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The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

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Re: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

#91

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.

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.

Re: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

#92

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 enou…

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.

Re: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

#93
post #26

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 really not that hard.

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 th…

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.

Re: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

#94
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

This is really helpful perspective, thank you! (the author)

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.

Re: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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 oth…

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).

Re: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

#96
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never get rid of books. I got rid of a lot of mine and thoroughly regret it. Why? I now have children who want to read them.

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…

So do you keep the books that are part of the 90%, or do you get rid of them?

Re: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

#97
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.

Re: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

#98

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.

Yep - Sold. http://usesold.com/

Re: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

#99

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 a…

Exactly. Out of "recycle, reduce, reuse", the last two are the most important.

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.

Re: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

#100
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have things that are slightly broken that are worth money if someone is willing to spend some time. I do not have that time. Does anyone?

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 va…

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.
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