Why Do We Love All Our Crap?

Yesterday, the wife and I drove into town and parked across the street from a big tag sale organized by the local Catholic church, and before walking around and looking at all the junk on display, I shot the pic above.

The tag sale must have attracted at least 50 vendors, all of whom were proudly displaying crap they had brought from their homes to sell before taking most of it back to their basements or garages or wherever they stored all the stuff they would then try to sell at the next tag sale.

Several years ago, I drove from Lexington, KY to my home in Massachusetts, staying off the interstate highway system and taking local roads all the way. I must have gone through thirty or so small towns in parts of Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey before finally grabbing I-95 and then I-90, and on the outskirts of every, single town I saw a large and evidently rather new walk-in storage facility where people could rent walk-in lockers to store all their junk.

The trade association which represents the owners of such enterprises estimates that together all these walk-in lockers cover some five billion square feet of space, of which somewhere around 90% is rented at any given point in time. That’s about three times the size of the area covered by Washington, D.C., and that estimate was from a few years ago.