junk items - use?

what's the use of things like bricks and soap on the rope and why are so many people buying them in bulk? (I get that there's a limit to how many you can buy in shops at one go - but why do they want it?)

So they can get the merit for dumping 5k items

as the owner of the largest bazaar in the game i can tell you that some people collect 'junk' even 'pointless' worthless junk.

As others have said, collecting and the 5k items dumped award, but there are other reasons too, for example, I bought a bunch of bricks as a cheap alternative to getting the 100 finishing hits with a temp weapon award. Plus for new players with no means of making cash (below level 15 etc) buying up cheap items in bulk and selling them for more is a great way of making some extra cash, it may not seem like much but it starts the ball rolling.

That sweet sweet feeling when you lob a brick at someones head.

You can sell some of it back to the shops and it contributes to networth but it's usually a very expensive way of bumping networth.

As someone said, it's collecting or dumping. There really should be another reason for it though. I'm pretty sure an interesting way to make junk sales and/or purchases affect other aspects of the game could be thought up quite easily - e.g. bricks sales/availability impacting upon Property values and shares in relevant companies.

If you collect 1 million bricks you can trade it in for a semi detatched house

This would be a great idea - but it should be for a Mansion or castle, of even a PI.

Like I said, some of these junk items could influence the game in a Plethora of fun and interesting and surprising ways.

Well the problem with what I said was how does one build a semidetatched house without building the ajoining house.........

Ha, that went over my head. Although I guess you could find a row of houses and build one on the end, although the current end-owners might have something to say about that plan. But no, you would just put money up and get involved in a new housing scheme.

Personally I used junk items in numerous ways. I bought them for under $800 and sold them for around $820.
This doesn't seem to work anymore and you'll more than likely end up wasting all your money and having a bunch of junk in your bazaar as richer players seem to have an unlimited amount of junk.

I also got the 5k dumping merit relatively cheap dumping 5k items.

There's also players who collect certain junk items.

Bricks are used to smack people, things like jackets are just there to be traded or trashed, they have no use.