Everyone else’s stuff is shit and your shit is stuff? Yes, George was full of the wisdom of the ages.
In her column today on MSN Money M.P. Dunleavy talks about “The High Price of Too Much Stuff” and notes how the rise of the small storage industry has corresponded with the rise in easy credit and Americans’ overall consumer debt. Not only are we buying more stuff, we’re having to pay rent on a place to store it (this even though the average home size has gone up and the average family size has gone down over the last 30 years). Not surprisingly, the storage industry person she interviewed with the article begged to differ. Based on what he has seen from auctioning the contents of abandoned storage units, many are used for the following:
- Old tax returns
- Newspapers
- Collectibles
- Their children’s old toys
- Their parents’ old belongings
Old tax returns I can understand, sort of. Aunt Connie has a degree in records management and I can assure you that “it’s complicated”…of course, whether or not it needs to be complicated is a different rant entirely. But why, oh why, is anyone saving old newspapers? I’ll tell you why, the answer is right there in the list, item number three, the insidious…collectibles.
Thanks to the MSM (main stream media) and Americans’ seemingly never ending capacity for both stupidity and consumption, many of us (at times even me) have been duped into thinking our shit stuff is, one of these days, going to be collectible (and, consequently, worth more money than we paid for it). People, I’m telling you right now that, by and large, this is a load of shit stuff.
It’s a trick, right up there with “stock up and save!” and “the more you spend the more you save!” to get you to buy a bunch of something you don’t need with the hope (not promise, hope) of maybe one day making a profit on it. I’ll save “stock up and save” for another day. Today, I just want to talk about collectibles.
My first memory of the collectible phenomenon comes from the 1980s–Cabbage Patch Kids. They were the ‘hot’ Christmas item. The ‘must have’ toy of the season. A big part of this memory is a teenage me walking through a shopping mall at Christmas time with my mom. I saw a little girl smugly toting her (impossible to find right now, I have one, you don’t, neener neener) dolly through the shopping mall and told my mom “I’d really like to run snatch that thing right out of her hands zoom past her a ways and stomp on on it.” I didn’t even want one of the damn things, I was just appalled by her audacity. Anyway, they were the hot toy that year. According to whom? The MSM of course! But at some point shortly thereafter this child’s doll changed from being a toy that was designed to be played with to something that adults were buying in bulk and keeping in the box (somewhere…maybe a storage unit, maybe a separate room in a bigger house that is only used to store shit stuff) with the hope that they would be really valuable to someone at some as yet undetermined time in the future…maybe they are. I don’t know and I don’t care. I didn’t want one then and I don’t want one now.
Flash forward a decade…to Beanie Babies. I bought a bunch of those. At the time, I had a lot of disposable income and I liked them. I only bought the ones I liked. I never lined up to purchase one. And today there’s a box of them in my gardening shed. Am I keeping them pristine to fund my kids’ education? Hell no! I finally got tired of looking at/dusting around them and boxed them up. When the kids are wanting a new stuffed toy or deserve a reward, I let them pick one out of the box…and then I cut off the ear tag and they play with it! In other words, they aren’t collectibles…they’re toys!
Flash forward another decade. Now we have e-Bay and online shopping. Now I can’t find my kids the action figures they want at the store because ‘collectors’ are snapping them all up as soon as they hit the real and virtual shelves and then trying to get double or triple the prices in online auctions or as ‘third party’ sellers. Not from me they aren’t. They’re toys for the love of yarn! I’m not paying twenty bucks for a five dollar action figure that my kids are going to break or bury in the dirt within a week of (try not to cringe…) taking it out of the box!
The collectible phenomenon has been helped along by shows like Antiques Roadshow and Cash in the Attic but again our collective stupidity comes into play. Most of the items on those shows are ‘found’ items or have been handed down as family heirlooms…not purchased and held like a good stock in the hope (again, hope, not promise) that they will get more valuable over time. Between the collectibles industry (who makes a fortune convincing us to buy and hold onto a bunch of something completely frivolous), the MSM, and our own stupidity we not only grossly over consume…we never get rid of anything (hence items four and five on the list, you can’t tell me all of that shit stuff has sentimental value).
Here’s a plea to stop the insanity in the words of Lester Burnham “It’s just stuff!” Can we all admit that, in the end, it’s just stuff? Buy the stuff you need. And, by all means, buy some of the stuff you want. But please, oh please, stop buying stuff to hold and sell unless you really, really know what you’re doing (that means unless you can support yourself doing this and only this). Seriously, buying stuff is never a way to save money and, only in rare cases with “I’m going to be a Major League Baseball Player” type odds will it ever make you money. If you want to save money, put it in the bank. If you want to make money, work. It’s really that simple.
Oh yeah, and imagine, just imagine the gauge effect of a bunch of us buying and storing less stuff…gas saved on moving the stuff from one place to another, energy saved because less stuff is being manufactured, people living in (and heating and cooling) smaller spaces because they don’t need such a big place “for their stuff”. Now there’s something to hold onto.