Free Cell Phone Chargers!

By Zack on January 22, 2010

Well, sort of. Lifehacker has an excellent roundup of advice on replacing your cell phone charger for free.

Apparently, chargers are one of the most frequent belongings left behind during a hotel stay. For this reason, most hotels of boxes with literally hundreds of cell phone chargers. All you have to do is show up, tell them you stayed there recently and left your charger and they'll break out the box. This is brilliant! Perhaps a bit disingenuous, but the user comments Lifehacker gathered from Gizmodo and Reddit indicate that hotels have so many chargers that go unclaimed that no one will miss it if you take theirs. Plus, you're in college, you deserve the free stuff!

From Gizmodo:

I work for the second largest conference hotel in my city. You have no idea the size box we have of chargers left behind. 90 percent are idiot blackberry chargers. This works 100% of the time, we never verify that anyone stays here we just let them go shopping for [their] charger. Hell we even will give people a charger if they call down to the front desk and say they forgot theirs!

So have a good weekend ... and if you go out of town, and forget your charger, just swing by the closest hotel.

"Sony Ericsonn mobile phone recharger" courtesy Iwan Gabovitch via Flickr Creative Commons