I do this all the time with Amazon's Trade-In Program. A couple of times a year, I look at my book shelf and video games. If I haven't read/played them within the last 6 months, and have no compelling reason to hold onto them for the foreseeable 6 months, into the box they go.
Amazon then gives me a pre-paid shipping label.
I find the whole process enjoyable. "How much will Amazon give me for this?" is an exciting game. Then things go in the box, and you can visibly see the consumer weight you're lifting off your shoulders. Then you get to see the fruits of your labors with a newly empty bookshelf.
The money they give me for it is only a small part of the benefits I feel from doing it. I try to do the same with Goodwill donations of old clothes, but I have to admit some laziness in actually getting down to the Goodwill (which is essentially zero difference from driving the box to the UPS Store. Procrastination is a weird and wonderful thing.)
You can make a little bit more money by shipping them to Fulfilled By Amazon and selling them at a higher price with Amazon Prime. It's great for things that people don't buy enough to warrant their trade-in program, and there's the risk of the occasional return, but it gets it all out of your house with really cheap shipping.
Nice approach. I personally can't force myself to get rid of books that I've read, which is not very rational, because I very rarely reread books. But other stuff I try to get rid of, or not buy at all.
It doesn't make sense to stockpile books on the chance that your children might one day want to read them when a used copy is generally a click away. (Not to mention that you may prefer to re-buy them in digital form.) Every square inch of space in your home has a carrying cost (I used to calculate $4 per net square foot per month in New York).
Having one less book shelf is effectively saving enough per year that you could probably pay for buying back all the books you'd ever re-read on that shelf. And if you ever move, the cost and annoyance of keeping books just skyrockets.
I have a lot of books I love, but 90% of books are essentially disposable vehicles for information of transient value.
My kids can't browse books that are no longer on my shelves. I encourage them to pick up a random book and explore it. It's kind of like having a hard copy of the web without distractions, and I can see them making their own connections from the words, rather than following links prepared by someone else.
I wouldn't under-estimate the value of this as an experience for kids. I discovered a copy of "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" by Alan Sillitoe in a pile of old books my parent had. It was like discovering a small nugget of gold.
My parents were a book household too. But back then, there was no Internet, no e-books. The only place to wander onto a book was your shelf or the local bookstore. Times change.
I get rid of them. My forcing function is that I won't buy any more shelves - I have two bookcases with about 4 shelves each, shared with my girlfriend, and if I want to keep a book I have to get rid of one. It's still probably 300 lbs of books but it keeps it bounded. (And a lot of those are hers, because she went to law school and still has many of her law books. Most of mine are design or cooking, since the color plates don't really have electronic equivalents yet and some are signed.)
Also, for text-only, transient stuff like business books and history books (that I'm unlikely to read twice), I buy a lot of Kindle stuff now.
Extremely interested in this idea - I've gotten to the point of pricing out FedEx-Kinko's to cut the bindings off ($1/ book actually) and then scanning them dual-sided into Evernote with searchable text (if you're a Pro member it scans inside PDFs).
Still can get past the cognitive dissonance of letting my bookshelf go.
I do re-read books, but only some. I've set myself a target of reducing the library in size by a factor of two over the next year, simply through space constraints.
The decision making is forcing valuable reflections!
I wish I could just bar code in media and books, accept / reject the prices en masse and then generate the shipping label to send it to Amazon. I'd be a lot more inclined to send in stuff if the process was a little more streamlined.
Things like books and games are fluid enough markets that the difference in the price I'm going to get between Amazon and other outlets is going to be fairly small. I just want a faster way to scan in ISBN codes so I don't have to enter them manually.
Sold seems like it might be good for hard-to-price items like antiques, but for media it just seems like a way to end up paying two companies' fees instead of just one.
The FAQ says they buy textbooks, but the page shows recent non-textbook books I've purchased as items I could "get up to $10.98". Have you sold books before? I usually sell my books to my local Half Price Books, but they pay a pittance.
I sold 50 or so of my books through Amazon when I moved. I usually got a great price through the trade-in program, which is nice because you get paid as soon as they receive the book from you, but if I didn't think the trade-in price was high enough, I just sold it through the Amazon seller program. This is a service where you ship your books to them, name the price you're willing to sell each one for, they warehouse them for you, and when someone buys one they ship it out and cut you a check. Pretty great.
Given the insulting price offered by Half Price, I just started giving all my books to my local public library. They mostly auction them to raise money.
I may check out the Amazon Trade In option mentioned upthread.
This treats the symptoms, not the cause. The ultimate solution is buying less shit and buying what you do need local and used (usually on Craigslist). If you do this, you get these great benefits:
1. You prevent all the waste included in manufacturing new shit
2. You can usually sell it later for about what you paid for it
3. Since you usually have to shop quite a bit to find what you need, it eliminates the highly addictive, instant gratification feedback loop that comes from buying online or in a store and ultimately leads to less buying.
"You can also use it as a free way to “store” your unused goods. I didn’t hesitate to sell my papasan chairs today, because I know if I ever need them back, I can open up Craigslist and find plenty more just like them at any point in the future."
and
"So I view Craigslist not just as an Environment Saver – by preventing the unnecessary manufacturing of a bunch of new stuff – but also a Community Machine – connecting millions of people to do real activities together, as opposed to the soul sucking model of big corporations stamping out stores across the world, staffing them with minimum wage workers, connecting them to a stream of wasteful products flowing straight from China, and having us all drive into the big boxes every day to bring home SUV-loads of it which will soon end up buried in a landfill."
Unfortunately some of us have relatives who insist on gifting us shit, regardless of how tactfully we try to ask them not to. I'd love to join a club like this. (Right now Goodwill suffices, but there's definitely non-cheap stuff we give away just because we don't have time to deal with it.)
This year so far: broken iPhones, a no brand android tablet that sucks, a pile of PMRs that don't work, a portable digital tv that was missing a proprietary power supply, an old HP server, a netbook with a nasty case of the clap, a naff 1998 vintage HP Omnibook, clothes that are too small for our children, a car (which instantly cost me £550 in repairs), a crap desktop pc full of spiders. Ugh.
It wasn't stuff i needed or wanted. It was stuff they didn't want and couldn't be bothered to get rid of.
One day I will just say no. No to everything. No gifts, no charity etc.
Get rid of it all.
The only problem is that I've been there. For a while I didn't own much and people thought I was a charity case and gave me more things.
The cycle is impossible to break.
Perhaps I'm too polite.
The problem is that most people think that things are status and people think improving status is how to help a person. Status does not concern me so I'm doomed.
Craigslist the non-cheap stuff. It only takes a few minutes to post something there (less time than going to Goodwill, probably), and you'll get some cash.
But yeah, the gifting culture drives me kind of bonkers too. I intend to establish Gift Truces with as many people in my life as possible come January 1st of 2014 (since, mathematically, I should be even with most people at that point). Or, if a person won't go for that, I'll ask them to donate to charity in my name instead of give me a gift.
But Craigslist can be a huge pain some times. It doesn't matter how low you price something, 5 people will try to get it for half that. I've had people arrange a time to come by & buy... and then never show up or respond again. Some times people really suck. lol
I imagine it could self fund through ads - if someone is on a waiting list but misses out, let them know with adword ads based on the product they failed to get for free.
And then we enter into a massive deflationary recession, you lose your job, people go hungry, etc... all because there's been massive demand destruction for 'shit'. Doesn't sound so great.
Or just let people decide what's worth buying for themselves. If they decide they'll get utility out of it, great. If not, then they don't have to buy it. No need to foist your desires on others.
Most people aren't deciding. They are in a consumption induced haze that begets more consumption. It's only by introducing and promoting ideas and memes other than consumption that people will wake up enough to actually make a decision. If they then decide to continue consuming at current rates, then so be it I guess, but right now they aren't actually making a decision.
You're definitely right. However, it does help those of us who understand that there is a problem push ourselves in the right direction and not only embrace the start of a solution but help us make it part of our lives, which makes it far easier and more honest to advocate the same.
It's "reduce, reuse, recycle" because they're in descending order of importance. That is, reducing is better than reusing, which is better than recycling.
> The cost of postage and the check along with all the processing costs are covered from the money generated from sales of valuable crap. Remember: one man’s crap is another man’s treasure.
And yet, Goodwill doesn't hand out $10 checks for every donation.
I suspect that the money earned from selling "another man's treasure" will rapidly decline.
At first, you'll have the type of people we imagine other HN readers sending things in - nice books, perhaps art, a few desktop toys and things like that. But after a few months, you'll start receiving things that I'd send in - desk lamps that are 99% functional, but don't quite bend in the angle that you want. Paperbacks that have been dropped into a puddle one too many times. An old thermos.
I used to work at a thrift store. The amount of value we could extract from the average box of stuff dropped off to donate . . . was nowhere near $10. In fact, a lot of it couldn't be sold at all -- it just got thrown away.
Broken toys, clothes with holes, dirty shoes, smoke-damaged, water-damaged, and just plain damaged stuff. Ugly nick-nacks, beat up plastic cups, dated books no one wants to read. We got so many tins and baskets! Everyone gets them full of cookies or gifts, no one wants to throw them away, and no one actually has a use for them.
My co-worker and I did the master sorting -- sending stuff to different departments or to the trash. I saw it all. Her summary? "People send us their garbage!"
And that's the stuff that people could be bothered to drive to the store, look a person in the eye, and drop off without too much embarrassment. This was stuff they genuinely thought was valuable.
A box you can fill with crap from your garage?
Well.
Paying $1 for that sight unseen is probably too much. $10 plus postage is . . . endearingly naive.
I still think your idea has merit. Thrift stores tend to attract a very specific market, and that doesn't need to be your market. Thrift stores operate by accepting "junk" from people and then trying to fob it off on to other people.
As a counter-anecdote, there is a place in my area that buys used tools & equipment from people and then sells them back. They're one of my favorite places -- I'd much rather buy a used Milwaukee than a brand new cheapie -- and they seem to do pretty good business. Lots of stuff coming and going all the time.
You might bake in some kind of tracking & rating system if you're concerned about resale value. If a particular user sends in too many boxes of stuff you can't get $15+ for, reduce their payment accordingly.
> Thrift stores tend to attract a very specific market, and that doesn't need to be your market.
This is part of the reason I started off my comment by imagining what an idealized HN reader would donate. That's the kind of person you want to attract. But I genuinely wonder if there are enough of those people - the fact that you're paying them a pittance turns a gift of generosity (e.g., donating to a cancer charity) into a job.
Ah, well, since I have your attention, I'll give you the other side of the coin. The key to getting good stuff from people is how you make them feel about giving it to you.
Most people think thrift stores sell the stuff people drop off there. That's far from true. They get their product from a lot of places -- retail seconds, charities, sometimes even new.
Direct donations are the worst. It's still positive expected value after you collect, sort, and label it all, but sometimes only just barely. Ever notice thrift shop donation centers sometimes have terrible hours? They don't want the stuff that bad!
In direct donation, people give you things they think you're going to sell. They think they're doing you a favor, they think everything has to have some value and anyway, you guys are the experts and at worst you'll just throw it away, right? You get lots of garbage.
One of the things I think people don't understand is the "where it came from" factor. My tennis shoes have some value to me, even though they're pretty beat up. I know where they've been. They've always been mine. I'd cheerfully spend $40 to get them back if they'd disappeared tomorrow.
But to a stranger they're stinky, dirty, beat up, and they don't know where they've been. Zero value. Negative value, even.
Anyway, when people are assessing their own stuff for resale value, they do a pretty terrible job, and it's my private theory that the above is responsible.
Anyway.
The boxes we got with the highest value were from charities. Those signs that say, "Donate your quality used goods to the center for (cancer|mental retardation|war veterans)" . . . those goods eventually end up being sold to thrift stores, and the typical quality is amazing compared to what people drop off. Five times better. Ten times better. More. Depends on the source.
Psychology is weird, and in the thrift business, it can be the difference between a (very) positive and (very) negative profit margin. Just what people choose to give you. I certainly can't begin to explain it, and would never have expected that the difference in the quality of donations to different causes would be so wide.
Just be careful, is all. In my (limited, unscientific, yet still statistically significant) experience as a junk sorter, stuff coming from the "we'll take your junk and resell it" message performs the worst. The very worst. "For the children" seemed to be about the best.
I have absolutely no idea how "purify your life" will do. Could be awesome. Could be terrible. I'm not optimistic, but who knows. People are weird.
If it does poorly, though, seriously considering donating the $10 to a (specific!) charity. That should help a lot.
Thank you! Again, very helpful. Clearly, the message/concept will need to be carefully crafted to encourage good behavior.
One solution that occurred to me: sharing X% of proceeds back with the donor. The idea being that this would encourage people to send more objectively valuable stuff (though as you point out people are terrible at estimating value).
I like really like the idea of donating to specific causes. Did the thrift shop pay the charities a portion of the proceeds in exchange for the boxes?
Did the thrift shop pay the charities a portion of the proceeds in exchange for the boxes?
Sort of. It would have been impossible to track that, but corporate did have some idea what the average box (from a particular source) was worth, and paid them that amount. Or maybe the charity set the price. I don't know. I just know it was different for different sources, and well justified.
This does, however, make me wonder if there's a way to (ab)use the charitable deductions system to make it a zero cost thing. Spun right, I can see a lot of people (myself included) find donating it for free to be a more satisfying idea than paying to throw it away, provided it's a minimally irritating process (remember that in both cases you're competing against "put off throwing it out for another month/year").
As a good example, some friends of mine who work in a networking team will turn up with a land rover and collect whatever pile of old computer equipment you have; they aggregate it and sell it to scrap merchants and the proceeds go towards drinks at their office christmas party. Their management have concluded the fuel costs are less than the recovered beer costs, and I know I can reliably get rid of old tech I don't need and even if it doesn't go to a charity as such it's going to buy beer for people I know and like.
The point here is that making it almost entirely free of effort on my part, plus at least the illusion that the money raised is going for something I consider to be of at least marginally more than zero value, makes it a proposition I'm quite happy to work with.
Or: Find a way to make people feel at least a little good about making as little effort as possible; the marginal value of a slight good feeling to me is far more than $10 especially if the $10 requires more effort to get.
i find this fascinating. tell us more about the stuff you got at the thrift store!
liketwice.com has a program like the OP is suggesting, but they have a short list of requirements for what they accept. they review the stuff and make you an offer that you can accept or reject. i imagine if they get through two or three holey shirts or smelly shoes they just send you a $1 offer (or $0) and move on.
A few people do... My neighborhood has a pretty good culture of leaving free stuff on the curb for a day or so. There's enough for traffic that stuff gets picked up pretty quickly if anyone actually wants it. I'm always surprised by which things go immediately and which things go into the trash after a day or so. But I feel much less wasteful throwing something out if the curb has already demonstrated its complete valuelessness.
I love this system. Halifax, NS had an amazing culture of that when I was in my late teens early twenties I furnished all my apartments with street finds/repairs. Sadly the city is going through gentrification and they're starting to crack down on this.
things that I'd send in - desk lamps that are 99% functional, but don't quite bend in the angle that you want. Paperbacks that have been dropped into a puddle one too many times. An old thermos.
Kill that feeling. Kill it with fire, bury it under a rock, then pave the whole area with three feet of concrete.
I feel that feeling with every fucking object in my apartment, and if it weren't for my friends and my wife, I'd probably be one of those hoarders, sleeping in a 3x3 foot area surrounded by garbage.
I wish I could find a photo of my room as a teenager. I wasn't a Collyer, but you couldn't see my floor.
I give to my local thrift shop (or charity shop as we call them in the UK) and their average bag value is £25 ($39) [1]. That probably includes the 25% extra they can reclaim through tax breaks.
71 comments as I read this, and no mention of eBay. That says to me that eBay itself is broken, as time was that the only logical answer was to sell this sort of thing there. In New Zealand we have Trade Me, which is much larger than eBay in population adjusted terms. They didn't court the larger sellers, but instead maintained focus on helping people sell to people. They are also, in my mind, not making it easy enough to list and sell ones goods. The bar has raised.
Trade Me has been gamed though, by importers and people using it as a virtual store for selling or trading their niche. I'm not sure what the answer is, but a way to filter out the high-volume sellers would be nice.
I'm wondering the same thing. I mostly enjoy articles from Medium, except that they seem to frequently present foreign-language articles that I can't read.
I'd agree -- and do, generally speaking -- due to the very excessive proportion of crap from medium.com that gets upvoted lately, except this is by far one of the best pieces I've seen from that site recently.
one-in-one-out is a good one; we already implemented this in our household. still a lot of unimportant stuff hanging around getting moved from one apartment to the next... ;)
Would it not save everybody time and money if you simply drive to the thrift store every month. A recurring calender reminder will do... They do have thrift stores in the US as far as i know right?
Another getting-rid-of-shit option: http://www.freecycle.org/
Of course, it's also a getting-new-shit-for-free source which may be irresistible for some people.
> Of course, it's also a getting-new-shit-for-free source which may be irresistible for some people
I unsubscribed for this reason after I just couldn't pass up 60 free mason quart jars. Right before we moved. Want to know how many lacerations I got from cleaning them? But, I did sell them for $30 on craigslist when it was all said and done, so there's that.
I think that this is a great idea and it kind of reminds me of http://usesold.com/ with an expanded scope. I'm constantly packing up things into bags for AMVETS, but having a box sent to me that automatically gets picked up would be awesome.
I use Goodwill for this. I take things there when I don't need them anymore, and I go there looking for things I do need. Sometimes it feels like I'm just renting from them, when I donate something there, buy it later, then donate it again when I no longer need it.
I doubt the money generated from sales of valuable crap
will cover the cost of your expenses.
The problem is that there is no such thing as "valuable crap". But let's assume people won't send you crap but only boxes they consider themselves worth more than $10.
You will have a hard time find a buyer that pays $10
.
In reality it's more like
"one man’s treasure is every one else's crap"
<shameless_plug>
I actually just built an iPhone app to help people get rid of stuff they don't need called Give or Take: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/give-or-take-bay-area/id6517....
Everything on it is free, so you won't make any money off it. But sometimes giving stuff away can be faster and less stressful.
</shameless_plug>
There's a similar app called "myfreestuff" that automates posting to freecycle mailing lists. Freecycle can be a pain due to latencies and no-shows. Liking forward to trying this one out.
[edit] oops, it requires a facebook login. As a Facebook Luddite, I'll have to ask my wife to check it out for me.
I think its a nice idea, the core problem is what others have identified: people will send crap.
What about charging people $120 / year to sign up? and then they get their $10 /month back. No one will make money, but if you're motivated by helping out, and by relieving yourself of crap, it still could be worthwhile. And there's still tax write-offs (if it's made as a charitable org).
My problem is trying to cull the wheat from the chaff. I have so much crap and so many things mixed in with it that I don't have time to make sure I'm not throwing out my children’s baby pictures with my junk.
But this could definitely solve part of the problem, and provide some well needed motivation.
You will feel so much better if you get junk and useless shit out of your life. Its a huge life improvement that requires no expenditure of money and may actually net you some.
I really like this idea. I agree there's a big activation energy to getting rid of stuff. Often I have things that are for specific tasks or activities, where it wouldn't make sense to donate them to Goodwill. Having something like this would help, because you would know it would get used, but you don't have to figure out where to send it. At the receiving point, you could even coordinate with different charities - like the ones that want eyeglasses or old cell phones. So, some could get sold and some could get donated.
I didn't know about the Amazon trade-in program. That sounds great for books and games.
Or you could just walk over to your local thrift store every month and give them your shit. Or used book store. Or used clothing store. Or record store. Or...
It's surprisingly hard considering the low benefit derived. First you have to find or buy a suitable box, which might need to be taped up. Then you have to decide what stuff is actually useless. And if you want to get the most out of your potential tax deduction, you also need to itemize everything you're giving away. Then you have to find the local thrift store. I have no idea where mine is. Then you have to find the time to either walk or drive there. For me, that'd be at least a half hour round trip. With a full time job, a baby, and a rapidly shrinking social life (did I mention I have a baby?), it hardly seems worth it to trade my time for such a small gain.
It's times like this that I forget how lucky I am to live downtown in a major city. Within 15 minutes walking distance from my house, I have at least 4 used book stores, 2 record stores 1 vintage/thrift store, and another 2 vintage clothing stores, all of which accept trade ins for cash or merchandise. If none of those places give me moneys for my useless crap, then I can just leave stuff on my sidewalk and it'll be gone in less than a day.
WHEREAS, if I lived in a suburban area, which I assume you probably do, finding anyplace this would be substantially harder to achieve, and ideas like the OPs/amazons, would actually be pretty awesome.
You're right that it's harder to get to places where I live but the OP's idea is still not great for me because I have so much extra space that it doesn't bother me having a bunch of extra crap. I can just toss it in the basement storage area and forget about it.
That being said, suburban problems are an often ignored market in the startup world, presumably because the major tech hubs are in large cities. How many startups focus on homeowners, for example? I would love a company that made taking care of my home effortless. It's so much more of an ongoing challenge than I had originally anticipated. Even if you decide to hire others to take care of the lawn, the repairs, and the general upkeep, it's a giant pain in the ass. You have to research, schedule, research again when the first handyman flakes on you, schedule, reschedule, reschedule again, negotiate, watch over them to make sure they do a good job, answer all their questions (especially true for landscaping), stand up for yourself when they try to rip you off, research some more and schedule someone else to finish what the first handyman started but failed to finish, negotiate again, watch over the new handyman, and hope you know enough to make sure they did what was promised.
I want a company that I pay a monthly fee to and everything is just taken care of. No scheduling. No negotiation. No questions interrupting my work day. They keep tally of what needs to be done and just do it. I'd pay 500/month for that - maybe more. That's assuming they take care of maintenance and repairs. If it's just maintenance, I'd pay 200/month.
You are making excuses. You need to be making a plan and executing on it.
Find out where your local thrift shop is (30 seconds on Google), figure out what other errands need to get done in that part of town, put the shit you don't want near the front door or in the garage. Next time you run an errand near the thrift store, put your pile of crap in the car (loose, no need for a box). Drop it off while running your other errand.
Strart by telling yourself that you will do something and it will get done, but start by telling yourself that something cannot be done and it will not.
Agreed with all except that I'm making excuses. By that I mean it's great advice for most things in life that you want to do.
My point is that in this instance I just don't care. Not enough anyway. I could do exactly as you describe to minimize the cost but the value gain is so minimal that it doesn't warrant the effort. Simple cost/benefit analysis with the result being that the cost is too high (even if it's really low).
Yes, but I don't think that. I live in the midwest. I have a copious amount of space. Having extraneous crap doesn't bother me much at all as I hardly ever see it.
One of the highest value activities for me is spending time with my kid. It's a hard sell that getting ridding of extraneous crap is worth it if it costs me even 10 minutes I could have instead been spending with my kid.
Didn't a group of MIT-ers just launch a product like this a few weeks ago? I can't remember the name - they had an iOS app, and you get one of three different sized boxes in the mail, then they sell your item for you, giving you some of the profit. It was on HN a few weeks ago.
I think this could work if you kept a focus on hobby-type items. I think most of us with too many hobbies would be glad to send stuff if we thought it was going to an appreciative audience, and you'd get stuff worth selling.
Better idea -- stop acquiring crap in the first place. Where did all this crap come from, and was it crap when you acquired it, or did it morph into crap?
reading this is kind of funny as I have a bed, sheets, 4 outfits, a towel, toothpaste, toothbrush, detergent, and deodorant all in my apartment (just moved out of parents home).
I experienced something similar a while ago as I was moving from Sweden to Japan. I could only ship a few things. Once moved, while waiting for those few shipped things to arrive, and living on yet fewer things in the meantime, I realized how few things we really need and how many things just tie us down and consume space. It's liberating to have just a few things.
Amazon then gives me a pre-paid shipping label.
I find the whole process enjoyable. "How much will Amazon give me for this?" is an exciting game. Then things go in the box, and you can visibly see the consumer weight you're lifting off your shoulders. Then you get to see the fruits of your labors with a newly empty bookshelf.
The money they give me for it is only a small part of the benefits I feel from doing it. I try to do the same with Goodwill donations of old clothes, but I have to admit some laziness in actually getting down to the Goodwill (which is essentially zero difference from driving the box to the UPS Store. Procrastination is a weird and wonderful thing.)