It’s a rainy Monday rush hour on Highway 169 in Golden Valley, Minnesota, and the parking lot in front of the Empty the Nest thrift shop is relatively empty. It’s similar inside the store, which is usually swarmed with people shopping for sport. But that’s during the weekends. On Mondays, everything is 40 percent off, but many customers assume that the best deals disappeared over the weekend (they didn’t) or appear to be shopping for only what they need, not what they want.
Sharon Fischman, the owner and founder, is at the front in conversation with a man she introduces to me as Shane the Truck Driver. He wears a cowboy hat, jeans, a jean jacket, and cowboy boots with spurs. He is in the midst of conveying some interesting news: the Perkins restaurant across the street has just closed permanently, and he has permission to pull the restaurant’s sign from the dumpster where it now rests.
Sharon glances briefly into her store. It contains thousands of objects cleaned out of dozens of homes. More are on the way, via cleanouts that are scheduled weeks and months in advance. To make room for it all, Sharon will soon begin her painful weekly cull of unsold inventory. But first there’s the matter of that sign. “I’m going dumpster diving,” she tells me.
Shane and I follow her out the door and across the street. Sure enough, there’s a dumpster in the Perkins parking lot and it holds a ten-foot-long, five-foot-tall green plastic PERKINS RESTAURANT & BAKERY sign. “I want it,” she declares. Then she turns to Shane. “Do you think it’ll sell?”
Perhaps there’s a griddle aficionado somewhere in the western suburbs of Minneapolis who craves a pancake-house sign to fill up a basement wall. Or perhaps not. Shane smiles skeptically. “It’s kind of a beast, Sharon. I don’t even know where you’d put it in the store.”
She turns back to the sign with pursed lips. It’s barricaded into the dumpster by perfectly good tables and chairs from the restaurant (I recognize them from a lifetime of eating at Perkins). Merely creating a channel to extract the sign will be a brutal task. “Yeah, maybe. Maybe I can send my staff over to pick up some of this furniture. Let’s ask.”
Shane the Truck Driver examining perfectly good furniture discarded by a Perkins restaurant in Golden Valley, Minnesota.
We walk through the restaurant’s open door and find the remaining employees, including the now former manager, seated around a table drinking coffee and looking morose. Sharon says a friendly hello—she was a regular—and asks for the chairs and tables. The manager says she can have the metal shelves in the walk-in refrigerator, too, just so long as everything is gone “before the higher-ups come tomorrow.” We also get a few leftover brownies that Sharon asks me to place in my pockets and give to her staff when we get back to the store.
When we’re ready to leave, she hesitates and turns back to the manager. “Doesn’t Perkins want this stuff?”
It’s a reasonable question: Minnesota-based Perkins has nearly four hundred restaurant locations in the United States and Canada. Surely the furniture can be used in one of them? The manager shakes her head. “Perkins is closing five stores this year, and there’s no room in the warehouse for it. So we’re putting it in the dumpster.”
Back at Empty the Nest, Sharon busies herself selling the furniture she already possesses. Empty the Nest manages to sell 80 percent of the goods it acquires in home cleanouts in the store (a small percentage is also sold online). That’s an extraordinarily high number for the thrift industry, where selling even 50 percent of inventory is aspirational. Nonetheless, Empty the Nest’s unsold 20 percent isn’t a trifle. It takes up space and weighs tons.
As the late afternoon inclines into evening, Sharon attaches a sticker gun to a belt loop and begins moving methodically through the store, identifying that which won’t sell. This weekly ritual, this cleansing, runs into Tuesday. She places a green sticker on a white leather sectional sofa; later, an employee will post the sofa on OfferUp, the online flea market. She places a pink sticker on a heavy oak table with a deep gouge in one corner; soon, the crew will load it onto a truck bound for Bridging, a furniture “bank” that distributes household goods to people transitioning from poverty and homelessness.
“How do you decide?” I ask.
“Partly it’s based on gut and knowing what sells. Partly on how long things have been here. And I’m also making calls based on what’s coming in,” she says, referring to the home cleanouts. “I’ve seen [pictures of] what we’re getting.” In fact, a truck full of fresh cleanout property is parked against Empty the Nest’s loading dock, ready to be unloaded, priced, and displayed.
Sharon stares up at a tall, solid-wood television cabinet. “This has been here two months.” As she contemplates what color sticker it deserves, a customer approaches to say that she’d like to buy the white sectional sofa tagged for OfferUp. Sharon beams; last-minute reprieves are rare. She excuses herself to schedule a time for the sofa to be picked up, and I wander around the store, pausing to flip through a pile of black-and-white snapshots for sale out of a wicker basket. What were once “family photos” are now anonymous “vintage photos.” I wonder if family members ever find their relatives in these baskets.
Sharon admits to worrying about how to keep up with the demographics of America’s retiring baby boomers as they shed stuff into the secondhand economy. A few months earlier we had a late-afternoon breakfast at the now-closed Perkins. Toward the end of the meal, she recounted a recent meeting with her staff. What, they wanted to know, should be done with soiled and torn women’s clothing found in the course of a home cleanout? Should it be boxed up to be sold at Empty the Nest—where it almost certainly won’t sell? Donated to the Salvation Army? Thrown away?
“So, my heart says don’t throw it away,” Sharon explained. “But reality is it costs money for Empty the Nest. We pay for the boxes, we pay for the time and the transportation to get it donated. And are [the charities] going to be throwing it away, too?” If she’s going to run a profitable business that employs people and offers cleanouts and resale, the answer should be clear. But it’s painful.
Sharon isn’t alone in the struggle. At Goodwill, at the Salvation Army, at church and synagogue flea markets, near the bitter end of every garage sale, some version of the question asked by Sharon’s staff is muttered. The sought-after answer—“take your unwanted used item to this innovative, sustainable solution at no cost to yourself, and it will be reused indefinitely”—almost never exists. Meanwhile, the growing flood of stuff means that the economics of creating—much less sustaining—that innovative, sustainable solution are becoming harder. Consumers in need of reassurance that their stuff is wanted and useful must, at some point, accept the idea that every object dies.
“I have a theory,” I told her. “Over time, as Empty the Nest grows, you’ll throw away more.”
“So that’s the struggle,” she answered. “The throwing. The throwing away.”
“People really want to know their stuff is reused.”
“Exactly!”
“It’s primal.”
“Yes, it is. And I want to walk my walk.”
So what is to be done?
In one important respect, nothing. Sharon and the rest of the existing secondhand industry, whether it’s Goodwill or rag makers, are sustainable and profitable already. Their models of reuse predate the environmental movement, the decluttering fad, and the oncoming flood of unwanted stuff from baby boomers. They don’t need to be reinvented, recalibrated, or regulated. If anything, they should be encouraged and studied.
Nonetheless, Empty the Nest and its counterparts aren’t sufficient to solve the bundle of emotional, financial, and environmental challenges posed by humanity’s avalanche of unwanted stuff. Other answers are needed.
Recycling—the process of turning old stuff into new raw materials for making more new stuff—is a good one. But as I wrote in Junkyard Planet, recycling is imperfect, especially as an environmental solution. First, nothing is 100 percent recyclable, no matter what the manufacturer might say (for example, half of the roughly thirty metals in the average smartphone are basically unrecyclable). Most complex objects—from smartphones to sofas—are a combination of recyclable and nonrecyclable components, and the financial and environmental costs of extracting the former often make landfilling or incineration the more responsible option.
That’s not the only problem. A book manufactured from recycled paper uses less energy and fewer raw materials than one made from virgin paper pulp. But it still requires an expenditure of energy and raw materials. In fact, by easing consumer concerns over the environmental impact of consuming, and lowering the overall cost of raw materials (recycled raw materials compete directly with virgin), recycling can actually contribute to more consumption.1 There’s a reason that “recycling” is the third “R” in the familiar “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” environmental mantra: it’s the third best (or worst) thing you can do with stuff. When a consumer brand like Coca-Cola advertises the recyclability of its products, it’s not promoting sustainability. It’s helping sustainably minded consumers assuage their guilt.
Another increasingly popular solution (in affluent countries, at least) is located further up the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” hierarchy: minimalism. Rather than live a lifestyle in which shopping is sport and homes are cluttered with stuff, minimalists pare down their possessions to the bare necessities and seek entertainment away from Amazon and the shopping mall. Many of the cleanout professionals I met during the course of reporting this book admitted to adopting some degree of minimalist practice after regular exposure to the pervasive excess of stuff. Jill Freeman, the professional sorter who works with Gentle Transitions in Minneapolis, was straightforward when I asked what her home looks like: “We don’t buy stuff. We don’t bring things home. We already have everything we need.” It’s an approach that she tries to impart to others. She explained to me that rather than give physical gifts for weddings and other occasions, she prefers to give cash or “experiences,” like restaurant gift certificates.
I’m sympathetic. Though I’ve never been much of a shopper, the experience of reporting this book—days spent in thrift shops and attending home cleanouts—made me reassess my own consumption and hoarding. The things that I value, I quickly realized, generally aren’t valuable to anyone but me. Once I had that understanding, I started letting go and curtailing what I was buying in the first place.
It’d be nice to think that lots of Americans, in particular, would have the same epiphany (perhaps by reading this book?). Certain trends are positive. For example, the smartphone has given billions of people around the world a reason not to buy a camera, a television, a home stereo, a laptop, DVDs, CDs, cassette tapes, videotapes, or photo albums (in a generation, paper snapshots will be as relevant as painted portraits). Yes, dematerialization, as the phenomenon is known, will leave behind lots of obsolete, hard-to-recycle smartphones. But compared with piles of VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, vinyl records, snapshots, landline telephones, VCRs, and other smartphone-replaced stuff that turns up—mostly unwanted—at Goodwills, it’s genuine progress.
Nonetheless, neither the smartphone nor the popularity of minimalist lifestyles or other individual-based consumption choices can overcome two immovable facts. First, despite being the subject of bestselling how-to books around the world, minimalism (and the Japanese “art” of decluttering) hasn’t made much of an impact on the world’s stuff. Arguably, it’s increased it by giving folks an incentive (empty house!) to buy more. Second, consumption-based economies and lifestyles aren’t going away—even in affluent economies where environmental consciousness runs high.
For example, in the early 2010s, sociologists, economists, and marketers noticed that millennials—a generation born between the early 1980s and late 1990s—were buying far fewer cars and homes than their predecessors. According to this popular narrative, millennials were instead embracing the new sharing economy and services like Uber’s ride shares and Airbnb’s home shares. Rather than buy stuff, they preferred to buy experiences like travel. The optimistic interpretation, widely disseminated in mainstream media, suggested that the willingness to share rather than own was inspired in part by climate change and growing environmental consciousness.
However, recent studies suggest that the millennial penchant for sharing over ownership is actually about a shortage of money. High urban rents, backbreaking student loans, and the long shadow of the 2008 financial crisis have crimped millennials’ ability to make the big purchases their parents considered a rite of passage. Put more money into millennial pockets and they, too, will acquire stuff. Indeed, a 2018 Bank of America survey of two thousand adults found that 72 percent of millennials consider home ownership a “top priority,” and ranked it over travel, getting married, and having children.2 Another consumer survey found that, despite their embrace of ride sharing, 75 percent of millennials who don’t own a car aspire to own one.3 Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, an ongoing European Union research project into the sharing economy finds that millennials are “interested in sharing platforms only when platforms offered a more cost-effective alternative to traditional services.”4 In this way, at least, millennial consumers in Europe and the United States aren’t that much different from their resource-poor developing-world counterparts. Both sets aspire to consume.
That doesn’t mean humanity is helpless against the rising tide of unwanted secondhand. But it does mean we need to be more creative with the kinds of questions we ask about that tide. For example, when viewing a home that’s cluttered with stuff bound for the dumpster, the question shouldn’t just be “What do we do with it?” It also needs to be “How do we make sure homes fill up with stuff that can eventually be resold at thrift stores?” Jill Freeman reframed the problem for me over coffee: “If you want to have an estate sale, it isn’t about having enough stuff. It’s about having enough to sell.” Put differently: Goodwill simply isn’t capable of selling a used shirt that pills after two washes; Empty the Nest can’t move—much less sell—a set of Ikea shelves made from particleboard held together by glue.
From that perspective, the crisis of stuff didn’t cause Grandma’s house to fill with property bound for the dumpster. Rather, it’s a long-brewing crisis of quality.
The remaining chapters of this book will examine steps that can be taken to reverse this crisis of quality and ensure that more stuff flows into the secondhand economy. Think of it as a program to boost the fortunes of thrift stores, rag makers, and other stalwarts of used stuff.
Only the first two steps—initiatives designed to boost product longevity and repairability—require direct intervention by government. And those interventions are relatively minimal, intended to encourage consumers and manufacturers to act in ways that they already consciously or unconsciously think is in their best interests. One of those interests is lowering the cost of ownership for stuff ranging from refrigerators to sweaters. Nudging consumers to buy longer-lasting, more durable, and repairable products is one method to do that. Along the way, such nudges will produce more inventory for the secondhand market—meaning less stuff overflowing our homes.
The third and final step might be the most difficult. It asks consumers, journalists, corporations, and government regulators to embrace the idea that what they view as waste, others view as an opportunity. As I’ll show in this book’s final chapter, prejudices—sometimes racial, sometimes economic, always ignorant—have a stubborn and long-standing history of inhibiting reasonable people from seeing the possibility of secondhand goods in circumstances different from their own. Overcoming a crisis of quality means accepting that there are people who can see quality where you don’t.
Obviously, no single solution—or combination of solutions—will be enough to prevent homes from filling up with unwanted stuff. Thrift stores will continue to throw out goods. Cleanout businesses will struggle to find homes for collectibles that are no longer collectible. Fashion will transform the most durable of garments and the sturdiest of dining room tables into wastes of space that nobody wants. But amid the pessimistic piles of stuff, entrepreneurs are finding ways to make a living from the leftovers. They are making business plans, employing friends and family, and investing themselves and their capital into a secondhand economy that already exists, and one they’re gambling is just around the corner. I think they’re onto something, and they could use a little help from all of us to achieve it.