Getting Things For Free, Vol. 74: Scrounged Baker’s Dozen Bagels

Innocently rounding the corner at East 21^st Street, we found ourselves outside Ess-A-Bagel. We were hungry; it was closed. But we had no reason to worry. Heaps of invitingly isolated black plastic trash bags outside the storefront piqued our interest. We hunched down and felt the bags for bagel shapes until we came upon… the bagel bag. What is the bagel bag? A perfectly clean, tightly packaged plastic bag of day-old bagels foolishly treated as refuse by the bagel-makers. Our booty: Sesame, cinnamon raisin, whole wheat and garlic big, soft, doughy, lonely-until-we-found-them bagels. And most importantly: Free.