17 ms·

There Is Too Much Stuff

222 points by SQL2219 7y ago

torgian 7y ago
"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?
- Lowkeyloki 7y ago
  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.
- crispinb 7y ago
  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.
  - ip26 7y ago
    IMO it's the twin problems of the relatively high price of labor here, and the relatively low price of labor elsewhere. E.g., I don't want to accumulate a ton of stuff, but an entire pipe sweating kit that I might use once or twice a year costs less than one ten minute visit from a plumber. (multiply by every single other trade applied around the house)
    - jmb12686 7y ago
      As a homeowner, I completely relate to this. Every single task around the house requires "stuff" that you may or may not ever use again. That is of course unless you pay $100+ an hour for a contractor, and that's IF (and big if) they are even willing to show up for a small simplistic job. Many contractors worth their salt are only interested in larger jobs that are more profitable. Good luck finding someone to do handyman work.
      - mc32 7y ago
        It’s too bad tool-banks (communal or otherwise) aren’t too popular. One alternative (for seldom used things) is renting tools from home improvement centers/large hardware stores. Even auto parts stores have rentals or loaners for a deposit programs.
        marcosdumay 7y ago
        Tool renting is complex. Is the renter open at the time I need the tool? How long does it take to go there, get it, and come back? Many of the stuff I have is there just because I can't rent it when I have a bit of time to use it.
        twothamendment 7y ago
        It doesn't have to be complex to be useful. I had a small plumbing project, needed a pex crimper. My local plumbing store will loan it to you for free if you buy the parts there. There is no schedule, no set time to return it. If it is there, you can have it. If not, you can wait, they will call you when it comes in.
- SantalBlush 7y ago
  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.
  - perfunctory 7y ago
    > 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. I think it's actually much worth because it's the other way around. Productive members usually have to convince unproductive to spend money. http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-bankers/ http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-b...
- Spooky23 7y ago
  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.
  - swoongoonz 7y ago
    fuck when are you opening up tours in nyc? this is just fascinating for a west coaster that has no ties here
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      Lol, I’d make a poor guide. My grandpa knew seemingly everything. At his peak, he owned a few taverns with his brothers and seemed to know and get along with everyone.
      - angleofrepose 7y ago
        There are hilarious stories I've heard and read about the way that things used to be "built to last" something a while back about an small Irish village mailman who rode the same bike for decades without ever getting a flat. It was a book I think, can't remember the name though but that image stuck with me. I'm sure that nostalgia and the way stories work have a large part to play in that kind of reminiscents, but there's certainly something to it, and we don't have much of that something these days. I also don't buy much, and I've been rocking my few pair of jeans for years and will for years to come. But my old laptop frame is cracked in many places, my phone screen is cracked for the first time and has been a while now, just waiting for a wayward meeting with water now. To make it relevant to software, though I admit I haven't read the article, it just seems on topic for the forum and I like the conversations around here. Why are versions, or going out of date, or legacy systems such "a thing"? How did we not realize that the databases airlines used 40 years ago were just going to sit in place until something bad happens, and why is keeping them current or really just lubricated so hard? I have a bike I've been needing to do a little work on lately, just a few things all hitting end of life at around the same time, but it's been treating me well for years, and the fixing up process is simple and obvious. New chain and cassette, replace the cables, replace the break pads and tires. It's clear and obvious how I can take care of my thing, the people at my local bike shop are clear and honest with me and I don't have to take their word for it the first time, I know enough to check and confirm. Those guys are good guys, my bike is a good bike. I'm a good owner (mostly). It's a good happy system. I don't know my electronic stuff, I don't know my hardware and I don't know my OS and I don't know my software. I can't tell whether the guy at Fry's or Newegg is cheating me or not. I don't really get how displays have so many damn names and resolutions and surfaces. I mean I get it, but what is a "Retina Display" or a "butterfly keyboard". As if I was selling you a "Surefire chain". What the heck is a "surefire"? I want a bike chain. I know my computer very well, I fight it sometimes, and over the years I got to know it better. I really enjoy playing with tiling wms and xmodmap and I think there is a world of opportunity there (mostly because our modern pop culture doesn't care so much about input devices as PC innovators used to). But my phone? Man, I wish. It seems so clear to me that I can do so many magical handy things with my phone. I know the area, I've lived here for years, but it's a bigger city. Can you just get me to the freeway then turn off the nav? Not a chance. Ah I just accidentally swiped that notification or, what's this, my alarm did go off when I wanted but then it decided to stop and just let me know I overslept. Where are these software logic decisions being made? Can I prevent some action? How do I know what non-visual state changed and most importantly why!? Please give me a simple state dashboard, this is how the real world works. I can see why my sink is leaking or my shelf fell over. I can find why my feet are getting wet and the trash smells. Give me digital physics please so that I can see what is happening to me. Where are things logged? I have a GPS, can I use it? Can I have the best contouring route down this mountain? No it's not likely anyone has been here before or done this with a phone in hand, no I don't care the time prediction or reviews, I just want some lines on a map. I just have a quick question about literal figures my software systems have access to and I can see it, but no way for me to use this ui to get it without coding my own thing up. This is why I enjoy coding, because I can make it do what I want. But also screw that; hours of work for a simple connection between two things that I decided should be connected in an instance of use. I can't do this for everything, I know most things are extensible, but I don't have the energy or interest to figure them all out. I want my whole digital experience to be mine, I'll buy other people's pieces to put in, like I buy furniture for my house. But it's my house, not Google's or my local municipality's. I really enjoy woodwork, I'm not so skilled myself, but my friends are. So I want their stuff, or my simple stuff, or the local farmer's market stuff. I want a simple digital life. I want simple software. If I don't get to see all the latest events or robberies I'm ok with that. I'll find ways to incorporate my neighborhood at my own pace, and with those people directly in mind. I want it designed for me as an individual, not the way something like NextDoor (what's that apps name?) Is designed for what seems to be "The American Neighborhood", that's way too damn broad. I want my tools to work the way I want them to work. Well, long uncertain ramble. Thanks for reading, and I'm glad your kid is using your pants, I think that's hilarious and great. I love all my Dad's stuff, or even just stuff I get to use with him. My Grandad also can tell stories for endless hours, and it's become one of my favorite qualities in the friends I have, and one I love to share with the people around me. Cheers. (I wrote this on mobile, though I'm sure I'll get to cleaning this up in the next couple days, I apologise in advance for autocorrect and punctuation)
- jklinger410 7y ago
  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.
esotericn 7y ago
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.
- noahmoss 7y ago
  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.
  - llamataboot 7y ago
    A random "junk shop" perhaps, but I'm to the point where I'd much rather go down the street to Target and pick up some slightly higher priced piece of electronics because I know it is quality controlled, than wade through Amazon. If I'm shopping for a particular brand, okay Amazon, if it's just needing something in particular that's guaranteed to have hundreds of Chinese knockoffs with no way of differentiating between reviews (like a bike headlight, or LEDs, or a USB adapter), I go to a B&M that stocks those things.
    - jpindar 7y ago
      Or order it from Target.com?
  - esotericn 7y ago
abathur 7y ago
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.
- Misdicorl 7y ago
  I also have daydreamed about this on and off for the past couple years. In the end, it doesn't look much different from consumer reports, but with broader scope for both reviewed items and reviewers. Authentication is a hard problem, and I've not really hit on anything that seems feasible besides a paycheck.
  - abathur 7y ago
    Not unrelated to CR, but I'd like to take it further than they do. A more comprehensive effort to cobble together a purchasing block as leverage to encourage better behavior from producers, develop lists of design/production/marketing/sales/support practices that'll earn blacklisting, distribute the costs of trialing new products, hire experts for teardowns, etc.
- clydethefrog 7y ago
  In the Netherlands we have a consumer union (although wikipedia calls it a league) which quite some success. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.consumentenbond.nl%2Facties%2Fonze-successen%2Feen-trotse-terugblik https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
RickJWagner 7y ago
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.
- foobarian 7y ago
  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.
  - asark 7y ago
    > 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. There's a Chuck Palahniuk novel in there somewhere.
    - quickthrower2 7y ago
      It reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 where the fireman burn books (because there are no accidental fires anymore).
  - sbov 7y ago
    Dumpsters are relatively cheap. When we remodelled our house we got a 7 foot tall, 6 foot wide, 21 foot long dumpster for 2 weeks for just $370. You can fit a lot of junk in there.
  - 7y ago
noonespecial 7y ago
Amazon used to be my go to place precisely because they provided working tools to help me wade through that mountain of stuff. Recently not so much. Not a good sign.
- anonymous5133 7y ago
  Same here but now amazon has so many of these knockoff type Chinese products that you don't even know what to pick. Most of it ends up being of questionable quality as well.
ianai 7y ago
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.
- Bakary 7y ago
  If you value your freedom this strongly, then it's time to make bold choices regarding the rate at which you save money. 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?
  - djrobstep 7y ago
    Most people like not being homeless and not starving, I guess?
    - Bakary 7y ago
      This is a false dichotomy. I'm not advocating for living in the woods, but just taking a hard look at the choices you make everyday and how much actual utility and satisfaction you get from them. Are those expensive clothes and cars worth it to you? Maybe they are. But you have to compare them to the months or years of labor you could avoid if you saved that money instead, or perhaps even invested it. Perhaps our world is extremely proficient at generating insane amounts of envy, but that doesn't mean you are completely powerless to respond in a life-affirming way.
      - ianai 7y ago
        Ultimately your way asks people to change their innate behavior.
jen729w 7y ago
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.
- koyote 7y ago
  We went through a similar process after moving country (not worth the shipping costs so we simply sold 99% of our stuff) and felt the same. A year later we now have just as much stuff as we used to, maybe even more. No matter how hard you try, you will always end up accumulating new things, whether it's through gifts or because you need something in particular for a specific occasion (specialty screwdrivers for example). I think it's healthy to go through all (and I mean all) of your stuff at least once every two years and sell anything you have not used in a year or more.
  - anonymous5133 7y ago
    You can have a certain amount of stuff but don't let it get excessive. I used to have boxes and boxes full of items that weren't even organized. Like literally....I knew I had that one item...but good luck finding it in the mountain of boxes! If you are at that point then it is time to start reducing your items. The stuff you have needs to be neat and organized and not overly excessive.
  - JeanMarcS 7y ago
    A rule we apply at home: if you haven’t use it in the last six months, get rid of it.
- 7y ago
pdonis 7y ago
The thread title is misleading: the article is about consumers being presented with too many options, not about there being too much stuff.
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AgentME 7y ago
This paragraph mirrors something I'd been thinking for a while: >For a relatively new class of consumer-products start-ups, there’s another method entirely. Instead of making sense of a sea of existing stuff, these companies claim to disrupt stuff as Americans know it. Casper (mattresses), Glossier (makeup), Away (suitcases), and many others have sprouted up to offer consumers freedom from choice: The companies have a few aesthetically pleasing and supposedly highly functional options, usually at mid-range prices. They’re selling nice things, but maybe more importantly, they’re selling a confidence in those things, and an ability to opt out of the stuff rat race. I really value it when companies offer some simple differentiated product lines, and are confident enough in the products to recommend one. If you go to Apple.com wanting a computer and click "Mac" at the top, then the site breaks it down into only a couple categories. The page has big pictures of one of their flagship desktop options and of one of their flagship laptop options. You're probably not going wrong in picking one of them. Apple stands by them and updates them and those machines have their current recommended experience and software setup, though really that also goes for any of the other machines. The other laptop categories are mostly about how thin you want your laptop; the categories aren't perfect but it's not hard to imagine how to pick between them. Now go search for "dell laptops" or "lenovo laptops". You get pages leading to giant grids of laptops with no obvious categorization or ordering. -- Do I consider myself as looking for a "professional" laptop or a "home office" laptop? Do the "gaming" laptops have the best hardware, or do they just have the same hardware as the "professional" laptops with flimsier gamer-themed cases? Which models do they put the Superfish crap/malware on again? -- The part that really feels the strangest to me is that there's no flagship model. My eyes are glazing over looking at these grids. If I were in a store, this is the part where I'd tell the salesman that I'd love it if they could recommend me their standard new general model, and I'd hope they'd hand me a machine they were confident in. I feel like the Dell site isn't confident enough in any of the models to push it onto shoppers. It makes me want to run away back to Apple's site. Maybe my thinking is really influenced by my phone experience. Years ago, I used to have a certain popular but cheaper phone carrier. When I went to their site, they had a big grid of phones to choose from. I picked one of the ones near the top that wasn't the cheapest, that I think I remembered from some ad, and assumed it was one of their flagship choices. It was slow, didn't support certain features like tethering, was on an old Android version, and never got updates. I spent a long time wondering whether this was really the average customer experience of theirs, or did I just accidentally pick an old model that they hadn't gotten around to de-listing? Eventually I decided to switch phone services, and most phone carriers looked pretty much the same. A billion phone options, and also lots of plan options. Even if I'd heard good things about the company and they presumably had a good average customer experience, I was worried that I'd pick a wrong choice and have a worse experience. Then I found Google Project Fi, which just had one plan option, and heavily recommended the Pixel phone. I went with them and haven't regretted it. The Pixel has good hardware, but it also has regular Android on it, regular updates, and a lack of crapware. I'm sure there's other providers that offer good choices like that, but it feels like it would take some research and risk to figure out the non-risky "right choice" at a different provider.
raz32dust 7y ago
The article is not about stuff itself, but the issues caused by the amount of choice such variety offers and the inability of humans to cope with the choice. Choice and freedom certainly increases stress, but I'd take that any day over less choice or less freedom. What we need to ensure is that the choice we have is effective choice - e.g, the same company selling the same product with different names is just adding stress without any value. That is increasing choice in name but not effectively. Likewise, companies not properly listing what exactly makes their product different, apart from marketing buzzwords - this increases choice, but effectively the choices remain the same.
temp99990 7y ago
This is partially why I like shopping at Costco. Usually there is only one or at most a few of one thing, and usually it’s of good quality.
rland 7y ago
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.
rdm_blackhole 7y ago
I have already talked about it on another thread, but that is the reason why my wife and I shop at Aldi. Less choice, good prices and we can do our weekly grocery shopping in less than 20 minutes. I don't need 20 different kinds of hangers and 30 types of hot sauce. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't exist but simply that it is not a necessity for some people like us. The paradox of choice is a pretty powerful phenomenon.
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JamesBarney 7y ago
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.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  > But honestly I don't think getting rid of a bunch of random stuff in my apartment will make life feel less cluttered. You will never know unless you try.
- anonymous5133 7y ago
  It sounds more like you are just alone. In situations like that, yes it is important to go out and meet new people or family.
- b3n 7y ago
  The article has nothing to do with clutter, it is about choice paralysis.
jakobegger 7y ago
There are alternatives to Amazon! 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 7y ago
  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?
  - _petronius 7y ago
    At the very least, a price point that doesn’t externalize the real environmental cost of the item, perhaps?
    - kkarakk 7y ago
      Unless you're a "brain-washed hippy environmental activist", the markup definitely feels like a ripoff - which is the fundamental problem with any ethical shopping website. I'd gladly pay Amazon price + 5 dollars,any more and my ethics bow down to my trained budgeting
      - _petronius 7y ago
        Which probably accounts for a lot of people's behaviours, but the real cost of most products is going to be more like 100-500% markup, not a flat $5, especially once you get into cheap flights or items that have been shipped large distances. I'm not someone who believes that changes in individual consumer behaviour is going to keep up under 5 degrees of global warming, but if we don't start getting used to some of this, then there will never be the political will to enact the policies that will head off the worst of climate change.
perfunctory 7y ago
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.
- anonymous5133 7y ago
  Something like 70% of the us economy is entirely driven by consumer spending....the acquisition of more and more trinkets. If people reduced their consumption then the USA would immediately go into a recession. That would be a serious problem considering how many people live paycheck to paycheck with no savings at all.
  - perfunctory 7y ago
    You are absolutely right. It's tragic that the livelihoods of people actually depend on polluting the planet. We are gonna have to find a way to restructure our economy. Maybe we can draw inspiration from Bertrand Russell (http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html) and John Keynes (http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf)
- leadingthenet 7y ago
  That's absolutely not why people advocate nuclear energy...
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  That's not why we need nuclear energy. We need it for two things. One, it's very unrealistic to expect people to cut down on this stuff in meaningful amounts and short time (and if you tried to force them, a lot of blood would be shed and a lot of misery caused; we've covered that topic in other threads of the past few days, I saw you there ;)). Two, we kind of need clean energy for other things as well. Undoing the environmental damage, in particular, will be energy-intensive.
  - perfunctory 7y ago
gridlockd 7y ago
George Carlin on "Stuff": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  That is my favorite Carlin bit.
gridlockd 7y ago
I agree, there's too much stuff. In particular, there's far too much software. If you advocate against too much stuff, just don't forget that making someone's stuff is someone else's livelihood.
coldtea 7y ago
"Too much stuff" is the gift of death: https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/ https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/
harimau777 7y ago
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".
mapcars 7y ago
>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
return1 7y ago
In fact i think there is a startup opportunity there, because cleaning up / getting rid of stuff is work.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
This isn't even first world problems, this is just rich people problems. 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 7y ago
  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.
corey_moncure 7y ago
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.
- GEBBL 7y ago
  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.
- jriot 7y ago
  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.
- antiterra 7y ago
  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.
- newsgremlin 7y ago
  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.

222 points by SQL2219 7y ago

"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?

Lowkeyloki 7y ago
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.
crispinb 7y ago
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.
- ip26 7y ago
  IMO it's the twin problems of the relatively high price of labor here, and the relatively low price of labor elsewhere. E.g., I don't want to accumulate a ton of stuff, but an entire pipe sweating kit that I might use once or twice a year costs less than one ten minute visit from a plumber. (multiply by every single other trade applied around the house)
  - jmb12686 7y ago
    As a homeowner, I completely relate to this. Every single task around the house requires "stuff" that you may or may not ever use again. That is of course unless you pay $100+ an hour for a contractor, and that's IF (and big if) they are even willing to show up for a small simplistic job. Many contractors worth their salt are only interested in larger jobs that are more profitable. Good luck finding someone to do handyman work.
    - mc32 7y ago
      It’s too bad tool-banks (communal or otherwise) aren’t too popular. One alternative (for seldom used things) is renting tools from home improvement centers/large hardware stores. Even auto parts stores have rentals or loaners for a deposit programs.
      - marcosdumay 7y ago
        Tool renting is complex. Is the renter open at the time I need the tool? How long does it take to go there, get it, and come back? Many of the stuff I have is there just because I can't rent it when I have a bit of time to use it.
        twothamendment 7y ago
        It doesn't have to be complex to be useful. I had a small plumbing project, needed a pex crimper. My local plumbing store will loan it to you for free if you buy the parts there. There is no schedule, no set time to return it. If it is there, you can have it. If not, you can wait, they will call you when it comes in.
SantalBlush 7y ago
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.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  > 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. I think it's actually much worth because it's the other way around. Productive members usually have to convince unproductive to spend money. http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-bankers/ http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-b...
Spooky23 7y ago
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.
- swoongoonz 7y ago
  fuck when are you opening up tours in nyc? this is just fascinating for a west coaster that has no ties here
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Lol, I’d make a poor guide. My grandpa knew seemingly everything. At his peak, he owned a few taverns with his brothers and seemed to know and get along with everyone.
    - angleofrepose 7y ago
      There are hilarious stories I've heard and read about the way that things used to be "built to last" something a while back about an small Irish village mailman who rode the same bike for decades without ever getting a flat. It was a book I think, can't remember the name though but that image stuck with me. I'm sure that nostalgia and the way stories work have a large part to play in that kind of reminiscents, but there's certainly something to it, and we don't have much of that something these days. I also don't buy much, and I've been rocking my few pair of jeans for years and will for years to come. But my old laptop frame is cracked in many places, my phone screen is cracked for the first time and has been a while now, just waiting for a wayward meeting with water now. To make it relevant to software, though I admit I haven't read the article, it just seems on topic for the forum and I like the conversations around here. Why are versions, or going out of date, or legacy systems such "a thing"? How did we not realize that the databases airlines used 40 years ago were just going to sit in place until something bad happens, and why is keeping them current or really just lubricated so hard? I have a bike I've been needing to do a little work on lately, just a few things all hitting end of life at around the same time, but it's been treating me well for years, and the fixing up process is simple and obvious. New chain and cassette, replace the cables, replace the break pads and tires. It's clear and obvious how I can take care of my thing, the people at my local bike shop are clear and honest with me and I don't have to take their word for it the first time, I know enough to check and confirm. Those guys are good guys, my bike is a good bike. I'm a good owner (mostly). It's a good happy system. I don't know my electronic stuff, I don't know my hardware and I don't know my OS and I don't know my software. I can't tell whether the guy at Fry's or Newegg is cheating me or not. I don't really get how displays have so many damn names and resolutions and surfaces. I mean I get it, but what is a "Retina Display" or a "butterfly keyboard". As if I was selling you a "Surefire chain". What the heck is a "surefire"? I want a bike chain. I know my computer very well, I fight it sometimes, and over the years I got to know it better. I really enjoy playing with tiling wms and xmodmap and I think there is a world of opportunity there (mostly because our modern pop culture doesn't care so much about input devices as PC innovators used to). But my phone? Man, I wish. It seems so clear to me that I can do so many magical handy things with my phone. I know the area, I've lived here for years, but it's a bigger city. Can you just get me to the freeway then turn off the nav? Not a chance. Ah I just accidentally swiped that notification or, what's this, my alarm did go off when I wanted but then it decided to stop and just let me know I overslept. Where are these software logic decisions being made? Can I prevent some action? How do I know what non-visual state changed and most importantly why!? Please give me a simple state dashboard, this is how the real world works. I can see why my sink is leaking or my shelf fell over. I can find why my feet are getting wet and the trash smells. Give me digital physics please so that I can see what is happening to me. Where are things logged? I have a GPS, can I use it? Can I have the best contouring route down this mountain? No it's not likely anyone has been here before or done this with a phone in hand, no I don't care the time prediction or reviews, I just want some lines on a map. I just have a quick question about literal figures my software systems have access to and I can see it, but no way for me to use this ui to get it without coding my own thing up. This is why I enjoy coding, because I can make it do what I want. But also screw that; hours of work for a simple connection between two things that I decided should be connected in an instance of use. I can't do this for everything, I know most things are extensible, but I don't have the energy or interest to figure them all out. I want my whole digital experience to be mine, I'll buy other people's pieces to put in, like I buy furniture for my house. But it's my house, not Google's or my local municipality's. I really enjoy woodwork, I'm not so skilled myself, but my friends are. So I want their stuff, or my simple stuff, or the local farmer's market stuff. I want a simple digital life. I want simple software. If I don't get to see all the latest events or robberies I'm ok with that. I'll find ways to incorporate my neighborhood at my own pace, and with those people directly in mind. I want it designed for me as an individual, not the way something like NextDoor (what's that apps name?) Is designed for what seems to be "The American Neighborhood", that's way too damn broad. I want my tools to work the way I want them to work. Well, long uncertain ramble. Thanks for reading, and I'm glad your kid is using your pants, I think that's hilarious and great. I love all my Dad's stuff, or even just stuff I get to use with him. My Grandad also can tell stories for endless hours, and it's become one of my favorite qualities in the friends I have, and one I love to share with the people around me. Cheers. (I wrote this on mobile, though I'm sure I'll get to cleaning this up in the next couple days, I apologise in advance for autocorrect and punctuation)
jklinger410 7y ago
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.

esotericn 7y ago

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.

noahmoss 7y ago
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.
- llamataboot 7y ago
  A random "junk shop" perhaps, but I'm to the point where I'd much rather go down the street to Target and pick up some slightly higher priced piece of electronics because I know it is quality controlled, than wade through Amazon. If I'm shopping for a particular brand, okay Amazon, if it's just needing something in particular that's guaranteed to have hundreds of Chinese knockoffs with no way of differentiating between reviews (like a bike headlight, or LEDs, or a USB adapter), I go to a B&M that stocks those things.
  - jpindar 7y ago
    Or order it from Target.com?
- esotericn 7y ago

abathur 7y ago

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.

Misdicorl 7y ago
I also have daydreamed about this on and off for the past couple years. In the end, it doesn't look much different from consumer reports, but with broader scope for both reviewed items and reviewers. Authentication is a hard problem, and I've not really hit on anything that seems feasible besides a paycheck.
- abathur 7y ago
  Not unrelated to CR, but I'd like to take it further than they do. A more comprehensive effort to cobble together a purchasing block as leverage to encourage better behavior from producers, develop lists of design/production/marketing/sales/support practices that'll earn blacklisting, distribute the costs of trialing new products, hire experts for teardowns, etc.
clydethefrog 7y ago
In the Netherlands we have a consumer union (although wikipedia calls it a league) which quite some success. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.consumentenbond.nl%2Facties%2Fonze-successen%2Feen-trotse-terugblik https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

RickJWagner 7y ago

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.

foobarian 7y ago
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.
- asark 7y ago
  > 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. There's a Chuck Palahniuk novel in there somewhere.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    It reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 where the fireman burn books (because there are no accidental fires anymore).
- sbov 7y ago
  Dumpsters are relatively cheap. When we remodelled our house we got a 7 foot tall, 6 foot wide, 21 foot long dumpster for 2 weeks for just $370. You can fit a lot of junk in there.
- 7y ago

noonespecial 7y ago

Amazon used to be my go to place precisely because they provided working tools to help me wade through that mountain of stuff. Recently not so much. Not a good sign.

anonymous5133 7y ago
Same here but now amazon has so many of these knockoff type Chinese products that you don't even know what to pick. Most of it ends up being of questionable quality as well.

ianai 7y ago

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.

Bakary 7y ago
If you value your freedom this strongly, then it's time to make bold choices regarding the rate at which you save money. 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?
- djrobstep 7y ago
  Most people like not being homeless and not starving, I guess?
  - Bakary 7y ago
    This is a false dichotomy. I'm not advocating for living in the woods, but just taking a hard look at the choices you make everyday and how much actual utility and satisfaction you get from them. Are those expensive clothes and cars worth it to you? Maybe they are. But you have to compare them to the months or years of labor you could avoid if you saved that money instead, or perhaps even invested it. Perhaps our world is extremely proficient at generating insane amounts of envy, but that doesn't mean you are completely powerless to respond in a life-affirming way.
    - ianai 7y ago
      Ultimately your way asks people to change their innate behavior.

jen729w 7y ago

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.

koyote 7y ago
We went through a similar process after moving country (not worth the shipping costs so we simply sold 99% of our stuff) and felt the same. A year later we now have just as much stuff as we used to, maybe even more. No matter how hard you try, you will always end up accumulating new things, whether it's through gifts or because you need something in particular for a specific occasion (specialty screwdrivers for example). I think it's healthy to go through all (and I mean all) of your stuff at least once every two years and sell anything you have not used in a year or more.
- anonymous5133 7y ago
  You can have a certain amount of stuff but don't let it get excessive. I used to have boxes and boxes full of items that weren't even organized. Like literally....I knew I had that one item...but good luck finding it in the mountain of boxes! If you are at that point then it is time to start reducing your items. The stuff you have needs to be neat and organized and not overly excessive.
- JeanMarcS 7y ago
  A rule we apply at home: if you haven’t use it in the last six months, get rid of it.
7y ago

pdonis 7y ago

The thread title is misleading: the article is about consumers being presented with too many options, not about there being too much stuff.

deleted 7y ago

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AgentME 7y ago

This paragraph mirrors something I'd been thinking for a while: >For a relatively new class of consumer-products start-ups, there’s another method entirely. Instead of making sense of a sea of existing stuff, these companies claim to disrupt stuff as Americans know it. Casper (mattresses), Glossier (makeup), Away (suitcases), and many others have sprouted up to offer consumers freedom from choice: The companies have a few aesthetically pleasing and supposedly highly functional options, usually at mid-range prices. They’re selling nice things, but maybe more importantly, they’re selling a confidence in those things, and an ability to opt out of the stuff rat race. I really value it when companies offer some simple differentiated product lines, and are confident enough in the products to recommend one. If you go to Apple.com wanting a computer and click "Mac" at the top, then the site breaks it down into only a couple categories. The page has big pictures of one of their flagship desktop options and of one of their flagship laptop options. You're probably not going wrong in picking one of them. Apple stands by them and updates them and those machines have their current recommended experience and software setup, though really that also goes for any of the other machines. The other laptop categories are mostly about how thin you want your laptop; the categories aren't perfect but it's not hard to imagine how to pick between them. Now go search for "dell laptops" or "lenovo laptops". You get pages leading to giant grids of laptops with no obvious categorization or ordering. -- Do I consider myself as looking for a "professional" laptop or a "home office" laptop? Do the "gaming" laptops have the best hardware, or do they just have the same hardware as the "professional" laptops with flimsier gamer-themed cases? Which models do they put the Superfish crap/malware on again? -- The part that really feels the strangest to me is that there's no flagship model. My eyes are glazing over looking at these grids. If I were in a store, this is the part where I'd tell the salesman that I'd love it if they could recommend me their standard new general model, and I'd hope they'd hand me a machine they were confident in. I feel like the Dell site isn't confident enough in any of the models to push it onto shoppers. It makes me want to run away back to Apple's site. Maybe my thinking is really influenced by my phone experience. Years ago, I used to have a certain popular but cheaper phone carrier. When I went to their site, they had a big grid of phones to choose from. I picked one of the ones near the top that wasn't the cheapest, that I think I remembered from some ad, and assumed it was one of their flagship choices. It was slow, didn't support certain features like tethering, was on an old Android version, and never got updates. I spent a long time wondering whether this was really the average customer experience of theirs, or did I just accidentally pick an old model that they hadn't gotten around to de-listing? Eventually I decided to switch phone services, and most phone carriers looked pretty much the same. A billion phone options, and also lots of plan options. Even if I'd heard good things about the company and they presumably had a good average customer experience, I was worried that I'd pick a wrong choice and have a worse experience. Then I found Google Project Fi, which just had one plan option, and heavily recommended the Pixel phone. I went with them and haven't regretted it. The Pixel has good hardware, but it also has regular Android on it, regular updates, and a lack of crapware. I'm sure there's other providers that offer good choices like that, but it feels like it would take some research and risk to figure out the non-risky "right choice" at a different provider.

raz32dust 7y ago

The article is not about stuff itself, but the issues caused by the amount of choice such variety offers and the inability of humans to cope with the choice. Choice and freedom certainly increases stress, but I'd take that any day over less choice or less freedom. What we need to ensure is that the choice we have is effective choice - e.g, the same company selling the same product with different names is just adding stress without any value. That is increasing choice in name but not effectively. Likewise, companies not properly listing what exactly makes their product different, apart from marketing buzzwords - this increases choice, but effectively the choices remain the same.

temp99990 7y ago

This is partially why I like shopping at Costco. Usually there is only one or at most a few of one thing, and usually it’s of good quality.

rland 7y ago

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.

rdm_blackhole 7y ago

I have already talked about it on another thread, but that is the reason why my wife and I shop at Aldi. Less choice, good prices and we can do our weekly grocery shopping in less than 20 minutes. I don't need 20 different kinds of hangers and 30 types of hot sauce. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't exist but simply that it is not a necessity for some people like us. The paradox of choice is a pretty powerful phenomenon.

deleted 7y ago

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JamesBarney 7y ago

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.

perfunctory 7y ago
> But honestly I don't think getting rid of a bunch of random stuff in my apartment will make life feel less cluttered. You will never know unless you try.
anonymous5133 7y ago
It sounds more like you are just alone. In situations like that, yes it is important to go out and meet new people or family.
b3n 7y ago
The article has nothing to do with clutter, it is about choice paralysis.

jakobegger 7y ago

There are alternatives to Amazon! 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 7y ago
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?
- _petronius 7y ago
  At the very least, a price point that doesn’t externalize the real environmental cost of the item, perhaps?
  - kkarakk 7y ago
    Unless you're a "brain-washed hippy environmental activist", the markup definitely feels like a ripoff - which is the fundamental problem with any ethical shopping website. I'd gladly pay Amazon price + 5 dollars,any more and my ethics bow down to my trained budgeting
    - _petronius 7y ago
      Which probably accounts for a lot of people's behaviours, but the real cost of most products is going to be more like 100-500% markup, not a flat $5, especially once you get into cheap flights or items that have been shipped large distances. I'm not someone who believes that changes in individual consumer behaviour is going to keep up under 5 degrees of global warming, but if we don't start getting used to some of this, then there will never be the political will to enact the policies that will head off the worst of climate change.

perfunctory 7y ago

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.

anonymous5133 7y ago
Something like 70% of the us economy is entirely driven by consumer spending....the acquisition of more and more trinkets. If people reduced their consumption then the USA would immediately go into a recession. That would be a serious problem considering how many people live paycheck to paycheck with no savings at all.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  You are absolutely right. It's tragic that the livelihoods of people actually depend on polluting the planet. We are gonna have to find a way to restructure our economy. Maybe we can draw inspiration from Bertrand Russell (http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html) and John Keynes (http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf)
leadingthenet 7y ago
That's absolutely not why people advocate nuclear energy...
TeMPOraL 7y ago
That's not why we need nuclear energy. We need it for two things. One, it's very unrealistic to expect people to cut down on this stuff in meaningful amounts and short time (and if you tried to force them, a lot of blood would be shed and a lot of misery caused; we've covered that topic in other threads of the past few days, I saw you there ;)). Two, we kind of need clean energy for other things as well. Undoing the environmental damage, in particular, will be energy-intensive.
- perfunctory 7y ago

gridlockd 7y ago

George Carlin on "Stuff": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

theandrewbailey 7y ago
That is my favorite Carlin bit.

gridlockd 7y ago

I agree, there's too much stuff. In particular, there's far too much software. If you advocate against too much stuff, just don't forget that making someone's stuff is someone else's livelihood.

coldtea 7y ago

"Too much stuff" is the gift of death: https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/ https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/

harimau777 7y ago

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".

mapcars 7y ago

>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

return1 7y ago

In fact i think there is a startup opportunity there, because cleaning up / getting rid of stuff is work.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

This isn't even first world problems, this is just rich people problems. 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 7y ago
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.

corey_moncure 7y ago

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.

GEBBL 7y ago
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.
jriot 7y ago
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.
antiterra 7y ago
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.
newsgremlin 7y ago
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.