I will start looking through everything and once I see it is going no where I stop and toss! If by chance I find a few good things such as old coins, (gold and silver in tied up socks) I will of course check further. If I find a bag of just dirty stinky clothing, it's dump time! Actually got another bidders unit one time (mgr. told me after the auction) and thought "Oh crap! This is going to be junk he didn't want and total garbage!") but it turned out he and his wife got into drugs pretty heavy and just stopped doing auctions and lost two units. Mine turned out to be very profitable. Lots of old silver coins, jewelry, gold, etc. Serious boxes of items he had apparently planned to come back and go through and never did. So, a long story short, I start cleaning and if it's looking good, I work harder at it. If not, it's gone in 60 seconds. :-) But then again, from reading above, a lot of you do this as a hobby, I do it as an income supplement.