Junk man

Junk man is the (largely American) term for a person that buys, trades, or collects disparate items (scrap and usable/repairable things) that are considered of little or no value to their owners. This person then tries to sell or trade these items at a profit to other individuals and scrap yards.

Appearances in pop culture

The poet Carl Sandburg has a poem called "Junk Man," in which Death is personified by a junk man.^[1]

In the television program Sanford and Son, the father's character, played by Redd Foxx, was a junkman, although even in those days the profession was not as common as it had once been.

In his song "The Pretender", Jackson Browne imagines that "the junk man pounds his fender", referenced as a Los Angeles neighborhood sight.

Footnotes

See also

• Karung guni
• Rag and bone man, the British equivalent of this vocation
• Sanford and Son, a television program centered on a junk man and his son
• Dumpster diving
• Waste picker
• American Pickers