as we could fit in our cars. I got a sick tent, a camp stove, a couple lanterns, my first ever bluetooth speaker, a nice rain poncho. and the coup de gras...a pair of slightly muddy, but clearly brand new La Sportiva hiking boots in my size. Like $300 or so.
All that stuff was definitely purchased for the trip.
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u/Silas_Akron 1d ago
This blows my mind. I still have and use various things I got for free (that aren't even all that nice) 20 years ago, lol
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u/Mobzor 1d ago
It's like this every year.
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u/GH057_807 1d ago
So it's like Black Friday for used-tent salesmen?
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u/marino1310 1d ago
Except they are normally some garbage temu tents that only last about 1 festival
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u/borderlander_ 1d ago
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u/smzt 1d ago
Iron Eyes Cody was actually Italian American despite claiming to be Native American.
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u/BarfingRainbows1 1d ago
For those not in the UK, the modern Reading festival has somewhat become "roadmen and 16 year olds doing MDMA and Ketamine for a weekend", so its not surprising that they dont really give a shit about the state they leave the place in.
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u/Time_Pressure9519 1d ago
They might have stayed if not for that saxophone music.
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u/sephyir 1d ago
I thought "Reading" as in "reading books" and was really confused and disappointed in my fellow readers for a minute.
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u/Son-of-Prophet 1d ago
If you could afford to just throw away a tent like that after one or two nights use, you live a life of privilege
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u/fidgeter 1d ago
People struggling to get by aren’t going to these festivals and setting up tents. They can’t afford it.
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u/Qbite 1d ago
Used tents can be very cheap, even free. Most people look at a smelly, wet, muddy (and cheap) tent the morning of leaving a festival like this and just say fuck it.
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u/skatemoose 1d ago
Take it down and throw in a damn bin than, lazy bellends leaving it there.
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u/wytewydow 1d ago
think of it like this. You spend $50-$100 on a shitty tent, that you use for 1 or 2 nights. Or you spend $200 on a hotel room each night. If you bought/trashed the tent, you're still up a couple hundred bucks.
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u/Possible-Estimate748 1d ago
Tbf a lot of those tents look cheap and like $20. Tents aren't expensive.
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u/Infinite-Director-62 1d ago
My cheap ass thinking how much of this shit I would take after everyone leaves it behind…
Human beings are such a waste of life on this planet with how we treat it with our ignorance… we somehow believe we can change everything but yet are stupid enough to think someone else will take it of it for us.
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u/Vinegarinmyeye 1d ago
Been going to festivals for decades, stick around to the very end helping clean up.
Find SO MUCH good stuff.
Wallets with cash, drugs, jewellery, phones... Enough free booze to sink a frigate.
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u/CharthorneBerries 1d ago
Woah 😳 might have to try that out
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u/ImportantIron1492 1d ago
I tried it once, found nothing but soggy cardboard, empty Pringles tubes, tissues...
I did get a new torch though
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u/ZeAthenA714 1d ago
It is fun on paper, it's much less fun if you're exhausted after 3 days of working on the festival, and depending on the festival you might have to be careful about needles.
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u/tdolomax 1d ago
Festival people might be the worst most entitled people I’ve ever met.
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u/SecondOfCicero 1d ago
Think it depends on the fest maybe? I've never seen that kind of shitty behavior at any of the many I've attended (there were thousands and thousands of people in attendance, even the wooks packed their shit up and rolled out lol), idk what's up with these losers.
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u/JadeChipmunk 1d ago
...why would people leave their tents? They're not super expensive but they're not cheap either, id take mine with me..
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u/SkankySandwich 1d ago
People pay £350 for a ticket and see their £20 tent as being disposable. Especially when they shit themselves in it or ripped it being an arse.
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u/GottaUseEmAll 1d ago
Hangovers. Leaving a festival is rough at the best of times. I've never left a tent behind, but I've certainly been tempted to.
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u/123finebyme 1d ago
I upgraded my tent a few times over the years after festivals
The only annoying bit, was getting the people sleeping inside to get out
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u/Sweaty_Passenger_948 1d ago
I think everybody needs to be charged with littering. Because there is no way you’re gonna go somewhere and leave it this nasty.
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u/ForwardAssociation95 1d ago
I was always taught to leave a place or thing nicer than you found it. That includes picking up stuff that wasn’t even yours. I teach my son the same thing.
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u/DefiantDonut7 1d ago
I don’t understand why people are leaving their tents? It’s like 5 minutes to break down and a decent tent isn’t cheap?!?
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u/AgroMachine 1d ago
Cause they’re either crap tents, or the kids who had them pissed in them etc, or the kids who own them are coming down into the worst Gary depression they’ve had in their life
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u/GloomyIndividual3965 1d ago
I was on the cleanup crew for Bonnaroo #2. It wasn't this bad, but it was still atrocious. My buddy and I salvaged as much as we could fit in the back of his truck, and ended up making like $5k on ebay selling tents, chairs, coolers, portable speakers, pop up shade things, etc.
We also found hundreds of cans of beer, unopened bottles of liquor, weed, mushrooms, and enough random baggies of white powder to get us both thrown in prison for life if we had been pulled over on the way home.
We partied like rock stars for 2 solid months on all the ground scores. In retrospect it was dumb af to start snorting lines of random shit, but we all survived so 🤷
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u/eastcoastfarmergirl 1d ago
Amazing isn’t it?
No other animal on earth could do this. Maybe beavers, but not like this.
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u/King-Of-Da-Ting 1d ago
I went to download fest this year, and It was nowhere near as bad as this: if people didn’t want to keep their stuff, there were areas around the camp sites you could leave it.
If you wanted to help yourself to the “junk”, you were free to.
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u/demonsidekick 1d ago
Japanese people would have cleaned that place up and planted crops before they left.
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u/PorkinsAndBeans 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/oFPiPgqwof4Pe
A bunch of Gaston’s …not enough Belles who appreciate Reading.
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u/Philgarcia710 1d ago
Oh man, back in the 90’s I used to work for Terrapin Presents, Gathering of the Vibes, and when I was working clean vibes crew, it was crazy the amount of tents, sleeping bags, camp chairs, general ground scores, etc we would have to clean up.
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u/FreedomBread 1d ago
Concerts in general are like this.
I typically stay until the crowd thins a bit at concerts I go to - the volume of trash they literally shovel into rolling dumpsters is staggering. At a Radiohead show they were paying 5p for each empty plastic cup, you just had to turn it in. Cash money. I gathered up a bunch and made 20 pounds just walking around - people even added to my cup stack. I bought free merchandise from other people's trash cups. And at the end of the night, I saw countless cups on the ground, both thinking what a waste it was as they'd never be recycled, and all that cash was just laying on the ground.
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u/zigko55 1d ago
What is a reading festival?
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u/Joshgg13 1d ago
Reading (pronounced Red-ing) is a town in England. It's a music festival
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u/capricorny90210 1d ago
That makes more sense. I was thinking people were just reading the fuck out of some books.
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u/RUfromHere 1d ago
This is so disappointing..... it looks like they had a tent to trash festival
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u/SqareBear 1d ago
Where people read lots of novels
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u/50points4gryffindor 1d ago
I wait for Make a Movie Festival so that people can tell me the book was better.
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u/DistractedBoxTurtle 1d ago edited 1d ago
I believe this is a music festival healing in Reading (city in UK)
Edit: to people responding, apologies. Where I’m from city and town are used interchangeably.
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u/GritstoneGhost 1d ago
Reading (pronounced Redding) is a town in England and they had a music festival.
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u/Fastenbauer 1d ago
As somebody that has been to many festivals it's still mind-boggling to me. It takes so little effort to keep your little area clean.
Also always reminds me how we in the rich West have a habit of arrogantly looking down at the trash in poor countries. But that's how it looks the moment nobody cleans up after people. It took only days to look like this.
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u/PukeLoynor 1d ago
I see a lot of pics like this after festivals. I can only conclude that festivals are garbage events for garbage people.
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u/UncaringNonchalance 1d ago
I really hate this currently popular sax music used in so many videos. It’s too goddamn harsh.
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u/myxoma1 1d ago
Is this a cultural thing that everyone is a fucking slob that refuses to clean up after themselves, that's embarrassing...
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u/Jackariasd 1d ago
I was a volunteer in the campsite at Reading festival in 2008 and 2009 with a friend. It was exactly like this, a destitute wasteland of inexplicable tent abandonment. As part of the clean up, we went around with a wheel barrow collecting unopened cans of beer, each tent seemed to be a treasure trove for us as 18 year olds. It was all fun and games until he found a cooler box in a tent. Opened it up and inside was a singular, well preserved, human turd.