I can’t understand it - It’s very popular in this town.
At first I thought it was dimwitted college kids, desperate to vacate at end of term and unable to transport the odd easy chair home for the summer.
But they do it all over town.
The furniture quickly gets tarry footprints from passing school kids, and wet with dew. Cushions are scattered by kids and animals, and taken by scavengers with shooping carts that won’t take the frame.
Is this common in your area?
It’s done around here, usually in anticipation of the city’s monthly heavy trash pickup. This is how I plan to dispose of y old bed whenever I get around to buying a new one.
There are also many weekend cruisers in pickup trucks who scavenge. I once was helping a friend pack to move and she said she no longer wanted an old brass hatrack. So I took it out to the curb. When I got back inside, she was looking out the window and chuckling. The hatrack was already gone.
Oh yeah. it’s disgusting. There’s frequently some ratty old couch or dead television blocking the sidewalk.
Not movers. Now, we occasionally have dumps from people who’ve been evicted, with the usual scavengers. I even posted a Q about the legality of it, in GQ IIRC.
Common near college campuses here. I have scavenged from time to time. I still have an old wicker chair that I my cat has made her own for scratching purposes, and I feel zero guilt.
Around the middle of may, go to Allston in Boston. With all the college kids moving out, it’s like an army of futons is moving in. Or out, as the case may be.
Hamilton has an organized timeframe at the end of the school year where univeristy and college students (and I suppose anyone else) can dump their things on the curb and let people pick it up as wanted…I think it lasts a week or two, and it is designed to essentially ditch old furniture and pick up new stuff. Also, there is the monthly or bimonthly (I don’t remember) large trash pickups, but I think there is also a regulation about how early you can put out your garbage for this.
We have Hard Rubbish Chuck-Out’s about every three or four months in my suburb. And they’re BRILLIANT!!
But you’ve got to be quick to beat the professional punters with their utes who go cruising for sellable stuff. Rubbish Chuck-Out Days transcend social class, and you get rich and poor alike lugging their new-found treasure home on top of shopping trolleys and the like. There is a real camaraderie amongst ratters, nobody minds you rifling through their stuff on the nature strip, and truly, there ARE some absolute gems to be discovered.
We’ve got one this weekend…I can’t wait. 
They have scheduled pick-up days for large stuff here, too. But the scavengers often make off with it long before the pick-up day. As long as it’s not too busted/rusted/mangled/mildewed, it’s fair game.
When we moved into this house, we had to replace the washer and dryer, and the previous owners left an old BBQ in the shed. We put the BBQ out first, went in the house for a little while, came back out, and poof! it was gone. Washer and dryer lasted until bedtime, but they were gone in the morning.
Sometimes, people will even put out boxes of smaller cast-off gew-gaws, fixtures, frames etc with a sign saying “free”. I walked by one the other day and scored an overhead light shade in perfect condition, exactly the type I needed but hadn’t yet quite got around to buying new.
Other times, you will see a POS old chipboard bookcase, ratty couch or cheap endtables on someone’s lawn with a hopeful sign stating a price. Dream on, people, dream on. 
“Heavy trash day” is one of my favorite designers.