The United States of Hoarders!

A few days after my new neighbors moved in a couple of years ago, I was sweeping my garage with the door open, of course.  My neighbors saw me, and in that very American way jokingly said the vast empty space, maybe they could store some of their stuff in my garage.

Ha ha, we laughed.

Whether we live in apartments or mansions, apparently we Americans collect a whole lot of worthless crap.  A few years ago, I wrote about in Planetizen.  I wrote there:

Of course, as many of us have observed, but for which data don't exist, most homeowners seem to fill their garages with refrigerators, freezers, bicycles, treadmills, etc., and then park their cars on the driveways or by the curb. When things have to be put away, households find that they have more stuff for which they need additional space, which is where the self-storage business comes in.

No, don't worry, this post is not about the self-storage industry.

It is about how this American "virtue" of accumulating crap has been made easy by Amazon and the malls-on-wheels revolution. 

Now, to become a hoarder is as easy as simply barking your shopping list at one of those "smart" boxes!

Thanks to a perfect storm of factors, Americans are amassing a lot of stuff. Before the advent of the internet, we had to set aside time to go browse the aisles of a physical store, which was only open a certain number of hours a day. Now, we can shop from anywhere, anytime—while we’re at work, or exercising, or even sleeping.

Ah yes, those old days when the malls were open only for a certain number of hours, and one had to physically get to the stores in order to buy the crap that we did not need.  Now, the stores are available to us 24x7, and we can shop for underwear while in our underwear!

All told, “we are all accumulating mountains of things,” said Mark A. Cohen, the director of retail studies at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He sometimes asks his students to count the number of things they have on them in class, and once they start counting up gadgets and cords and accessories, they end up near 50. “Americans have become a society of hoarders,” Cohen said.

I should start worrying that my non-hoarding behavior will be viewed as being un-American and that the FBI will soon come knocking!

Back in June, as students were vacating their apartments and dorm rooms, we noticed piles of stuff lying near the waste bins.  A mattress had also been discarded, and it looked to be in much better condition than the one on which I plomp down every night.  The ease of buying things also means the ease of dumping things.

 In 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, Americans put 16 million tons of textiles in the municipal waste stream, a 68 percent increase from 2000. We tossed 34.5 million tons of plastics, a 35 percent increase from 2000, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Over that same time period, the population grew just 14 percent.

Keep that in mind the next time some crazy person says that population growth is the greatest problem ever!

Maybe I should think about renting out my garage space!