Highway 169 runs north-south through the affluent western suburbs of Minneapolis. High brown walls that serve as sound barriers block views of most of the neighborhoods, but here and there a mini-storage business appears along the way. Beige seems to be the preferred color, and during the dry Minnesota fall, when the highway scrub turns tan, they’re all but camouflaged.
Everyone knows they’re available and the purpose for which they’re erected. To meet the ever-growing demand from Americans for space to store their stuff, hundreds, sometimes thousands, are erected across the United States every year. As of 2017, there were at least fifty-four thousand mini-storage sites in the United States, with enough rentable space to cover all of Palm Springs, California, golf courses included. In recent years, the industry’s annual profits are triple those of Hollywood.
Those profits won’t be threatened for many years. At a time when personal identity is wrapped up in brands, Americans are prone to keep things longer, and sometimes value them more than they value themselves. At Ace Mini Storage,a located along Highway 169 in Plymouth, the cost for a square foot of unheated storage space exceeds the cost per square foot of many studio apartments in the surrounding area.
On a brisk fall day I stop into the Ace Mini Storage office to ask about price and availability. The balding clerk picks up a piece of paper with a grid printed across it and squints. Outside, a pickup pulls into the parking lot with furniture piled into the bed; a lamp hangs off the side. “We might have something available later in the week,” the clerk declares and pushes a business card across the desk. “A ten-by-forty unit.”
It turns out that particular unit is the reason Sharon Kadet is now pulling up in her car. She’s the account manager of Empty the Nest, an eight-year-old local business that empties homes of their property.
The reasons for these cleanouts vary, but they typically revolve around downsizing and death. Business is booming: by 2030 senior citizens will account for one fifth of the U.S. population. Some of those seniors want to remain in their large single-family homes packed with stuff. But many others downsize, either by their own or someone else’s choice. And some will pass on, leaving the heavy responsibility of cleaning out a life’s accumulations to somebody else.
Plenty of companies and individuals will clean out homes and drive the stuff to the dump after skimming the easily marketable objects. But Empty the Nest is unique in its commitment to finding reuse and resale markets before giving up on an object. Empty the Nest has a thrift store, and what can’t be sold there is donated to organizations that might have better luck.
As Sharon steps out of her car, a cold breeze whips past, ruffling her black windbreaker and shoulder-length hair. “The deal is that we’re cleaning out two units for this man whose mother filled it up with all kinds of collectibles,” she tells me as we walk toward a large truck parked at one end of the facility. “It’s pretty incredible how much she left. I think she might’ve had a store.”
There are 753 individual units for storing excess stuff at the former Ace Mini Storage in Plymouth, Minnesota.
A truck is parked in the driveway beside two storage units with their doors raised. Three crew members are passing boxes from the units into the truck, where they’re stacked neatly. Standing in silent witness is the woman’s son, a retired auto mechanic happy to chat, so long as I don’t ask for his name. “These were my mother’s units. She had a knickknack store. Not antiques, but collectibles.”
One unit holds dozens of boxes marked “Beanie Babies” in black marker. I pull back the top flap of one and see it’s packed with colorful stuffed animals. “I looked on Craigslist,” the mechanic tells me. “They’re going for three dollars. But nobody wants them.”
Sharon peers into the truck—it’s about one third full. Then she looks at the larger unit and wonders if there’ll be enough room. The crew assures her that they can manage.
I have my doubts. At the front of the larger unit are display cases. The remainder of the space is filled with unopened boxes from collectible companies. The mechanic’s mother seemed to have a particular affinity for small porcelain Christmas villages made by Department 56, a manufacturer of holiday baubles. There could be a hundred of those alone. And as the movers work deeper into the storage unit, it’s revealed that she was also passionate about limited-edition porcelain dolls marketed by something called the Consummate Collection. “I don’t know what she was thinking, buying all this stuff,” the mechanic says. “Was it for us? When she had her store, I don’t think she had dolls.” He picks up an unopened box. “Made in China,” he mutters.
I step gingerly into the larger unit. On the floor is an unopened six-pack of Coca-Cola with a Santa Claus design and CHRISTMAS 1996 printed across the cans. I look back at the mechanic. “How long did she have this unit?”
“Rented it in 2006 or 2007,” he answers. “We’ve been paying over five hundred dollars per month for both.”
“That Coke is twenty-one years old.”
He shakes his head. “Mother’s house was full of stuff, so she put it here. You kind of wonder if she had a problem with stuff. They sell it to you on credit.” We both step back and watch as Empty the Nest’s crew methodically stacks boxes of dolls in the truck. “Tell you what,” he tells me. “I won’t leave my kids this kind of mess. My wife and I already decided that.”
Most American homes contain very little of value beyond the sentiments of the person who purchased them. The contents of a bathroom—from toothbrushes to soap—can’t be reused. Kitchen utensils are typically too beat up to serve anything but the scrap-metal industry. Old CDs, DVDs, books, and media players are generally worthless unless they’re scarce, in good condition, or of interest to collectors. Furniture, unless it’s an antique of value, has a diminishing market, especially if it’s made by Ikea. Used clothing, unless it’s made by a well-known and expensive brand, is often barely competitive with the flood of new garments made in low-cost factories around the developing world. And electronics, from desktop computers to phones, rapidly depreciate into a state of worthlessness—at least to consumers in places where the next upgrade is just a season away.
Few Americans know it better than Sharon Kadet. In the six years she’s worked for Empty the Nest, she’s taken thousands of photos of potential and actual client homes before they’ve been cleaned out. It’s an impromptu, inadvertent, and largely unprecedented archive of American consumption, discreetly contained in Dropbox folders accessed through an iPad she carries everywhere. When she sits down with me at a Caribou Coffee along Highway 169, she places it on the table to her left. As she checks a message, I notice her inbox contains 25,322 emails.
“Okay, let’s find a good one.” She opens a folder that holds hundreds of additional folders, each labeled by address. Most store between twenty-five and thirty-five photographs of the things filling up the homes of potential and actual clients. For Sharon, the photos fulfill two purposes. First, they allow her to quote a price for a cleanout. Labor and dumpsters are costs; the potential resale value of the stuff in those photos is value that can be deducted from those costs. Second, the photos allow a crew to plan a cleanout, some of which can last for days.
“This is a good one,” she decides, opening up a folder devoted to a home located north of the Twin Cities. “Split-level house,” she adds and leans in. “From the outside, you know nothing.” She scrolls quickly through images of a bedroom dominated by stacked books and a kitchen table piled with binders, and she stops on an image of hundreds of VHS cassettes stacked on shelves, on tables, and stashed in open boxes. She zooms in. “They’re all homemade,” she notes, pointing at the handwritten labels on the spines. Then she zooms out and points to rows of three-ring binders. “I think he cataloged the tapes. This is a very passionate townhouse. A very passionate guy.”
“Is any of that worth anything?”
She leans back and crosses her arms over her black EMPTY THE NEST T-shirt. “Homemade VHS tapes, no.” Sharon pauses for just a beat. Reuse is what makes Empty the Nest unique in an increasingly competitive cleanout industry. “The idea that your stuff isn’t going to be wasted is more important than packing your own vases,” she explains.
Why that’s so important is a complicated question. Sharon, with hundreds of cleanouts in her background, has watched the difficulty that clients have in letting go. “Yesterday we cleaned out a place, and later the sister called and said he [the client] died at four A.M.” She throws up her hands. “I don’t know … but coincidence?”
Historically, personal identity revolved around religion, civic participation, and pride of (oftentimes small) place. But as those traditional bonds disintegrate in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and secularization, brands and objects become a means to curate and project who we are. Users of iPhones “think different” than users of Android-enabled phones do. A Volvo station wagon, a brand and model favored by liberal residents of academic communities, isn’t likely to be found in the drive-through at Chick-fil-A, a fast-food chain favored by conservatives.1 Small acts of consumption add up to a picture of who we are—just ask Google or Facebook, companies that keenly track consumer identities online. And for many Americans, objects packed into a home present the complete curated package.
Like most people in a very new industry, Sharon Kadet didn’t aspire to her current position in home cleanout. She grew up in a middle-class Minneapolis family, attended college, and spent much of her career working for large philanthropic foundations like the United Way. Then, in the late 2000s, her father passed away, and the family hired a company to help her mother transition to a smaller home. The manager of that move eventually founded Empty the Nest in 2011. Not long after, Sharon ran into that “move manager” at the gym and later looked up what she was doing. “It made sense to me from a human standpoint,” she says, recalling her first online encounter with Empty the Next. In 2013, Sharon joined the company as a packer. Then she started visiting senior housing communities to market Empty the Nest’s services.
In addition to generating profits, Empty the Nest also generates knowledge. Sharon opens another folder and clicks on a photo. It shows a cluttered basement with a treadmill in the center. “Exercise equipment has no value,” she says, then clicks through to an image of bookshelves stacked with magazines, many with yellow spines. “Basements full of National Geographics on the shelves.” She sighs. “People thinking they’re valuable.” A moment later we’re on a particular peeve: hide-a-beds. “Nobody wants used ones, and they’re dangerous to move. Can’t sell them.”
Sharon is aware that talking about the difficulties of her job can make it feel like every cleanout is an episode of Hoarders, the wildly successful American television series about people who compulsively acquire objects and never unload any of them. “But not every home or transition from a home is extreme,” she reminds me. “Most aren’t.” Even so, each Empty the Nest client finds themselves in the same position: they have more stuff than they can handle.
Before we go, I ask Sharon if the job has impacted her personally. “Materially, no. I have a house full of stuff. But personally, yes. Life is short.”
The idea that a person may reach the end of life with more stuff than he or she can manage is new. For much of human history, senior citizens were among society’s most destitute and left little material evidence of themselves. That changed, like so much else, in the mid-twentieth century. Thanks to large houses (the average U.S. house has more than doubled in size since the 1950s), a robust social safety net, and longer lifespans, Americans have had the opportunity to acquire more stuff over a longer period of time than any nation in history.
That’s mostly a good thing. Living standards have never been higher. But eventually, people—and their stuff—wear out.
In 1987, Mercedes Gunderson of suburban Edina, Minnesota, moved her mother—and her stuff—from her lifelong home in small-town Wisconsin to the Twin Cities. It was one of four moves that the elder Ms. Gunderson would make during the final seven years of her life. The stress of those relocations made an impression on the younger Ms. Gunderson, and in 1990 she founded what’s believed to be the first U.S. company devoted to moving senior citizens and their stuff: Gentle Transitions.
The business case is simple. Families are geographically scattered and increasingly busy, so someone other than the kids will have to pack Mom and Dad for the move to senior living. It’s a sensitive task. Seniors with three-bedroom houses have more stuff than they can take to their new, much smaller homes in assisted living. So a new job category—“senior move manager”—was created to help them end to end, from the packing to the unpacking.
Gentle Transitions is a lucrative and influential business. In 2018, it coordinated more than 1,200 moves in the Twin Cities, for fees that average $1,500 to $3,500 (not including the cost of the moving truck). Gunderson’s son, who owns and operates a California branch of the company, was one of the cofounders of the National Association of Senior Move Managers, a trade association with more than six hundred members in forty U.S. states.
As the industry grows, new job categories proliferate. “Sorter” is the most interesting. In addition to helping pack up for the move, the sorter works with a property owner to choose what stuff makes the move to a new home—and, more important, what doesn’t.
Jill Freeman, a marketing associate at Gentle Transitions as well as a professional sorter, is one of the best. I meet her at another Caribou Coffee on Highway 169. “Hoarding is a spectrum disorder,” she tells me. “It’s just a question of where you land on that spectrum. And we all do.”
Freeman has a blonde bob, blue eyes, and endless charisma; I’m not at all surprised when she tells me she’s a former actor, or that she’s scheduled to lead a decluttering seminar in ninety minutes. “When I first arrive at a house, the first thing I do is have a discussion,” she explains. “I want to be a friend, not an adversary. Because that’s how they see me, as someone who throws away stuff.”
That’s just the starter. Inevitably, the job is about convincing people to let go and assuring them that the things they love aren’t lost. “There’s a grieving process,” she says. “When you got that wedding china, you were going to keep it forever. I have clients break down.” As possessions are set aside, a more profound grieving takes place. It’s not just the loss of a sentiment; it’s the loss of an identity.
The process is made even more difficult by changing tastes. The fine china and antiques appreciated by Americans born in the middle of the twentieth century aren’t in much demand from the younger generations. “People just don’t want it. But seniors want people to want it,” Freeman says. “ ‘Oh, my kids will take it.’ No, they won’t.” It’s not their identity.
In the course of sorting someone’s stuff, Freeman’s best tactic is to persuade the clients that stuff won’t be wasted. “Men won’t get rid of tools. Women, Tupperware. So we tell them the Tupperware can be recycled. The tools can be used by someone else.” Then it’s left to the senior move manager to figure out what to do with what’s left behind, and quickly. Freeman and other sorters have an hourly rate. Efficiency, not sustainability, must be their first priority.
That can be painful. Tammy Wilcox, a Gentle Transitions move manager, recalls sorting a photographer’s belongings. “His whole life in pics,” she tells me over coffee at the south Minneapolis home of another Gentle Transition sorter. “I went through pics of safaris, animals, his whole life. I told family they should take them. They said no. 1-800-JUNK came, and it broke my heart. They cleaned out three storage units.” Tammy doesn’t know where it all went, and it’s not in her job description to worry about it. “They’re paying us fifty-two dollars per hour, and the family’s goal is to get rid of the stuff.”
The Empty the Nest thrift store is located in a long beige office strip just off Highway 169, behind a Culver’s restaurant. Out front, a handful of rakes and garden tools in metal buckets set it apart from the office tenants. But open the front door and the bland and beige give way to a riot of the very best stuff: a midcentury white leather sofa, side tables, metal buckets of vintage photos, farm equipment, shelves of glassware and plates, vintage magazines. The cash registers are perched on a desk made from hundreds of books; random objects hang from the ceiling. And all of it, every last object, was extracted from someone’s home in the last month or so, with the promise of being reused.
For someone like me, the son of a junkyard owner, this is the best sort of playground. If my grandmother, the daughter of a junkyard owner, were still alive, it’s where I’d take her for an outing—and then, after an hour, wonder if we’d ever leave.
But on this particular Wednesday, I don’t get to linger. Sharon Fischman, the owner and founder, has agreed to sit down for an interview. But if we do it at the store, she’ll be distracted. So, looking for a reason to get away, she suggests we go across the street to a Perkins restaurant. She’s barely five feet tall, her wide eyes are constantly moving, and she walks at a single pace: straight-ahead fast. I practically chase her across the street.
At Perkins, Sharon leads me to a table and orders breakfast. It’s the middle of the afternoon. “So,” she says, “what do you want to know?”
A native of the western suburbs of Minneapolis, Sharon spent her early career working in television and, later, doing sales for a ground-beef processor. “Traveling around the U.S., calling on McDonald’s and Perkins,” she recounts with a fond smile. She married, had kids, and took time off to raise them. But after a health scare in her forties, she looked to reenter the workforce. There was no plan or direction. Reflecting on what she liked to do, she circled back to a childhood passion for organizing. One night, while surfing the internet, she googled “organizing” and Gentle Transitions turned up.
She started as a packer and progressed to move manager. The part of her job that required finding somewhere for all the stuff to go, post-move, made an impression. “I would end up calling the mover who moved them and saying, ‘I have a bunch of stuff here. You want it?’ And they’d be like, ‘Yeah! We’ll come get it.’ ” Sharon wondered if there wasn’t an easier, more efficient, and more sustainable way. “I hate—hate—throwing away stuff.” She pauses. “But I’m not a hoarder. My staff thinks I’m a hoarder because of the store. They should see my house. Not a hoarder.”
As Sharon saw it then, the price of an Empty the Nest cleanout could be offset by the money recouped from the resale of the stuff—and marketed accordingly. Eight years later Empty the Nest has around thirty employees and a thrift store that’s become a bit of a Twin Cities landmark. But Sharon insists this wasn’t the plan at all. “It was just kind of like—it was more kind of like—there is all this stuff. And there are so many people who could use this stuff. How can we get it together with them instead of having it be so difficult.” She pauses to cut into the omelet that was just delivered to the table. “And then when it hit me on that personal level, when we had to empty my parents’ house, and we had an estate sale, and then there was this amazing stuff left in the house.”
“Do you remember anything specifically?”
“The dining room table. It’s gorgeous. Nobody wants this? Yeah.”
At nine A.M. on a Tuesday, Sharon Kadet is standing outside a modest split-level home on leafy Vincent Avenue in North Minneapolis. A crew of four is already inside, cleaning out the contents. She’s on her phone, checking on the delivery of a dumpster to take away what can’t be reused. I gaze through the windows and see a relatively empty living room with a few spare pieces of furniture. “Doesn’t look too bad,” I tell her.
Sharon slips the phone into her jacket pocket. “Wait till you see the basement. You can’t be fooled.”
Inside, Denise Dixon, a willowy, middle-aged woman, is seated on one of the three chairs remaining in the living room. Each has a piece of blue tape affixed to it, indicating that it’s going with the family—not Empty the Nest. The dining room table at the far end of the room, blue tape affixed, has an assortment of glassware and what appear to be antiques, most of which lack blue tape.
As packers descend the stairs with cardboard boxes, Denise crosses one leg over the other. “I could’ve gone down to the corner and hired a couple of guys for a few hundred bucks to do this job,” she says in a businesslike manner. “But I wanted the stuff reused in the community. That makes me feel good.”
A crew member walks in through the back door. “There’s a grill in the—”
“My dad’s smoker and charcoal,” she interrupts. “It’s promised to a gentleman who’s coming this morning.” Then she turns to me. “I’m unsentimental because I have to be.” The house belongs to her parents, who bought it in 1973. Mom was a covenant minister (“We were the first African Americans to integrate a Covenant church in Minnesota”); Dad was a surgical tech for the Veterans Administration. They raised Denise and her two siblings here and wanted for nothing. “We had an awesome life,” she says, her voice suddenly breaking. “We had everything.” In 1982, she tells me, they were named City of Minneapolis Family of the Year.
Both parents are now eighty-two, and they’d managed to remain in the house until nine months ago. Then Denise’s father, already suffering from dementia, “got sick,” was hospitalized for a month, and spent an additional month in an aftercare center. “And it became clear to me they couldn’t stay here anymore. So I bought them a condo in a co-op for seniors where there’s a pull cord if you need anything.”
That solved much of the problem. But there was still the question of what to do with the stuff. Denise, an entrepreneur, took the initiative and cleaned out what she could with family members. Most of what they kept has value to nobody but the family: photos and books. Then she hired Empty the Nest to handle the rest. “It was so clear to me that my mom was okay with this.” Other family members feel otherwise. “You don’t see my sister PJ because she’s probably crying somewhere,” Denise says with a sisterly roll of the eyes. “Well, PJ, if you feel that way, we should buy the house. At some point, stuff is stuff. We’ve had generations of stuff. We’ve had grandparents’ stuff.”
There’s a diesel rumble from the back of the house, and Sharon excuses herself to check on the dumpster delivery. Denise stands and invites me to look around. I follow her into the narrow kitchen, where two packers are carefully boxing sets of dishes stacked on shelves and on cabinets. “Hard to say how we got so many,” she says. “But hopefully somebody else can use them.”
From there she descends down creaky stairs into a basement lit by just a few bulbs and held up by exposed beams. There are boxes and garbage bags bursting with stuff; tools and vacuum cleaners; appliances. Three packers are arrayed at strategic points within the room, sorting and depositing stuff into boxes and bags bound for Empty the Nest, the Salvation Army (for what Empty the Nest can’t justify selling), and the trash. At the far end, behind the stairs, stuff is so dense that there’s no room for a packer, yet. “This is stuff my dad did over the years,” she says, pointing at a box. “Who knows?” I lean over it, but it’s covered in newspapers. Denise takes a long gaze around the room and then excuses herself. “I have an appointment at ten.”
As she walks up the stairs, I wade gingerly into the stilled tide of her parents’ material life. Tracy Luke, a sinewy sorter with a strong jaw and an air of unsentimental efficiency, is kneeling beside boxes of clothes. “This requires making some judgment calls,” she tells me. Unless the garments are vintage and collectible, the margins are too small to interest Empty the Nest. So they pack them for the Salvation Army.
Generally, packers sort into five different categories: new, vintage, collectible, and resalable stuff goes to Empty the Nest’s thrift store; reusable stuff too cheap or common for the thrift store is bound for the Salvation Army or a similar charity organization; old electronics are bound for a specialized electronics recycler; recyclable paper and metal goes to a general recycler; and trash is bound for wherever the hauler takes it that day.
“When I first started working at Empty the Nest, I didn’t think I had much stuff,” Tracy tells me as she pauses to examine a carefully folded blouse before tossing it into a bag for the Salvation Army. “Then I started downsizing.”
Tracy’s experience with the hoarding spectrum preceded her work at Empty the Nest. She’s a retired police officer who worked for more than two decades in an affluent Twin Cities suburb and called on many hoarder homes. “Older generations—things get away from them,” she says. But her sympathies have limits. “How many gifts do we need? Over there is a cook set, all new in the box. Probably a book in there too.” It’s just one hint of the new and unused things that are stashed in American homes. And it’s not just an American problem. A 2016 study sponsored by the British retailer Marks & Spencer and Oxfam, a British confederation of twenty charities, revealed that British closets contain 3.6 billion unworn garments.2
Across the basement, Ally Enz, another packer, stands up amid the boxes. “There are four vacuum cleaners down here.”
Tracy nods. “That’s super common in hoarder houses.”
“I think older people are recalling back when you’d repair the things.”
I wander up the stairs and into a first-floor bedroom off the living room. Inside, Kristy Dueffert, a four-year packing veteran, is sorting through clothes. Three vacuum cleaners are perched in a corner. “People hold on to a lot of stuff. If they have one piece of paper,” she tells me, “they have a thousand.” She’s younger—and breezier—than her colleagues. “I have two kids, and I used to keep a lot more stuff,” she explains. “Then they grew up, and I realized it didn’t mean as much to them.” She folds undershirts into a bag for the Salvation Army. “You should take a look in the attic.”
It’s reached via a set of stairs that ends at a tight landing further constrained by the angle of the roof. The overly warm space is cramped, and made more so by the wild assortment of stuff that’s spread across the floor, a bed, tables, and a dresser. I open a large black garbage bag and find a sparkly paper Santa Claus staring back; beneath him, ornaments. I close the bag and scan the piles. There’s another vacuum cleaner in a corner.
Downstairs, I mention the Christmas stuff to Kristy. “It’s still summer, nobody wants it,” she tells me. “If you try to donate it to the Salvation Army, they’ll say no. Nowhere to store it.” She shrugs. “Things accumulate. Working with Empty the Nest, you learn ‘you bring something in, you take something out.’ ”
Prior to World War II, little that Kristy just said would’ve made sense. The United States, like the rest of the world, was still an agrarian society, families were large and localized, and property of any kind was scarce, oftentimes homemade, and valuable. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practical housekeeping manuals (a genre that’s largely disappeared) were, in many respects, repair manuals.3 Some included basic cement recipes to aid in the repair of broken dishes. Others offered advice on basic strategies to prolong the usable lifespan of pottery, ironware, and glass. What little a parent or grandparent owned and left behind was bequeathed to the next generation for uninterrupted use.
As the industrial revolution drew families into cities and mass-production jobs, society’s relationship to stuff began to change, and modern notions of “waste” emerged. For example, in traditional farming communities, food scraps are fertilizer. But the nineteenth-century urban tenements into which rural families relocated provided little space or opportunity to “recycle” food. In the absence of waste collection, food scraps often literally went out of the window, into the streets. In 1842 the New York Daily News estimated that ten thousand pigs were roaming the streets of New York, consuming mostly organic garbage. Modern trash collection and disposal had yet to be invented.
Likewise, before mass production rendered clothing cheap and large wardrobes a middle-class entitlement, garments were homemade and expensive. A shirt could require days of labor; bed linens and blankets were heirlooms. When they wore out or tore, they were mended, reused in other garments, or—ultimately—reduced to rags for cleaning.
Industrialization and urbanization changed everything. Busy days spent in a sweatshop provided little time to mend a shirt, repurpose it into a new garment, or reduce it to rags. As a result, store-bought alternatives emerged, and families used the money earned from hourly or daily wages to buy them. They were still expensive—it would be decades before middle-class Americans could afford multiple changes of store-bought clothes. But the idea that a garment or other object was a resource that should be renewed at home was eroding. In the process, the sentimental value associated with clothing declined as quickly as the material value. After all, it’s easier to discard a store-bought shirt than one made at home by a mother, a wife, or a sister.
Of course, a preindustrial agrarian lifestyle is more environmentally sustainable than a modern one. But so too is the brutish nomadic life that preceded the development of agriculture. Nobody is clamoring for either, and it bears repeating that neither is worth romanticizing: sanitation and nutrition were poorer, and the average lifespan was considerably shorter and less interesting. No doubt, there are downsides to an economy built on mass production and consumption. Factory production, in particular, can take a significant toll on air and water quality. But even in places where that toll is most tangible, such as contemporary China, consumers understandably embrace mass production and urbanization over the alternatives.
That’s worth celebrating. But spend a few hours at an average American home cleanout, and there will be moments when you doubt that you’re celebrating the upward arrow of human progress.
I meet Sharon Kadet in the garage of an upscale multilevel townhouse in the trendy Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis. Empty the Nest crewmembers—Sharon says there are “eight or nine”—are maneuvering chairs and boxes between the hills of other furniture and boxes cluttering the garage and into an Empty the Nest truck partly filled with stuff acquired during another cleanout earlier that morning. Sharon says she typically organizes seven to thirteen cleanouts per week. But thanks to several complicated multiday jobs—including this one—there’s just seven scheduled this week.
“I’ve seen everything,” she reminds me. “But the family really built this one up.” The townhome belonged to an elderly woman who’d recently passed away. According to her relatives, none of them—including the sister who lived nearby—had been allowed into the house in years. “She was embarrassed,” Sharon says. “But this actually isn’t close to the worst I’ve seen.”
She leads me into the house and up a stairway covered in carpet with years’ worth of grime ground into it. At one end of the landing is a room that was used as an office. Three crew members are inside, opening drawers and rapidly emptying them into trash bags. “They’re not looking for anything,” Sharon explains. “But they’re going through everything.” Personal papers go into recycling bags; broken staplers, used pens with ink leaking out, a stray plastic paper clip—that all goes into a trash bag. Unopened reams of paper, of which there are several, land in boxes for the thrift store. “A job like this, there’s probably not much Empty the Nest stuff. So we become more of a service.”
A tall and muscular older man walks into the room and kneels beside a desk and bookshelves covered in white vinyl. “Particleboard,” he mutters as he presses a hand against them, testing their weight and build. Sharon introduces him as Carl, and he is excited to reveal his knowledge of moving to a journalist. “I’ve been doing moves for thirty years,” he tells me as he stands up. “And I’d never buy something from Ikea. We’ll shrink-wrap them, but it’s only fifty-fifty they make it.”
Sharon leads me out of the office and up the stairs. As she does, she reminds me she’s not as optimistic as her movers. “That desk and those shelves aren’t the sort of thing we can salvage in most cases. Particleboard can survive one move, maybe. Then it’s done. Nobody wants to buy it—it’s so cheap already.”
This upper floor is what must have horrified the owner’s relatives. It’s a bright, high-ceilinged space, and the main living area is a forest of banker’s boxes, books, and loose paper. The tan carpet is stained brown; two vintage exercise machines—the HealthRider and the SoftWalk Plus—are in the center of the room; bottles of nutritional supplements are scattered randomly until they concentrate and overtake the kitchen. Every spare filthy counter is covered in stacks of bottles and containers of something allegedly healthy: slippery elm, tiger balm, organic barley sprout powder, reishi extract, organic wheat juice. Perhaps hundreds more are stashed in boxes.
A smashing occurs downstairs, and I jump. “The white particleboard shelves will not make it,” Sharon announces with a shrug. “The boys are breaking them up. Not worth the trouble.”
Ally Enz is here, seated on a box, going through banker’s boxes of paper and binders. “This would all go faster if we could just toss all of the paper into the recycling,” she says as she shakes out a binder, seeing what falls from it. “But you never know what’s in these binders, or books that we might be able to reuse.” Three books are on an end table next to Ally: Office 2008 for Mac, Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, and Clutter Free by Kathi Lipp. “Folks usually know they have a problem,” she tells me.
She reaches the bottom of a box and pulls out a handful of small porcelain cats. They land in the trash. “We’re not doing anybody any favors saving these kinds of tchotchkes,” she says dismissively. “I’ve seen stuff like this in really nice houses, with Goodwill tags still on them. How many more times are we going to send them through the reuse cycle?”
Spend time around cleanouts, and a few patterns emerge. Seniors born during the Depression tend to hoard more. Ally mentions finding plastic bags containing plastic bags among those clients. Baby boomers, by contrast, tend to have more electronics and less stuff in general. “The real interesting cleanouts are the ones where people have lived in the same house for forty, fifty, sixty years. Interesting and emotionally hard. They even kept the kids’ artwork. Even baby books.” She pauses and gives me a sad smile. Nobody cares about your old baby books but your family. And sometimes they don’t care, either. “If they’re vintage, the baby books can go to the thrift store.”
After a lunch of Domino’s pizza, Empty the Nest’s movers and packers continue. I descend to the first level and the office, which has been largely emptied of furniture and is now a shell containing loose papers. Around the corner is a bedroom not much bigger than the queen-size bed and two end tables that fill it. The perimeter is jammed with boxes that must be sorted.
Amy Rimington, the lead packer on this cleanout, is seated on the edge of the bed, sorting through a box of envelopes and documents. “I’m a bit of an environmentalist,” she tells me. “One reason I joined Empty the Nest was to reduce, recycle.” She takes a large envelope from the box and reaches inside. It’s filled with old color photos that she sorts through like they’re playing cards before tossing them into the garbage. “If they’re vintage or postcards we’ll send them to the store. People like to collect them.” Next, she pulls out a stack of personal letters still in their envelopes, shakes them out to make sure there’s no money or other valuables inside, and then tosses the remainders into the recycling.
I step farther into the room and see that there are several similar boxes at the bottom of a closet still heavy with winter clothes and coats. They remind me, at least, that whoever lived here was something more than a consumer of supplements. She, too, had things that she valued more than a thrift store ever would. And now much of it is on the way to a paper mill and the massive garbage incinerator on the edge of downtown Minneapolis.
Amy dispels whatever sentimentality that my face has betrayed. “When you’re running a business, you can’t take the time to examine every piece of paper. I do four or five homes per week, and I throw away a lot more than I used to. Still, this is a particularly bad one.”
At the bottom of the first box of letters and photos is a blue leather purse. The color is faded, and the stitching is frayed. She drops it into the trash and pulls out a smaller handbag with a needlepoint cover. “I’d like to recycle this, but nobody’s going to want it. So I make up for it myself, and reduce, reduce, reduce.”
She reaches into the closet and pulls out several additional cardboard boxes. To her surprise, dozens of pairs of new shoes are stored behind them. “Hey, Carl,” she calls out. “New shoes! Can you box them up for our store?” The stout mover strides into the room, gazes into the closet, and says he’ll be right back. “This house had hundreds of shoes and inserts,” she adds. “Lady had OCD, dementia. Her new and vintage shoes will go to our store. The rest we’ll give to charities that sell them for funds.”
“What percent of the stuff in this room is reusable?”
“Fifteen to twenty percent. Shoes mostly.” Amy leans over to pick up a handwritten letter that must’ve fallen out of an envelope earlier. Uncharacteristically, she pauses to read a few words—and then tosses it into the recycling. “I sometimes get mad at people. They buy things for no other reason than it’s cheap. And they hold on to things that people gave to them. ‘Oh, it meant so much,’ ” she says sarcastically. “Well, what’re you going to do with it?” She shakes her head and opens up another box of photos and letters.
Multifamily homes emptied of stuff are assets. And they are becoming more common. People over age sixty-five will account for one quarter of the U.S. population by 2030, and senior housing demand is expected to grow with their population. That’s why Sharon Kadet is seated at a small coffee table in the corner of a windowless conference room at a Coldwell Banker real estate office in Minneapolis at nine thirty A.M. on a weekday. She’s been invited to pitch Empty the Nest to the agency’s roughly forty agents. Also invited: a move manager, an odor-elimination company, and a woman who creates hand-lettered real estate closing gifts.
But first there’s coffee. As Sharon sets out Empty the Nest brochures, a handsome realtor in a very expensive-looking blue suit approaches. He’s heard of Empty the Nest and wants to know more. But it’s not for a client. “My dad is aging. He’s not a hoarder, and we’re talking about an estate sale. But the problem is that nothing sells at estate sales anymore.”
Sharon has heard this before. “With an estate sale, you don’t know what you’re going to make. And you’ll still have a project, stuff left behind when you’re done.” They exchange business cards, and as he walks away, Sharon whispers to me, “This is so common. You’re here to talk to realtors about a solution, but it quickly becomes about their family. It’s just how we live. We don’t just keep what we need. I’m the same way.”
As we’re talking, a short, late-middle-aged realtor in a bright red coat approaches us. She introduces herself as Lesley Novich and tells me she’s sold homes for twenty years. She also knows Sharon and uses Empty the Nest. “As a realtor, you can tell people to declutter. But to do it yourself …” She shakes her head.
Sharon tells Linda that I’m writing about Empty the Nest and the secondhand-goods industry. Linda puts her hand over her heart. “Love it! When I moved out for college, my mother held a secondhand party for me. All that old heavy wooden furniture, we wanted it.”
Sharon lets out a big laugh almost too loud for the room. “Now nobody wants it.”
Linda leans toward Sharon as if she’s getting ready to confide. “My nephew, moving into a new apartment, wants all new. He’s happy with Target.”
Sharon, the blunt marketer, takes it in and pushes it right back out. “Target is purposeful. Secondhand is the experience.”
a The facility was recently rebranded as a Storage Mart.