There seem to be two iron rules of American consumerism.
The first one is that people love to buy stuff even if the don’t really need the items. This habit has become hugely magnified by companies making it extremely easy to buy stuff on impulse. You see something online that interests you? Just one click and it appears at your door the next day. The second one is that people hate to get rid of stuff that they do not use and perhaps should never have bought in the first place.
I know people who have ever increasing amounts of stuff even as their need for it decreases. They buy things because they met a specialized need, like some tool or a kitchen gadget that is designed for a specific task, and now lies unused They hang on to them for sentimental reasons or with the idea that at at some point they may need it again, however unlikely that is.
I tend to be of the opposite frame of mind. I am an anti-consumer and try not to buy anything, however small and cheap, unless I absolutely need it and nothing else can substitute for it or it serves multiple useful purposes.Recently I was in the supermarket in the kitchen items aisle that has lots of gadgets. I make omelets and recipes for that and other things often call for the use of a whisk. I picked one up to buy but after a few moments decided that a fork would be an adequate substitute and put it back. Then the other day, I saw a video of a neat little gadget. You put a raw egg in it, close it, and then open it and the two halves of the egg separate cleanly, with no bits of shell or a broken yolk. But did I really need it? I usually crack an egg on a sharp edge of a skillet or a bowl and most of the time it separates just fine but occasionally there will be bits of shell or the yolk breaks. But I figured that the occasional mishap did not warrant getting such a specialized gadget. But clearly there is a market for such items. Because of my attitude, although my apartment complex provides additional storage space, I have not used it at all.
This high level of buying has the predictable result that people’s homes start to become full of stuff. Sometimes their homes become so crammed, even if they are not technically hoarders, that they can barely move and they need to find places to move stuff into. The first choice is the basement if they have one but not all parts of the country allow for them due to the local geology. The next obvious choice is the garage and people are using them for storage a lot.
A 2022 survey by the Craftsman tool division of Stanley Black & Decker found that more than a third of the country’s residential garages were so full of overflow possessions that their owners were unable to park cars in them.
Many people I know personally have fallen into this situation, where their garages are now just storage rooms. Even those who live in parts of the country that experience a lot of snow do this, though it means that frequently they have to start their days in winter by cleaning the snow that has blanketed their cars overnight, which is a tedious chore.
This ever-increasing amount of stuff has resulted in the booming business of storage facilities where one can rent out spaces of various sizes to keep your excess stuff. It should not be surprising that the US has 90% of such facilities, some of them sprawling over huge areas of land like the warehouses called fulfillment centers by businesses like Amazon. These places can now be seen everywhere and there is one just down the street from where I live. It turns out to be a profitable and relatively trouble-free way of being a landlord since the building are usually bare-bones and low-maintenance and you do not have to deal with annoying tenants.
Units range from closet-size to cavernous, including spaces that are large enough to hold entire houses. Most of the facilities I saw on my road trip were single-story structures with lots of closely spaced roll-up metal doors; some, owned or operated by national chains such as Public Storage, Extra Space Storage, and CubeSmart, looked like office buildings. According to the co-founder and C.E.O. of Neighbor, an industry marketplace that works like Airbnb, there are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined. Annual revenues are estimated to be more than forty billion dollars.
People in the business say that people who rent out storage spaces are driven by the four Ds: death, displacement, divorce, and downsizing. To which the author of the piece adds another D: the delusion of some people that their children might want the stuff after they die. But younger people nowadays are unlikely to fancy the old stuff of their parents and this trend might be the signal that the boom times for the storage industry may be coming to an end. The article quotes a former owner of such a facility who sold it in 2017, saying, “I’m not that smart, but I listen to my grandkids… And they don’t give a shit about hanging on to stuff.”
It turns out that people who rent storage units ‘temporarily’ often end up keeping them on for no good reason other than inertia.
My wife and I have a friend whose mother died in 2006. She and her siblings decided to sell their mother’s furniture and donate the proceeds to a charity that she would have approved of. “We put everything in storage temporarily, and it’s all still there,” our friend told me. She figures that they’ve spent at least fifty thousand dollars in rental fees so far—more than they could get from selling the furniture.
But at least they are paying the rent so the owners do not care. More problematic are those people who rent a space with no intention of paying the rent but merely in order to get rid of stuff that would be too expensive to dispose of otherwise, and then are never heard of again. Typically, when someone rents out such a space, they get to put their own lock on it so that only they have access to it and the owner cannot get into. If the renter defaults on the rent, the owner can overlock the door so that the renter cannot get into it without paying the arrears. If after some time it looks like they have abandoned the property, the owner can break their lock and auction off the contents. Such auctions have even spawned a TV show “Storage Wars,” that is now in its 18th season. People have to bid for the entire lot and can only view the contents of the unit from outside and cannot go in and see in any detail what they might be getting. Why anyone would buy the contents of someone else’s storage unit beats the hell out of me unless they have some inside knowledge of what it might contain. Or perhaps it is the excitement of hoping that one might stumble across something valuable.
As I said earlier, some people just enjoy buying things.
The prospect of having to run if things get insupportably bad in the United States has forced me to look at all of my stuff and realize that most of it is stuff I’d never try to take with me.
My car has not seen the interior of my garage in years. I wish I could take the high ground and say it’s all my wife’s fault.
Crack your eggs on a flat surface, not a sharp edge. Much less likely to get small bits of eggshell in your bowl.
This reminds me of an argument with my spouse. Our fridge is full -- My solution is to not buy stuff in advance and buy when we need , her solution is to buy an additional fridge (in the garage! -- All the folks with a costco membership favor this)
I also have the same problem with spices and dals. I have so many of the rarely used stuff that i bought just to try out a new recipe.
I expect the next innovation will be an option to have stuff you’ve bought delivered directly into storage… Straight from their warehouse to yours.
There are already “fake shopping” sites, where you can pretend to buy imaginary stuff.
Yes, and no. I have a number of whisks, which I use regularly for a number of tasks. Today I made spaetzle, and I needed a balloon whisk to mix the ingredients into the paste. However, I also have a specialized spaetzle tool, which I haven’t used for years as I’ve found that loading the mix onto a flat grater and then forcing it through the grater holes with a silicone spatula into the boiling water works better than the specialized spaetzle maker. It cleans up better too. I need to get rid of the specialized tool.
As for scrambled eggs, at least fifteen minutes of whisking is necessary to get really fluffy scrambled eggs. If you have half-an-hour to whisk you can get about as good as you can get. A blender is too fast, it has to be hand-whisked. No milk, no butter, just egg mixed with air and cooked. Heavenly. And time consuming. You can’t do it as well with a fork, but sometimes I don’t bother and just use the spatula in the pan to mix everything up.
My wife and I are somewhere in the middle. I feel that if you are keeping things in collection of random cardboard boxes in storage, either in the basement or a garage or even in a storage unit, you might as well get rid of it. However, if the boxes are easily accessible and well-labeled, I don’t mind holding onto them. The books in our basement are organized by category, there is a bin of computer programming texts, another bin of history books, a bin of religious commentary, etc. If I’m looking for a book which isn’t on our shelves I can go to the bin it is likely to be found in. Similarly, we have a couple bins of knitting patterns, a bin of used denim blue-jeans, a bin of throw rugs, and a bin of curtains. As we find we are not using these items for years we start getting rid of them. My wife takes a slightly more chaotic approach and cleans by shoving everything into a box and hiding it in a closet. Then, over the course of a year or so, I empty the boxes and organize the contents into bins which will then to easy to either give stuff away, throw away, or keep around until we die and our son has to throw it all away. It will be well organized for him to throw away though, and that gives me a small feeling of pleasure.
But, to be honest, we could get on with a lot less than we have. My collection of RPGs from the 1980’s probably could be sold on ebay without us missing them. Our collection of laptops from the last 30 years (all in the appropriate bin so I we can find them easily) should also be destroyed properly rather than mouldering in the basement. As I’m digitizing all our music, from the family’s collection of 1920’s 78’s through cheap cassette tapes from the 1980’s, the originals are ending up in the basement, but there may be some historical collector which would enjoy them for the physical characteristics more than just the content, which is what I’m interested in. But we’ll probably keep most of the books and the artwork. They still bring us joy.
It’s always worth keeping something which brings you joy.
flex @#6,
You have a collection of RPGs? Why would you need any rocket-propelled grenades at all?
Moving overseas is a great help in breaking that hoarding instinct. I have moved many more times than I ever thought I would. Both our cars get parked in the garage, which was true before I moved as well, but the current garage is much smaller. The last time I moved, I ditched my remaining CD collection; thanks Spotify. I am now down to a single bookshelf, and all the books I can’t bear to abandon fit on the top three shelves. My RPG*s are on the bottom shelf.
*no explanation despite Mano’s joke; those unfamiliar with the acronym are unlikely to care, and the insatiably curious can look it up on the information superhighway. 🙂
Over the years I used to accumulate so much stuff, that I had to rent storage. The only disaster with doing that was my once having to downsize after a major life changing event. Due to the amount of stuff (or junk as George Carlin would put it) I had in the unit, I lost track of where I had placed my most cherished mementos. Taking what I thought was the correct box -- it wasn’t -- and discarding everything else, I forever lost what really emotionally mattered to me. It was a bitter lesson.
Nowadays, I try to concentrate on only keeping whatever really has essential significance. Items still build up, but from time to time, I try to cull what little collects.
😉
The 78s could be worth quite a lot -- they don’t survive particularly well and collectors tend to have deep pockets. A lot of historically significant early recordings have been completely lost as far as anyone knows, so it’s even possible that you have the last surviving copy of something somebody has been searching for for decades.
I’m still a big fan of physical media -- I don’t trust streaming services to either stick around indefinitely, to keep the stuff I actually want (or even stuff I’ve already paid for) available, or to not enshittify their services to the point of unusability. I have a Deezer subscription for convenience and for access to stuff I don’t already own on physical media, but you’ll pry my record collection (and the hardware needed to play it) from my cold dead hands, and the same goes for ink-on-paper books. CDs I’m less attached to, as I’m not convinced of their long term durability, and the playback chain is harder to maintain independently…
Off-topic
I just wanted to tell you that ‘Clavicular’ is in trouble for allegedly SA a child. Weird, because looksmaxing by breaking your bones is so normal. Now back to the topic.
Visiting the hoarder in my family serves as a periodic reminder to me to keep my own disorganisation issues in check because I can see how one leads to the other.
From my latest visit: being unable to sit on a kitchen chair because it had a full box on it, a full box under it, and none of it could move anywhere because the available floor space had… you guessed it.
Those who know hoarders will already know that my offer to help (with just one box, and prompted by their own complaint that it was in the way) caused the hoarder actual distress. But not as much as it caused me. Their house has four bedrooms, and not quite 1.5 remain useable.
I’m off to find more about the fake shopping sites that Dunc mentioned, though I fear they are no match for the power of the torrent of ‘special offers’ and ‘deals” which flood through their phone every hour of every day.
#5 Dunc
“There are already “fake shopping” sites, where you can pretend to buy imaginary stuff.”
I don’t know what you are trying to say with this. Is it some sort of web game?
___
#7 Mano
I believe flex means role-playing games, e.g. Dungeons and Dragons, which have sometimes quite bulky rulebooks. And file thirteen, I am not so sure he is joking 🙂
Holms @#13,
I was joking, sort of. The only meaning I knew for RPG was rocket-propelled grenade, I was certain that flex could not mean that and so that there must be some other less lethal meaning. I have since looked it up.
I’m secretly collecting and hoarding rocket-propelled grenades just in case the Y2K bug, which has been hiding all this time, collapses civilization as we know it.
Jest kidding…
Dunc @10 wrote,
I’ve heard that, and they are in pretty decent shape. At least the ones I can find. Unfortunately, my father, who is now losing his memory, loved to build ambitories when redecorating a room. There are secret panels, hidden recesses, and sliding woodwork all over their house. I think I know where most of them are, and I know a good number of the 78’s are hidden beneath a moveable floorboard in an upstairs closet. But I have no idea if that is where all of them are. My sister and I are starting to clean out their house while they are still alive, but I have no confidence that we’ll find everything.
I did finally find a book I’ve been looking for. Granville Squire’s 1933 text, Secret Hiding-Places -- The Origins, Histories and Descriptions of English Secret Hiding-Places used by Priests, Cavaliers, Jacobites & Smugglers. I knew it existed from reading other books, but I didn’t have the complete title and author’s name. There was a footnote in a John Dickson Carr mystery which put me on the right path, and I found a copy for sale at a used bookstore in Ireland. It may be handy to find the hidden panels, but even if it isn’t it should be a good read. I don’t think my library will be particularly valuable when I die, but it will be eclectic.
@Holms: not really a game, no… More of a simulator. The idea is that people who are craving the experience of buying stuff online can browse catalogues of products, go through the purchase process, and even track an imaginary delivery, all without actually spending any money or purchasing anything.
These Fake Online Stores Are Letting People Shop Without Spending Money. Here’s Why.
I moved and used the opportunity to declutter my own stuff and objects from three generations. I found it hard to get rid of old tools, the other stuff was surprisingly easy to sell/throw/give away.
With my tools and crafting materials, this blog post really helped me to sort and decide what to keep.
https://scottlawsonbc.com/post/dot-system
I can recommend the system!