We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/08/online-shopping-and-accumulation-of-junk/567985/?single_page=true

by CraneWorm • 8 years ago

43 62 8 years ago

theatlantic.com

jhbadger2• 8 years ago

On one hand the Internet allows a (perhaps too) easy way to obtain physical goods, as the article mentions, but on the other hand it allows a way to avoid many physical goods that we had to purchase before. We can read books and magazines digitally and watch movies and listen to music without having physical media.

MiddleEndian• 8 years ago

The most offensive stuff I accumulate is paper received in the mail. Banks, insurance companies, and other self-important financial institutions will send junk that may contain relevant personal information, and as a consequence, I (and many others) have cabinets full of this uninteresting paperwork. At least if I order something I've made the decision to have it in my home. If I were to recreate a postal service in a new nation, I would make it request-only.

goalieca• 8 years ago

Shredding works great st disposal. You can even take a truckload to a professional service

paulie_a• 8 years ago

I personally want to pull a Seinfeld Kramer moment and opt out of mail entirely. I only check it once a week, then everything goes directly into the garbage. What a waste.

ryandrake2• 8 years ago

I have you beat: my mail goes directly to the trash. I keep a trash can under the mail slot in my garage and just let everything fall into it. Once a week, or when I have time or am curious, I pick through it and pull out anything that might be important.

amelius2• 8 years ago

There exist services which receive, scan, store and shred your paper mail.

gambiting4• 8 years ago

It might be different where you live, but over here(UK) bank statements/utility bills with your address on them are used as proof of address, so you really want those to be arriving at your own address, otherwise you can be completely screwed.

maxxEnt• 8 years ago

It should read: "100 million suckers have signed on to pay $119 a year for “free” two-day shipping instead of free 4-5 day shipping"

trentmb• 8 years ago

It should read "free" "two-day" shipping.

At some point, I was waiting a week for my Prime packages to arrive. So I cancelled my subscription.

Now I wait a week for my packages to arrive.

ntsplnkv2• 8 years ago

Amazon Prime has deteriorated similarly for me as well.

At first, 2 days, every time. It was great and extremely reliable.

Now? I'm lucky to get an estimated 2 day delivery. It's almost always 3 days. Why? They deliver it to the post office now, about a mile away. Half the time it gets there too late for the USPS truck to deliver it on that day. It is so frustrating.

Couple that with price increases, Twitch prime adding ads, counterfeit products, confusing product pages, fake reviews...Amazon is worse than ever.

frockington• 8 years ago

Anyone have experience canceling their subscription and then resubscribing? I know with SiriusXM I have to cancel each year to get better prices, maybe Amazon has a similar philosophy with speed of delivery

maxerickson• 8 years ago

They've been wooing me by sending my super saver packages in 2 days.

torgian• 8 years ago

Damn is it really that bad? I hate buying new shit. I spent a year thinking about replacing my head phones (5 year old Sennheisers) before getting a pair of Noise canceling AKGs. I have a 5 year old MacBook that I want to replace but don’t because it’s just fine for what I need.

Shit I spend most of my money on food.

criddell2• 8 years ago

Have you always been like that? When I was young, there was always more stuff that I wanted. Now as I approach 50, what I really want is more time to use the stuff that I bought.

plett• 8 years ago

I'm in the same boat as you.

I bought new earpads last week for my 15 year old pair of Sennheiser HD477 rather than buying a new set of headphones, and my primary laptop is an X230 from 2012.

unwind• 8 years ago

This boggled my mind:

The average American bought 7.4 pairs of shoes last year, up from 6.6 pairs in 2000.

I probably should buy shoes more often, that's easily 10 times more often than I do it. Perhaps that was the "wrong" conclusion from this article, though, oops.

LandR• 8 years ago

Same here. I've bough two pairs of shoes this year.

A pair of boots because my old boots finally fell apart and a pair of trainers / sneakers because I was going on holiday.

In general I try to minimise buying clothes. I hate the entire process.

CogitoCogito2• 8 years ago

I had your initial reaction as well since I personally use the same shoes continuously as long as possible (current every day pair is probably 14 months old and not slowing down), but then I realized that I have in fact gone through running shoes at a pace of 2-3 a year and I did also buy dress shoes this year (though I guess those will last many years to come).

Anyway it's a bit of blathering, but I generally consider myself as someone that does not buy very much stuff at all, but I still somehow managed 4-5 pairs in the last 12 months. Maybe I'm not as pure as I assume...

edit: Never mind upon reading the article more closely it's clear it isn't describing someone like me. I still take a long time to decide to buy things and even then I usually decide against it. Regardless of my shoe count this year, I definitely don't just buy random crap non-nonchalantly.

JoeAltmaier4• 8 years ago

Running shoes wear out in a hundred miles or so? So 2-3 pair a year is the expected value for some.

JoeAltmaier4• 8 years ago

I last bought shoes 3 years ago. About time to buy more I guess.

JoeAltmaier4• 8 years ago

No wait! Had a triple-niece-wedding year last year, bought some new dress shoes to go with the new suit. For the three weddings. One on a dairy farm in Switzerland near Zurich, one in Shenandoah National Park, one in Valencia Spain. Asked the Men's Store guy to help me choose shoes suitable for a dairy farm, a forest and a Catholic high church wedding in a Cathedral.

voltooid• 8 years ago

I don't think anyone needs 7 pairs of shoes a year. I have had the same three pairs of shoes (each for a different kind of weather) for the past 2 or so years. One of these pairs has been with me for close to 4 years. Buying 7 pairs a year seems so wasteful.

doombolt2• 8 years ago

This would depend heavily on weather. Not everybody is living in California. There are places when you need five different pairs of footwear just to survive a year. Some might last, some won't. Throw someting in to wear indoors.

criddell2• 8 years ago

Certain types of athletic shoes wear out long before they start to fall apart. Some people might replace their shoes to avoid injury or for performance reasons.

vorpalhex• 8 years ago

Hiking, which eats even quality shoes because sliding down a mountain side tends to pull apart rubber. These need to be able to go through creeks, slide down mountains, and still be comfortable to walk up to 20 miles in.

Martial arts, because mat shoes need to be soft enough to not injure a sparring partner, but still get used aggressively for hours every week.

Semi-formal shoes for work and going out.

Casual shoes for mowing the lawn in or other house work.

Flat-footed trainers for the gym, kept clean of any oil or other hazards (which is why they can't overlap with the lawn mowing shoes).

A pair of decent, well shined shoes for truly formal occasions (weddings, funerals).

Water shoes, for swimming in water holes and going tubing down the local river.

Note here that I don't run, which apparently truly eats shoes, and all of my shoes are high quality except my lawn mowing/house work shoes, because they're exposed to all sorts of crap like paint. These are just the shoes I've bought this year - my safety boots are still in decent condition, and it's likely my dress shoes will be last many more years.

loco5niner2• 8 years ago

It also depends on activity levels.

mmsimanga• 8 years ago

I don't have much interest in clothes or shoes but I do have too many DIY gadgets and an 18 month old Rasberry Pi still in its wrapping :-).

pjc504• 8 years ago

Needs gender breakdown and controlling for outliers: Imelda Marcos' 1000 pairs of shoes should not be counted, but most of the fancier ladies' formal shoes have very short lifetimes.

sevensor• 8 years ago

I would really like to buy fewer pairs of shoes. As I've been walking to work lately, I've worn out about two pairs a year. Seems unreasonable. I can only conclude that modern shoes were not designed to be walked in.

loco5niner2• 8 years ago

Some are designed to absorb the damage that your body would normally be absorbing. Others, are designed to be cheap for manufacturers. Either way...

kilo_bravo_3• 8 years ago

I initially thought that an "average american" may have included parents buying shoes for children, in which case 7 would seem less unreasonable, but the link says that children are included in the average.

Growing feet, play, sports, and back-to-school means that parents are buying shoes for kids every couple of months.

7.4 pairs of shoes per year seems absurd, but it may be a case of a less fortunate person not being able to afford the initial high cost of longer-lasting footwear (aka: The Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness)

https://www.thebillfold.com/2015/03/to-terry-pratchett-who-g...

Even though it comes from a fiction fantasy novel, I think there may be some truth to it. I have two pairs each (brown and black) of oxford shoes and Red Wing boots for work. I was able to afford really high quality shoes and have had the oxfords resoled three times in 11 years, with the boots being durable enough that they haven't yet needed new soles after five. I also have the time to spend a leisurely Sunday evening polishing them, to keep them in good shape.

I also don't care about wearing the same four pairs of shoes, one after another in a predictable cycle, all of the time.

Someone who can't afford USA-made leather boots and Italian-made Oxford dress shoes, and also lacks the time to care for them, may be stuck in a cycle where their cheaper footwear wears out quickly.

Even for sneakers, I pay a premium for USA-made New Balance sneakers, and they last an entire year after which I relegate them to lawn mower duty and replace them. They are old man shoes though, so their aesthetic may not be for everyone. If I ran, I would have to replace them more often-- my wife runs and she replaces her running shoes multiple times per year.

Then again, I don't have a job in the service industry where I'm standing the entire time and walking 10 miles every day so I may have unreasonable expectations about how long shoes should last.

So it could be socioeconomic unfairness, or it may be rampant consumerism, or it may be a combination of the two....

vfc1• 8 years ago

The internet has a solution for everything.

The same way there is 1-click online shopping to fill your house full of junk and toys our kids will never even use, there are also online services for companies that will come at your place and collect all the junk (you need to pay for that too).

They will empty your full basement if you want!

surya_• 8 years ago

Has Jeff Bezos been informed? If he doesn't own that company yet he must be loosing his edge.

The Jeff Bezos of Junk really needs to be Jeff Bezos.

pjc504• 8 years ago

The catch is: I would greatly prefer if my stuff was reused rather than simply landfilled, ideally I'd like a nonzero amount of money for it, and some of it would be of personal and emotional value if I could find it.

AnIdiotOnTheNet3• 8 years ago

If there is an Amazon for "take my junk and sell it for me, keeping a reasonable percentage" I'd really like to know about it. Craigslist is such a pain.

ryandrake2• 8 years ago

Unfortunately it’s the opposite. You generally have to pay people to take your junk. Raise your hand if you have that drawer (or closet) full of old RAM, hard drives and video cards that you’re going to one day sell on Craigslist for $5 each? Spoiler: you won’t. Nobody will buy any of that. You might as well just recycle or trash it.

I once took a picture of my computer parts/cables closet and put the entire contents for sale on Craigslist for $10. I got zero replies.

jhbadger2• 8 years ago

There actually is for some items (basically old cell phones, game consoles, and other items which have a large demand on the secondary market) in Amazon itself -- the Amazon "trade in" program -- which, granted, gives you payment in terms of Amazon gift certificates.

NeedMoreTea• 8 years ago

"as consumers demand cheaper clothing, electronics, and other goods, manufacturers are spending less to make them, which sometimes means they fall apart more quickly"

Oh if only it were that simple.

I find that even the premium and more expensive makes are being made just as cheaply meaning they don't last as long either. Or when a simple, and formerly replaceable, part fails it can't be replaced for reasonable cost.

Even the length of time spares are made available has shrunk dramatically, if available at all. No doubt as now manufacturers insist on constantly changing models for no reason other than visuals.

gaius• 8 years ago

I find that even the premium and more expensive makes are being made just as cheaply

I was looking for some new headphones recently, but reviews of even premium makes were pointing out quality flaws, flimsy manufacturing and so on and I guess now pretty much every pair of headphones in the world comes out of the same factory in Shenzhen and just gets a different brand sticker on it. So I bought a cheap pair by TaoTronics who I’d never heard of before and they’re great! Why would anyone pay 10x as much for basically the same thing?

hamilyon2• 8 years ago

This is literally one of very few ways capitalism can continue expanding.

Our per-capita production have long passed absolute minimum of things needed.

Now it is about convinience, but marginal gains are less and less.

For manufacturing to continue to increase, things have to rot after they had been paid for.

squozzer• 8 years ago

We should keep in mind that under the current system, goods are made before they are sold. Meaning that not buying so much now might have future benefits later, but at the price of throwing away unbought stuff.

And just-in-time manufacturing (e.g. 3D printers) looks awfully slow.

We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things

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