I don’t want to come off as all holier-than-thou, and probably will, but here goes.
My girlfriend moved in with me about a year ago and, in the process, we cleaned out a lot of ‘stuff’. Personal stuff, kitchen stuff, knick-knack stuff, furniture stuff, memento stuff, clothes stuff ... just all the stuff that you accumulate as you move through life. (We’re both ~40.)
Since then, we’ve been very careful not to accumulate more stuff. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we deliberate over a new kitchen utensil. We don’t buy anything unnecessary.
It’s amazing. Our home is amazing. We live in a mid-sized apartment but it feels spacious because it’s not full of stuff. Life is simpler. There’s less to clean. What there is to clean is easier because—you guessed it—it’s not covered in stuff.
Buy less stuff. Throw most of your stuff away. You almost certainly don’t need it.
For general household stuff, my go to store is manufactum.com
They only offer very few things, but the things they have are very high quality. If you buy something from Manufactum, you know it'll last for the rest of your life.
The stuff there is of course outrageously expensive compared to the plastic crap from Amazon, but for me that means I really think about the purchase. Do we really need two of those metal baskets for the shower that hold your shampoo bottles? Not if it costs 100€.
For tools, there's dictum.com, which follows a similar philosophy. They don't offer a million choices; they make a very deliberate choice which products they sell, so you don't have to make the choice. You can rely that something you order from them is a good choice.
My problem with sites like manufactum is that I have the feeling that I get exactly the same stuff as I would get from somewhere else but with an insane price markup. I can either buy a random organic cotton shirt for thirty Euros, or I can buy an organic cotton shirt from manufactum and pay four times as much. What's the extra value I get?
Oh thanks for those, the problem with a lot of the online retailers I frequent is that there's just too much stuff on there, and it's really hard to discern quality from churn; filtering by price is useless because retailers will just play with prices, filtering by reviews is also useless because people are just as likely to give a cheap product 5 stars than their expensive counterpart. It's also hard to just discover quality products you never thought about getting in the first place (like a good pen + case as I've seen on there).
and don't forget ebay....which probably beats most everyone's prices by far. If you don't mind the extra few days waiting for shipping then that is by far your best bet. Also if you aren't afraid of buying second hand then going to your local thrift shop will give you by far the biggest bang for your buck, especially for clothing.
US users might find Lehman's to be a helpful/similar resource. Their product selection skews towards old-timey/simpler life/non-electric stuff. They are located in a part of Ohio that has a large Amish population, which does explain that a bit.
> If you buy something from Manufactum, you know it'll last for the rest of your life.
That sounds like the opposite of how I want to shop. I don't want to have to think really hard about which trivial household item I want to spend the rest of my life with. I'd rather pick a random cheap one and then not feel too bad about replacing it, if necessary.
One of the frustrations of raising young children in the USA is the monthly ritual of birthday parties where everyone takes turns being the recipient of two cubic yards of "stuff". The gifts are almost invariably plastic junk from China via Walmart or Amazon. They hold my children's attention for about a week and then spend the rest of their lifetime occupying space in my house or in a landfill.
I absolutely hate this. Why can't we stop doing it? I look around and it's like no one sees the futility and stupidity of it. The social manipulation is so effective and complete that there's not even a single thought of the consequences of all this waste to the environment or even our own lives.
Recently, everything is covered in this pernicious glitter that rubs off when you touch it and leaves a trail of microplastic pollution everywhere it goes.
It's not hyperbolic to say that I put on a stoic face but inside I am on my knees begging for us to wake up and stop the madness.
Here in Ireland we got around this by providing a small sum of money (agreed by parents) in a card in lieu of cheap presents. That way the child gets to put the money towards savings, or a great present like a computer game.
We started giving a book or two with 2 - 3 chocolates on top. Even if the kid reads it in a week, they can then bring it to the used book store to trade it in for a different book.
We do a book exchange where everyone brings a wrapped book and each kid takes one when they leave. Generally we bring a few backup books for the guests who accidentally brought a regular gift. It’s worked out well so far.
Similarly it's the same feeling I have towards cards. Birthday cards, get-well cards, mother/father day cards, valentine cards. All thrown out in a matter of days if not the same day, yet the older generations still think they are important to get piece of card often with a generic salutation. To reject this tradition is akin to aversion of showing good will. There needs to be a acceptable token of appreciation that's not thrown away.
"The internet-shopping boom has spawned an excess-stuff economy, in which retailers such as Overstock.com buy up extra product from full-price retailers."
It was a problem _before_ internet shopping.
The article focuses on America, but it's a problem all over (obviously). For example, online shopping is so bad in mainland China, that people don't even trust major retailer stores on Taobao or Tianmao. It might be fake (at least, in their eyes).
That said, it's striking how much stuff there is. Walking around outside, you're kind of sheltered from it, but go into any market, mall, or shopping district and just... stand there and look.
There's so much _stuff_ that it's insane. How do these stores stay in business? Why is there so much crap all over the shelves?
Speaking as one person, I don't buy much. And I understand that these stores need to be able to potentially sell to a lot of people, but is there really a need for this much?
Yeah, I eye rolled at that quote. My dad worked in lower Manhattan when I was growing up. There were at least three different job-lot, odd-lot chains that he’d get us weird or overstock items from at lunchtime.
The reason why that stuff so abundant in China is because that’s where it’s made. In 1970s/80s, when my dad was picking up deals at lunch, New York was a declining industrial powerhouse. Toys and clothes and 10000 other things were made in NYC. My little league uniform was made 20 blocks away in Astoria. (My mom kept it, and my son is wearing the pants 30 years later!) Ball caps were made in Buffalo, etc.
Now, we export cash, and that’s what you find collecting in US cities.
Insane indeed. As someone who lives in the bush, the craziness of it all smacks me in the face when I make city trips. It's a prime example of the boiling frog syndrome - generations have become insensible to physical reality. As waves of consequent ecological catastrophes wash over our 'civilisation', violence will inevitably ensue: citizens against governments, governments against citizens, communities against communities, all against all.
Some will ask whether it was all worth it for temporary abundances of cheap plastic crap. Most will just be helplessly enveloped.
This is one of the fascinating things (in my mind) in economics. Not everyone can contribute directly to the production of our most basic needs; those who don't must convince the productive members that they have a good worth spending money on. It might actually be worthless, but what else will those productive people do with their excess cash? Once they have met their basic needs, boredom sets in. So they buy garbage to pass the time.
That's a simplification, sure, but there's truth to it. I think the populace is comfortable with this model because they prefer to have people do pointless work for their money rather than just get a handout.
I agree. This has been a problem for decades. The only difference now is that it's much more obvious since we now have a more complete, centralized catalog of all the stuff that exists.
Of course, I could get on my intellectual high horse and talk about things like chaos theory and market complexity and the value of redundancy and competition. But I won't do that because I completely understand where this article is coming from on a human level.
Internet shopping is a reaction to a lack of free time by an overworked population. Not this cause of all evil capitalism the retailers would like us to believe.
I find online shopping far more frustrating than in-person because there's seemingly no minimum standard, or at least if there is, I'm not attuned to it.
There's just too much absolute codswallop out there. Amazon and eBay are the pound shop/dollar store for low value items.
I can go to a supermarket and buy an economy brand tin of beans and it's going to be.. a tin of beans. It might, if I'm not careful and don't check, have added salt or sugar or something.
By contrast if I go and buy a low value item on Amazon like, say, a USB cable, 3.5mm cable, whatever, there's a really good probability of it being utter bollocks. Either broken in some way or just terrible to begin with.
I really, really wish this sort of thing could somehow be eliminated. Reviews don't cut it because even if they're not fake, I don't want to read reviews. I want your store to not sell dogshit items.
That's what name brands are for. Buy Anker or Apple or Samsung or Sony or Panasonic or whatever and you won't get crap.
It's not difficult to buy name brands.
"But name brand is charging $20 and generic is $8"
Yes, that's the price of wanting to avoid reading reviews.
"But there are counterfeits"
You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback. Just look if it's at least 95% and over say 100 feedback. Yes, some sellers that meet that will sell counterfeits and it's possible that commingling will mean it's a different seller's unit that gets sent but those are rare.
That's a false equivalency. The USB cables I buy in random shops off the street are usually much worse, and more expensive, than any I've gotten from Amazon. And I'd wager that if you got a can of beans on Amazon it would taste perfectly fine. Maybe there is lower quality on Amazon, but comparing such different products is essentially meaningless.
It would be nice if there was a website like Amazon, but that had some sort of editorially vetted product line. I just want a cheese grater that works well and isn't counterfeit. I'm willing to pay a few dollars more for the work that goes into verifying the products. It really seems like there would be a market opportunity here...
The solution that I would like to see is for online stores to add the ability to refine your search by what you DON'T want. For example, when looking for a game on Steam it would be helpful to exclude features that are deal breakers for me (e.g. permadeath). Or on Amazon it would be useful to be able to exclude Chinese brands.
I don't know how it would be implemented, but it would also be useful to be able to see what the "standard" and "entry level" products in a given category is. For example, I might be looking for a piece of equipment for a hobby that I am trying out and I want to know "what is the cheapest thing that isn't a shoddy knockoff". Or when I'm looking for a tool I'm often looking one that "I may replace it with a more expensive version when I become an expert, but I would never HAVE to replace it in order to progress".
Want less stuff cluttering people’s lives? Divorce them from having to ensure their basic survival and self worth in a zero sum economy. I genuinely think if people didn’t have to sell the largest, most productive parts of their lives to someone else they would focus more on social connections instead of social status. It feels pretty humbling to spend almost all of your day doing something you otherwise would never do, perhaps hate doing, only to be passed by a car worth more money than you’re likely to earn in your entire life summed altogether. But if I spent my day doing things I love doing, and would gladly do them over and over every day, I just might see that same car and not internalize it.
How is ability to choose a bad thing?
I disagree with your statement about economy: it's not zero sum economy. Everyone's quality of life is getting better as economy grows, if it was zero sum - you earning money would mean somebody losing it. Even basic survival requires smaller part of income, while more comfort will take a bigger cut (better house, better bed, better food and etc.). There is housing that's getting more expensive, but it still is affordable outside of big cities reach
I think they would focus less on wealth as a driver of social status, but they'd definitely still focus on social status. Instead it would be based around what hobbies you had, how important your volunteer work is etc...
Every now and then in the grocery store, a thought comes up: this is an exceptional circumstance. I can walk in here and grab as much nutrient content as I can hold, for only a couple hours of labor?
That situation is something that only appears for brief flashes in the natural world: when the ecosystem is tremendously off balance and some organism manages to capture the difference.
I've been daydreaming about a new sort of consumer's union to address this, among other problems (designed obsolescence, meaningless redesign cycles that make an existing product more cheaply--but not cheaper, astroturfed reviews, etc.)
The part I'm not so sure about is how to prevent infiltration/compromise/hostile takeover. I think I would prefer it to not exist than to make something useful and principled only to see it turned into a trojan horse.
It seems like a problem that's related to wages and consumption.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, there was just less stuff to be had. My family (8 kids, 2 parents) had one car for a long time. Today, it seems every high school kid has a car.
The same is true of other things. Bicycles, furniture, house size, etc. There is just more stuff today. A lot of it comes from lowest-cost retailers.
A visit to a GoodWill or Salvation Army outlet shows lots of product for very low prices. I don't remember it being this way in past years.
I'm not saying it's bad-- today's poor people seem to have more basic stuff than yesterday's-- but it is different.
I feel like the manufacturing complex just got a lot more efficient at making pretty much everything, so the costs are down a lot in relative terms. It's probably mainly due to offshoring and automation.
Coincidentally I feel that burglaries got a lot less frequent. It's almost as if the flow of value reversed - burglars don't want any of our crap, and the equivalent to a burglary today would be dumping a truckload of stuff in someone's house.
The price of stuff is just so cheap now. I can go out and buy just about any luxury item I want while hardly thinking about the price but it would take me a decade to buy a house if I spent $0 each year.
It is particularly sad when you realise that all this stuff drives climate change. While not necessarily making anyone happier. And then people advocate to expand nuclear power so we can produce even more stuff.
Finding out what thing meets the criteria is sometimes hard.
I wanted to buy a set of nail clippers the other day. I wanted a nicer set than the last one I had, which had slowly loosened up while I used them which led to me twisting and ripping my nail a few times. There is also this feeling that there might be better designed products than the cheap $3 ones you buy at CVS. So many basic products have been improved recently (or perhaps we just have greater access to better products that always existed before), at least in my opinion, that I thought there might be some overall better option.
Well, there are options on Amazon, as you will see, but it is very difficult to tell which is better. The reviews are a disaster. Many fake reviews, many products with multiple distinct and unrelated products under the same listing. Even when I found some that I thought seemed good, I would find a review saying that the machining was off with a picture of the front of the clipper misaligned, which caused their nails to be bent instead of cut... etc.
It was not clear at all, even ignoring price, which was the best option.
Sometimes I feel like life has gotten too cluttered. And I imagine that if I got rid of a lot of my stuff my life would feel less cluttered as well. But honestly I don't think getting rid of a bunch of random stuff in my apartment will make life feel less cluttered. I think figuring out how to slow down, spend more time away from my phone, in nature, and with close friends and family would have a much larger impact.
>The human brain can’t contend with the vastness of online shopping
This doesn't matter much since our brains can not contend with the vastness of the universe, existence, life and death and many many other things anyways
[+] [-] jen729w|6 years ago|reply
My girlfriend moved in with me about a year ago and, in the process, we cleaned out a lot of ‘stuff’. Personal stuff, kitchen stuff, knick-knack stuff, furniture stuff, memento stuff, clothes stuff ... just all the stuff that you accumulate as you move through life. (We’re both ~40.)
Since then, we’ve been very careful not to accumulate more stuff. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we deliberate over a new kitchen utensil. We don’t buy anything unnecessary.
It’s amazing. Our home is amazing. We live in a mid-sized apartment but it feels spacious because it’s not full of stuff. Life is simpler. There’s less to clean. What there is to clean is easier because—you guessed it—it’s not covered in stuff.
Buy less stuff. Throw most of your stuff away. You almost certainly don’t need it.
[+] [-] jakobegger|6 years ago|reply
For general household stuff, my go to store is manufactum.com
They only offer very few things, but the things they have are very high quality. If you buy something from Manufactum, you know it'll last for the rest of your life.
The stuff there is of course outrageously expensive compared to the plastic crap from Amazon, but for me that means I really think about the purchase. Do we really need two of those metal baskets for the shower that hold your shampoo bottles? Not if it costs 100€.
For tools, there's dictum.com, which follows a similar philosophy. They don't offer a million choices; they make a very deliberate choice which products they sell, so you don't have to make the choice. You can rely that something you order from them is a good choice.
[+] [-] adrianN|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymous5133|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mauvehaus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshvm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gridlockd|6 years ago|reply
That sounds like the opposite of how I want to shop. I don't want to have to think really hard about which trivial household item I want to spend the rest of my life with. I'd rather pick a random cheap one and then not feel too bad about replacing it, if necessary.
[+] [-] deadbunny|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs02rm0|6 years ago|reply
That just means there's even more choice!
https://xkcd.com/927/
[+] [-] corey_moncure|6 years ago|reply
I absolutely hate this. Why can't we stop doing it? I look around and it's like no one sees the futility and stupidity of it. The social manipulation is so effective and complete that there's not even a single thought of the consequences of all this waste to the environment or even our own lives.
Recently, everything is covered in this pernicious glitter that rubs off when you touch it and leaves a trail of microplastic pollution everywhere it goes.
It's not hyperbolic to say that I put on a stoic face but inside I am on my knees begging for us to wake up and stop the madness.
[+] [-] GEBBL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jriot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antiterra|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newsgremlin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] torgian|6 years ago|reply
It was a problem _before_ internet shopping.
The article focuses on America, but it's a problem all over (obviously). For example, online shopping is so bad in mainland China, that people don't even trust major retailer stores on Taobao or Tianmao. It might be fake (at least, in their eyes).
That said, it's striking how much stuff there is. Walking around outside, you're kind of sheltered from it, but go into any market, mall, or shopping district and just... stand there and look.
There's so much _stuff_ that it's insane. How do these stores stay in business? Why is there so much crap all over the shelves?
Speaking as one person, I don't buy much. And I understand that these stores need to be able to potentially sell to a lot of people, but is there really a need for this much?
[+] [-] Spooky23|6 years ago|reply
The reason why that stuff so abundant in China is because that’s where it’s made. In 1970s/80s, when my dad was picking up deals at lunch, New York was a declining industrial powerhouse. Toys and clothes and 10000 other things were made in NYC. My little league uniform was made 20 blocks away in Astoria. (My mom kept it, and my son is wearing the pants 30 years later!) Ball caps were made in Buffalo, etc.
Now, we export cash, and that’s what you find collecting in US cities.
[+] [-] crispinb|6 years ago|reply
Some will ask whether it was all worth it for temporary abundances of cheap plastic crap. Most will just be helplessly enveloped.
[+] [-] SantalBlush|6 years ago|reply
That's a simplification, sure, but there's truth to it. I think the populace is comfortable with this model because they prefer to have people do pointless work for their money rather than just get a handout.
[+] [-] Lowkeyloki|6 years ago|reply
Of course, I could get on my intellectual high horse and talk about things like chaos theory and market complexity and the value of redundancy and competition. But I won't do that because I completely understand where this article is coming from on a human level.
[+] [-] jklinger410|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esotericn|6 years ago|reply
There's just too much absolute codswallop out there. Amazon and eBay are the pound shop/dollar store for low value items.
I can go to a supermarket and buy an economy brand tin of beans and it's going to be.. a tin of beans. It might, if I'm not careful and don't check, have added salt or sugar or something.
By contrast if I go and buy a low value item on Amazon like, say, a USB cable, 3.5mm cable, whatever, there's a really good probability of it being utter bollocks. Either broken in some way or just terrible to begin with.
I really, really wish this sort of thing could somehow be eliminated. Reviews don't cut it because even if they're not fake, I don't want to read reviews. I want your store to not sell dogshit items.
[+] [-] ikeboy|6 years ago|reply
It's not difficult to buy name brands.
"But name brand is charging $20 and generic is $8"
Yes, that's the price of wanting to avoid reading reviews.
"But there are counterfeits"
You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback. Just look if it's at least 95% and over say 100 feedback. Yes, some sellers that meet that will sell counterfeits and it's possible that commingling will mean it's a different seller's unit that gets sent but those are rare.
[+] [-] noahmoss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xcelerate|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harimau777|6 years ago|reply
I don't know how it would be implemented, but it would also be useful to be able to see what the "standard" and "entry level" products in a given category is. For example, I might be looking for a piece of equipment for a hobby that I am trying out and I want to know "what is the cheapest thing that isn't a shoddy knockoff". Or when I'm looking for a tool I'm often looking one that "I may replace it with a more expensive version when I become an expert, but I would never HAVE to replace it in order to progress".
[+] [-] ianai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bakary|6 years ago|reply
Since there is such a huge gap between people who hold a lot of material status and the rest, why even play the game at all?
[+] [-] perceptronas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamesBarney|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dolores12|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rland|6 years ago|reply
That situation is something that only appears for brief flashes in the natural world: when the ecosystem is tremendously off balance and some organism manages to capture the difference.
[+] [-] abathur|6 years ago|reply
The part I'm not so sure about is how to prevent infiltration/compromise/hostile takeover. I think I would prefer it to not exist than to make something useful and principled only to see it turned into a trojan horse.
[+] [-] RickJWagner|6 years ago|reply
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, there was just less stuff to be had. My family (8 kids, 2 parents) had one car for a long time. Today, it seems every high school kid has a car.
The same is true of other things. Bicycles, furniture, house size, etc. There is just more stuff today. A lot of it comes from lowest-cost retailers.
A visit to a GoodWill or Salvation Army outlet shows lots of product for very low prices. I don't remember it being this way in past years.
I'm not saying it's bad-- today's poor people seem to have more basic stuff than yesterday's-- but it is different.
[+] [-] foobarian|6 years ago|reply
Coincidentally I feel that burglaries got a lot less frequent. It's almost as if the flow of value reversed - burglars don't want any of our crap, and the equivalent to a burglary today would be dumping a truckload of stuff in someone's house.
[+] [-] tty2300|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gridlockd|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
[+] [-] pdonis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|6 years ago|reply
You sort by price from low to high and buy the highest up thing on the page that meets whatever your criteria are.
If you are constantly buying the cheapest thing that meets your criteria sometimes you get burnt but that's very rare.
[+] [-] dual_basis|6 years ago|reply
I wanted to buy a set of nail clippers the other day. I wanted a nicer set than the last one I had, which had slowly loosened up while I used them which led to me twisting and ripping my nail a few times. There is also this feeling that there might be better designed products than the cheap $3 ones you buy at CVS. So many basic products have been improved recently (or perhaps we just have greater access to better products that always existed before), at least in my opinion, that I thought there might be some overall better option.
Well, there are options on Amazon, as you will see, but it is very difficult to tell which is better. The reviews are a disaster. Many fake reviews, many products with multiple distinct and unrelated products under the same listing. Even when I found some that I thought seemed good, I would find a review saying that the machining was off with a picture of the front of the clipper misaligned, which caused their nails to be bent instead of cut... etc.
It was not clear at all, even ignoring price, which was the best option.
[+] [-] noonespecial|6 years ago|reply
Recently not so much. Not a good sign.
[+] [-] temp99990|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] JamesBarney|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
You will never know unless you try.
[+] [-] anonymous5133|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mapcars|6 years ago|reply
This doesn't matter much since our brains can not contend with the vastness of the universe, existence, life and death and many many other things anyways