I do home clean outs and estate sales. The amount of old and expired pantry goods we have to throw away is mind blowing. The videos are photos are beautiful but I worry they contribute to the already massive issue of food waste in this country.
Really interesting insights. I don’t follow organizing influencers with the clear plastic bins, but I see this in the wild, especially at Costco. There is an ongoing war in my house between the stockers-up (no names) and the declutterer (me). I believe these are behavior patterns rooted in childhood, and whether we grew up with scarcity or abundance.
The way we set up home is absolutely related to our childhood experiences and psychology. I'm dying for a therapist to dive deeply into this and give us some interpretations!
I find influencer culture utterly fascinating, and the “container for a container” phenomenon really interesting.
Putting stuff in containers makes sense if you’re someone who shops at the bulk bin stores and gets stuff that literally don’t have a container to begin with.
But it’s environmentally (and perhaps time?) wasteful to move cereal or pasta from one box to another box.
I fully appreciate the quest to live in a more beautiful space, so I can appreciate the drive to “glow up” the pantry. But the container practice kindof echoes some sort of virtue signalling that I think ends up with most of us just feeling like failures if we can’t manage to keep our cupboards as pristine as a Pinterest board. If you can, by all means, fill your boots (and your containers.) Life’s tough and you need to find joy where you can and hold tight.
But I think influencer culture is in a molting period. It’s been well documented of influencers going broke, or suffering burn out, or not actually living the way they prescribe on their highly curated platforms. It’s an untenable reality and the cracks are starting to show.
I’m not petitioning we all live in our own squalor and never aspire for anything more, but a lot of these trends are so aspirational, a mere mortal who needs to balance the rest of life (without a celebrity’s budget and staff) can quickly be made to feel less than if the beds aren’t perfectly made and the sundries not arranged in a calming colour pattern.
(Wow, something struck a chord here, so I apologize for the TL;DR! )
Influencer culture is indeed a complex phenomenon, and the cracks are definitely starting to show. Thank you for your thoughts -- I agree there are so many angles to the container-ization drive!
Agree with you, Erin. Containers only as necessary (i.e. for bulk, messy things like sugar). As for the rest, it's just for show, in a disturbingly over-the-top excessive performative way. I refuse to waste food, I hate wasting time, and I avoid plastics - the 'show' isn't for me, and it's concerning for our culture.
Yes, Lor. It’s a wasteful and expensive trend that seems to be a tough one to keep up. I mean, if that’s someone’s joy, I’m not about to yuck their yum, but I wonder how many people can keep up these appearances? Probably not many, and then we just feel worse about ourselves, not better.
100% agree. I read The Home Edit Life hoping for some good tips, and instead of the images being soothing or aspirational, I ended up with anxiety! I find Rebecca's tips are more helpful for my lifestyle.
I’m of the no-backstock and no-plastic bin mindset. I also now have two young adult children who live overseas and I live alone in a one-bedroom apartment (recently downsized after dropping my youngest at Uni in New Zealand). So it’s more reasonable for me not to have extras in the house. I just wrote about the scarcity mindset of keeping unnecessary just-in-case items too - something I used to struggle with myself!
As a home organizer also, I’ve been influenced by working with a client with hoarding disorder in a small apartment and two storage units for almost a year now. She had hired an organizing pro previously who she said had her buy tons of the clear plastic bins and just sorted some things into the bins. Unfortunately they didn’t seem to do any decluttering or talking through what was leading to the hoarding.
I knew I didn’t like that so so so many influencers and celebrity organizers were posting the huge pantries with all of the new plastic and other matching bins like their own little store but hadn’t thought about how it was also showcasing the abundance. But that really makes sense. As someone who is and works with clients who are at least somewhat budget-conscious and concerned about the ridiculous amount of plastic and waste we are seeing, those posts have always rubbed me the wrong way, despite how beautiful they can look.
I feel like it also sets an unreasonable standard and turns home organization into an aesthetically pleasing rather than functional endeavor. (I realize it can be both but it often seems more about pretty spaces.)
Thank you for sharing this experience. I get sad when I see organizers who don’t help with decluttering or work through what’s going on in a situation where someone is accumulating in an unhealthy way. I know not everyone is ready to tackle these topics, but adding bins isn’t going to help.
I agree! I’ve actually started telling people I help declutter instead of saying I’m a home organizer first just to emphasize it’s not just about cute bins and insta-worthy storage.
She does, and my son has been loving it the last 4 years! I wish I had residency in NZ but never got it when I was married to a Kiwi in the US. I’ll just have to wait until my half-Kiwi children are able to get me in on the parent visa 🙂. It has always felt like a 2nd home to me the last 25 years - the people are great! Kia Ora (I need to learn Māori!)
Oh this is scary! I don't live in the US (but grew up there, in a previous century), and it is not the European Way to have big box stores and shop "only" once a week. Yet I still have a well-stocked pantry (some glass jars and plastic bins) and shelves in the cellar with extra / replacement goods (no plastic storage containers though).
I think I "hoard" stuff because – legit– shop hours here are such that if you don't have xyz on hand, you can't just run out and pick one up. Sundays and holidays are generally closed; after 6:30 pm weekdays, you have to get in the car extra and after 8 pm, forget it. If you go into a Swiss grocery store the day before a long weekend or a holiday, you will think everyone is prepping for the end of worlds. It's madness.
It’s similar where I live in the Dominican Republic—shop hours are odd and vary between stores, and often even the bigger grocery store doesn’t have an item—which leads to my “prepper mentality” husband buying random stuff like dill whenever he sees it and then we have to build a whole meal around it and he ends up back at the store 😂
It’s still like that? I studied in Germany back in 1994 and got frustrated with the shopping hours too. I’ve traveled to Europe a few times in recent years but I don’t think I ever tried to shop later in the day.
Well, shop hours *have* improved (grocery stores open till 8pm!) but the so-called liberalization is nothing a North American would recognize. One can get a half-dozen eggs, a bag of Haribo, a liter of milk at a gas station shop (open till 10 or 11pm). The Turkish grocer (fresh fruit and veg! yogurt! börek!) in the next town is open Sundays; not sure what the local legislation is on that (family business, maybe?). And mini-supermarkets (where the selection is mini) in train stations and at the airport are allowed to be open Sundays and holidays… but without a supporting supply chain, pickings tend to be slim.
I need to order and display whatever I’ve got stocked at home properly. I need the visualisation, otherwise my ADHD brain will forget its there. So old glass jars get used for things like rice and pasta- also just a little bit safer to store in closed containers than opened boxes or bags. And I can easily see when I am running out. But I only have two kitchen drawers dedicated to “pantry” space. Feels like a good balance; limited space to fill up, but whatever is there is sorted and stored so I have a good overview.
I hate food waste and eat some leftovers for one of my meals pretty much daily. “Girl dinner” is just trying to not waste food, people!
I am lucky to live within walking distance of a deer park. Whenever I have fruit and veggies I can’t consume for whatever reason, I can feed it to them. Thats so much more fun than restocking a bunch of clear bins!
We are mostly plant-based in our house, so that means regular grocery store trips for fresh produce—with the occasional stocking of frozen produce (our power goes out with some [ir]regularity, so stocking the freezer too much doesn’t make good economic sense for us).
But where we get caught up in this is our pantry. My spouse was diagnosed with celiac disease nearly 3 years ago (in our mid-40s!), so we HAVE to stock up on those items. Nuts.com and Edison Grainery deliveries are on regular rotation in our home. Bags (1 and 5 pound) arrive with certified GF grains, legumes, dried fruits, and more. We feel like we HAVE to stock up on these because we CANNOT rely on our one grocery store (7,000-person mountain town) to have them.
But we’ve resisted the re-storing culture of these (even though it would be so pretty and actually easier to identify a lot of things). Instead, we leave the items in the zip-top plastic bags they come in as we use them…and then re-use the bags as our under-counter trash bags for our kitchen. It means taking the trash out every other day—at least!—but the bags/containers are reused at least once. And we haven’t bought plastic bins or trash bags on top of them.
This is a fascinating observation. The spectrum of "tupperware as thriftiness" to "plastic bins as displays of abundance" is gonna have me pondering for a long time.
I've been at several points along this spectrum, which I like to think has been driven by practicality but maybe the reality has been less so?
- Childhood in a big family: parents did monthly stockups to save money buying bulk; things were stored in an organized fashion but it wasn't fancy
- Pre-pandemic, normal life: weekly shops for practicality, any special food containers were about extending freshness / being able to find things, and sometimes because they were pretty
- Pre-pandemic, debilitating chronic illness: someone else did weekly shops and cooking so we could survive; things were organized because they organized it and I will forever be grateful
- During pandemic: shopped and stocked up as infrequently as possible to avoid exposure + lived in rural environment with no local options; "running out to the store" was a half-day project, and things were stored in glass jars to protect them from mice
- Post-pandemic: had to re-learn how to shop more frequently and not stock up after moving back to the city, lol
- Current: I shop weekly and meal prep purely for sanity reasons while managing a business + chronic illness. I've discovered that labeling the stuff I've prepped and put in the fridge, using masking tape and a sharpie, makes me feel less frazzled during the week. I use glass containers for health reasons. As a result my fridge probably looks influencer-ish? I have a row of mason jars on an open shelf because it looks pretty and protects my dry goods from mice, ants, and pantry moths. I have shared pics of my fridge with my friends from the joy of finally figuring out a system that feels sustainable. But I have no interest in posting pics of it on social media for all the world to see, ha!
I also think there's an interesting tension between wanting things to be beautiful for beauty's sake, and wanting things to be beautiful for the gram. A life surrounded by as much beauty as you can sustainably create is lovely, and will be deeply idiosyncratic. A life curated for the gram is how we get pantries (and homes) that all look the same.
Once you experience pantry moths, glass jars are essential! It sounds like you have a good system. I also label with tape, although my husband loves his label maker 😆
I live in Ontario and we have Bulk Barns which is where you can get most things from a bin at any quantity you want. (Bring you own jars and save $ as well!). I pretty much get everything there and it’s amazing at saving your pantry from holding onto a bag of something you only needed a tbsp of. I make bulk (Costco) exceptions for toilet paper because I do not want to be running out regularly for that personally. I prefer to go to the smaller specialized grocery store weekly for fresh produce and only get that which we know we will consume.
There is one problem with stocking up, or with getting a huge quantity of something at Costco. Or at least I have the problem—curious if others do too. The issue I have is that if I buy, say, a pack of 1000 coffee filters, some part of my brain quits paying attention to whether or not we have coffee filters—and then it’s a shock when we use the last one and we have to use folded paper towel until somebody remembers to buy more filters.
There’s a weird “perpetual availability” blinder when I buy multi packs of things like toothpaste, paper goods, etc.
I hate running out of things like loo paper, washing up liquid and washing powder so I bulk buy - also like to always have a stash of pasta, salt, tinned tomatoes, anchovies etc.
My system is based primarily on my dislike of 1) having to do anything spontaneously (like running out to the store immediately because we've unexpectedly run out of a crucial item) and 2) going into a physical store (sensory nightmare for me, especially if it's large, crowded, or has fluorescent lights - ordering online is a godsend, but also means needing to factor in shipping times, especially since we no longer use Amazon). But we also have limited space to store stuff and I don't like hunting for items in a crowded pantry, plus, I've found that having a huge backstock of something at home is counterproductive, because it means I end up forgetting that it will need to be rebought at some point... until the last of it has suddenly somehow gotten used up. What I do is always have one extra in stock of crucial items--so when one gets used up, the backup gets opened and it goes back on the shopping list. For anything else, I'm pretty good about keeping track of when it's running low. If we ever do (eep) run out of something crucial, my husband doesn't share my horror of either physical stores or spontaneous errands, so he handles the weekly grocery trips and is my backup plan if an emergency store trip needs to happen.
I love things being neat, but I can never have that kind of social media approved neatly stacked pantry. It seems like they are buying a bunch of the same thing for it to look so uniformed and nice. Things in my fridge would expiry before I could finish them if I tried to do the same.
i absolutely agree and therein lies the problem with all those bins especially in the fridge. I'm only one here, but I haven't the space for bins and nonsense in the fridge, it's for keeping food cold, not to look nice. Like Emika said, things would expire before we could use them.
Right. Those bins! I bet those people have really huge fridge. Loaded folks. 🤭🤭🤭Some even decorate the fridge with vegetable in some vase-like container like flowers in a vase.
Love this. I wish the ease of just grabbing 1-2 things was possible for people working multiple jobs or living with no free time. This semblance of “order” feels like a response to a society where ease is made so hard - especially under capitalism. It makes sense that people look for these ways to feel some practical control.
I was scrolling looking for this comment. I think the stocking up phenomenon has a lot to do with time scarcity, and the fact that most of us can't just pop out to the store daily. In a more leisurely culture where a shop is a walk away and you're not working & parenting in isolation non-stop, sure, it would be lovely to only keep on hand what you need. But in the U.S., if I have an hour to spare on a weekday, the last way I want to spend it is running to Target. I see the stocking up as defense against having to spend your scarce free time shopping.
You articulated exactly what I was trying to say! Yes, a large variation of this stocking-up is simply trying to buy time in a time-scare reality (particularly for overworked folks)
I loved that Decoder Ring episode! And the detail about how they sold the new product to homemakers at parties was to fill one with liquid and toss it across the room. Brilliant!
I don’t have a large enough home/pantry to stock up on everything, but I still do with TP, paper towels, diapers, and wipes from Costco. It’s a scarcity mindset thing. What if I run out? The world will come crashing down! Never mind that I live walking distance from a Walgreens (and in a major city with many other stores nearby) and could get any of those things quickly if I really needed them…
I’m worried this take is slightly along the veins of regressive nostalgia…. what stores did people just pop into on a daily basis and where? Certainly not for rural people of any kind. I don’t know anyone in the US unless you’re in some very urban setting that has a local enough grocery store they can just pop into - that wasn’t the case in the 80s & 90s I grew up in and it’s not now. Shopping at corporate grocery stores with their over stocked too many choices shelves simply is not a pleasure able experience. Hence shopping once a week. Not to mention the gender care gap involved in procuring said grocery items to begin with. Influencer culture aside - the design of our communities and our broken agricultural system are far more the problems here.
Thanks for bringing this up. Being able to pop out to the store presupposes a certain kind of life. And also, as a kid some of my most tedious memories were of sitting in the car doing endless errands with my mom. Reducing errands isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I do home clean outs and estate sales. The amount of old and expired pantry goods we have to throw away is mind blowing. The videos are photos are beautiful but I worry they contribute to the already massive issue of food waste in this country.
I completely agree!
Really interesting insights. I don’t follow organizing influencers with the clear plastic bins, but I see this in the wild, especially at Costco. There is an ongoing war in my house between the stockers-up (no names) and the declutterer (me). I believe these are behavior patterns rooted in childhood, and whether we grew up with scarcity or abundance.
The way we set up home is absolutely related to our childhood experiences and psychology. I'm dying for a therapist to dive deeply into this and give us some interpretations!
I find influencer culture utterly fascinating, and the “container for a container” phenomenon really interesting.
Putting stuff in containers makes sense if you’re someone who shops at the bulk bin stores and gets stuff that literally don’t have a container to begin with.
But it’s environmentally (and perhaps time?) wasteful to move cereal or pasta from one box to another box.
I fully appreciate the quest to live in a more beautiful space, so I can appreciate the drive to “glow up” the pantry. But the container practice kindof echoes some sort of virtue signalling that I think ends up with most of us just feeling like failures if we can’t manage to keep our cupboards as pristine as a Pinterest board. If you can, by all means, fill your boots (and your containers.) Life’s tough and you need to find joy where you can and hold tight.
But I think influencer culture is in a molting period. It’s been well documented of influencers going broke, or suffering burn out, or not actually living the way they prescribe on their highly curated platforms. It’s an untenable reality and the cracks are starting to show.
I’m not petitioning we all live in our own squalor and never aspire for anything more, but a lot of these trends are so aspirational, a mere mortal who needs to balance the rest of life (without a celebrity’s budget and staff) can quickly be made to feel less than if the beds aren’t perfectly made and the sundries not arranged in a calming colour pattern.
(Wow, something struck a chord here, so I apologize for the TL;DR! )
Influencer culture is indeed a complex phenomenon, and the cracks are definitely starting to show. Thank you for your thoughts -- I agree there are so many angles to the container-ization drive!
Agree with you, Erin. Containers only as necessary (i.e. for bulk, messy things like sugar). As for the rest, it's just for show, in a disturbingly over-the-top excessive performative way. I refuse to waste food, I hate wasting time, and I avoid plastics - the 'show' isn't for me, and it's concerning for our culture.
Yes, Lor. It’s a wasteful and expensive trend that seems to be a tough one to keep up. I mean, if that’s someone’s joy, I’m not about to yuck their yum, but I wonder how many people can keep up these appearances? Probably not many, and then we just feel worse about ourselves, not better.
100% agree. I read The Home Edit Life hoping for some good tips, and instead of the images being soothing or aspirational, I ended up with anxiety! I find Rebecca's tips are more helpful for my lifestyle.
Thank you, Sara! I’m glad you’re finding my work helpful
I’m of the no-backstock and no-plastic bin mindset. I also now have two young adult children who live overseas and I live alone in a one-bedroom apartment (recently downsized after dropping my youngest at Uni in New Zealand). So it’s more reasonable for me not to have extras in the house. I just wrote about the scarcity mindset of keeping unnecessary just-in-case items too - something I used to struggle with myself!
As a home organizer also, I’ve been influenced by working with a client with hoarding disorder in a small apartment and two storage units for almost a year now. She had hired an organizing pro previously who she said had her buy tons of the clear plastic bins and just sorted some things into the bins. Unfortunately they didn’t seem to do any decluttering or talking through what was leading to the hoarding.
I knew I didn’t like that so so so many influencers and celebrity organizers were posting the huge pantries with all of the new plastic and other matching bins like their own little store but hadn’t thought about how it was also showcasing the abundance. But that really makes sense. As someone who is and works with clients who are at least somewhat budget-conscious and concerned about the ridiculous amount of plastic and waste we are seeing, those posts have always rubbed me the wrong way, despite how beautiful they can look.
I feel like it also sets an unreasonable standard and turns home organization into an aesthetically pleasing rather than functional endeavor. (I realize it can be both but it often seems more about pretty spaces.)
Thank you for sharing this experience. I get sad when I see organizers who don’t help with decluttering or work through what’s going on in a situation where someone is accumulating in an unhealthy way. I know not everyone is ready to tackle these topics, but adding bins isn’t going to help.
I agree! I’ve actually started telling people I help declutter instead of saying I’m a home organizer first just to emphasize it’s not just about cute bins and insta-worthy storage.
I agree! (Also chiming in to say haere mai to your daughter; I hope she loves it here.)
She does, and my son has been loving it the last 4 years! I wish I had residency in NZ but never got it when I was married to a Kiwi in the US. I’ll just have to wait until my half-Kiwi children are able to get me in on the parent visa 🙂. It has always felt like a 2nd home to me the last 25 years - the people are great! Kia Ora (I need to learn Māori!)
Oh this is scary! I don't live in the US (but grew up there, in a previous century), and it is not the European Way to have big box stores and shop "only" once a week. Yet I still have a well-stocked pantry (some glass jars and plastic bins) and shelves in the cellar with extra / replacement goods (no plastic storage containers though).
I think I "hoard" stuff because – legit– shop hours here are such that if you don't have xyz on hand, you can't just run out and pick one up. Sundays and holidays are generally closed; after 6:30 pm weekdays, you have to get in the car extra and after 8 pm, forget it. If you go into a Swiss grocery store the day before a long weekend or a holiday, you will think everyone is prepping for the end of worlds. It's madness.
It’s similar where I live in the Dominican Republic—shop hours are odd and vary between stores, and often even the bigger grocery store doesn’t have an item—which leads to my “prepper mentality” husband buying random stuff like dill whenever he sees it and then we have to build a whole meal around it and he ends up back at the store 😂
It’s still like that? I studied in Germany back in 1994 and got frustrated with the shopping hours too. I’ve traveled to Europe a few times in recent years but I don’t think I ever tried to shop later in the day.
Well, shop hours *have* improved (grocery stores open till 8pm!) but the so-called liberalization is nothing a North American would recognize. One can get a half-dozen eggs, a bag of Haribo, a liter of milk at a gas station shop (open till 10 or 11pm). The Turkish grocer (fresh fruit and veg! yogurt! börek!) in the next town is open Sundays; not sure what the local legislation is on that (family business, maybe?). And mini-supermarkets (where the selection is mini) in train stations and at the airport are allowed to be open Sundays and holidays… but without a supporting supply chain, pickings tend to be slim.
oh, yeah, and the groceries have *stopped* closing between 12 and 1:30 for lunch. 😱
I need to order and display whatever I’ve got stocked at home properly. I need the visualisation, otherwise my ADHD brain will forget its there. So old glass jars get used for things like rice and pasta- also just a little bit safer to store in closed containers than opened boxes or bags. And I can easily see when I am running out. But I only have two kitchen drawers dedicated to “pantry” space. Feels like a good balance; limited space to fill up, but whatever is there is sorted and stored so I have a good overview.
I hate food waste and eat some leftovers for one of my meals pretty much daily. “Girl dinner” is just trying to not waste food, people!
I am lucky to live within walking distance of a deer park. Whenever I have fruit and veggies I can’t consume for whatever reason, I can feed it to them. Thats so much more fun than restocking a bunch of clear bins!
Oh my gosh, a deer park?!
We are mostly plant-based in our house, so that means regular grocery store trips for fresh produce—with the occasional stocking of frozen produce (our power goes out with some [ir]regularity, so stocking the freezer too much doesn’t make good economic sense for us).
But where we get caught up in this is our pantry. My spouse was diagnosed with celiac disease nearly 3 years ago (in our mid-40s!), so we HAVE to stock up on those items. Nuts.com and Edison Grainery deliveries are on regular rotation in our home. Bags (1 and 5 pound) arrive with certified GF grains, legumes, dried fruits, and more. We feel like we HAVE to stock up on these because we CANNOT rely on our one grocery store (7,000-person mountain town) to have them.
But we’ve resisted the re-storing culture of these (even though it would be so pretty and actually easier to identify a lot of things). Instead, we leave the items in the zip-top plastic bags they come in as we use them…and then re-use the bags as our under-counter trash bags for our kitchen. It means taking the trash out every other day—at least!—but the bags/containers are reused at least once. And we haven’t bought plastic bins or trash bags on top of them.
This is a fascinating observation. The spectrum of "tupperware as thriftiness" to "plastic bins as displays of abundance" is gonna have me pondering for a long time.
I've been at several points along this spectrum, which I like to think has been driven by practicality but maybe the reality has been less so?
- Childhood in a big family: parents did monthly stockups to save money buying bulk; things were stored in an organized fashion but it wasn't fancy
- Pre-pandemic, normal life: weekly shops for practicality, any special food containers were about extending freshness / being able to find things, and sometimes because they were pretty
- Pre-pandemic, debilitating chronic illness: someone else did weekly shops and cooking so we could survive; things were organized because they organized it and I will forever be grateful
- During pandemic: shopped and stocked up as infrequently as possible to avoid exposure + lived in rural environment with no local options; "running out to the store" was a half-day project, and things were stored in glass jars to protect them from mice
- Post-pandemic: had to re-learn how to shop more frequently and not stock up after moving back to the city, lol
- Current: I shop weekly and meal prep purely for sanity reasons while managing a business + chronic illness. I've discovered that labeling the stuff I've prepped and put in the fridge, using masking tape and a sharpie, makes me feel less frazzled during the week. I use glass containers for health reasons. As a result my fridge probably looks influencer-ish? I have a row of mason jars on an open shelf because it looks pretty and protects my dry goods from mice, ants, and pantry moths. I have shared pics of my fridge with my friends from the joy of finally figuring out a system that feels sustainable. But I have no interest in posting pics of it on social media for all the world to see, ha!
I also think there's an interesting tension between wanting things to be beautiful for beauty's sake, and wanting things to be beautiful for the gram. A life surrounded by as much beauty as you can sustainably create is lovely, and will be deeply idiosyncratic. A life curated for the gram is how we get pantries (and homes) that all look the same.
Thoughtful insights! I envy your meal prep system—I’m still working on that. Beauty for its own sake vs the gram is an important distinction, I agree.
Once you experience pantry moths, glass jars are essential! It sounds like you have a good system. I also label with tape, although my husband loves his label maker 😆
I live in Ontario and we have Bulk Barns which is where you can get most things from a bin at any quantity you want. (Bring you own jars and save $ as well!). I pretty much get everything there and it’s amazing at saving your pantry from holding onto a bag of something you only needed a tbsp of. I make bulk (Costco) exceptions for toilet paper because I do not want to be running out regularly for that personally. I prefer to go to the smaller specialized grocery store weekly for fresh produce and only get that which we know we will consume.
There is one problem with stocking up, or with getting a huge quantity of something at Costco. Or at least I have the problem—curious if others do too. The issue I have is that if I buy, say, a pack of 1000 coffee filters, some part of my brain quits paying attention to whether or not we have coffee filters—and then it’s a shock when we use the last one and we have to use folded paper towel until somebody remembers to buy more filters.
There’s a weird “perpetual availability” blinder when I buy multi packs of things like toothpaste, paper goods, etc.
Yes! That happens with my toilet paper supply -- we so rarely run out that when we do it's always an emergency
I hate running out of things like loo paper, washing up liquid and washing powder so I bulk buy - also like to always have a stash of pasta, salt, tinned tomatoes, anchovies etc.
My system is based primarily on my dislike of 1) having to do anything spontaneously (like running out to the store immediately because we've unexpectedly run out of a crucial item) and 2) going into a physical store (sensory nightmare for me, especially if it's large, crowded, or has fluorescent lights - ordering online is a godsend, but also means needing to factor in shipping times, especially since we no longer use Amazon). But we also have limited space to store stuff and I don't like hunting for items in a crowded pantry, plus, I've found that having a huge backstock of something at home is counterproductive, because it means I end up forgetting that it will need to be rebought at some point... until the last of it has suddenly somehow gotten used up. What I do is always have one extra in stock of crucial items--so when one gets used up, the backup gets opened and it goes back on the shopping list. For anything else, I'm pretty good about keeping track of when it's running low. If we ever do (eep) run out of something crucial, my husband doesn't share my horror of either physical stores or spontaneous errands, so he handles the weekly grocery trips and is my backup plan if an emergency store trip needs to happen.
This seems like a good plan. Thank you for sharing, Zoe!
I love things being neat, but I can never have that kind of social media approved neatly stacked pantry. It seems like they are buying a bunch of the same thing for it to look so uniformed and nice. Things in my fridge would expiry before I could finish them if I tried to do the same.
When you're at the point of buying more things just so it all "matches" or fills the acrylic bin, it crosses the line for me!
i absolutely agree and therein lies the problem with all those bins especially in the fridge. I'm only one here, but I haven't the space for bins and nonsense in the fridge, it's for keeping food cold, not to look nice. Like Emika said, things would expire before we could use them.
No Nonsense in the Fridge = a fabulous motto
Right. Those bins! I bet those people have really huge fridge. Loaded folks. 🤭🤭🤭Some even decorate the fridge with vegetable in some vase-like container like flowers in a vase.
Yeah, minimalist has a new definition now. Buying more stuff to look more minimalist.
You are so right!
Love this. I wish the ease of just grabbing 1-2 things was possible for people working multiple jobs or living with no free time. This semblance of “order” feels like a response to a society where ease is made so hard - especially under capitalism. It makes sense that people look for these ways to feel some practical control.
I was scrolling looking for this comment. I think the stocking up phenomenon has a lot to do with time scarcity, and the fact that most of us can't just pop out to the store daily. In a more leisurely culture where a shop is a walk away and you're not working & parenting in isolation non-stop, sure, it would be lovely to only keep on hand what you need. But in the U.S., if I have an hour to spare on a weekday, the last way I want to spend it is running to Target. I see the stocking up as defense against having to spend your scarce free time shopping.
You articulated exactly what I was trying to say! Yes, a large variation of this stocking-up is simply trying to buy time in a time-scare reality (particularly for overworked folks)
I loved that Decoder Ring episode! And the detail about how they sold the new product to homemakers at parties was to fill one with liquid and toss it across the room. Brilliant!
I don’t have a large enough home/pantry to stock up on everything, but I still do with TP, paper towels, diapers, and wipes from Costco. It’s a scarcity mindset thing. What if I run out? The world will come crashing down! Never mind that I live walking distance from a Walgreens (and in a major city with many other stores nearby) and could get any of those things quickly if I really needed them…
I’m worried this take is slightly along the veins of regressive nostalgia…. what stores did people just pop into on a daily basis and where? Certainly not for rural people of any kind. I don’t know anyone in the US unless you’re in some very urban setting that has a local enough grocery store they can just pop into - that wasn’t the case in the 80s & 90s I grew up in and it’s not now. Shopping at corporate grocery stores with their over stocked too many choices shelves simply is not a pleasure able experience. Hence shopping once a week. Not to mention the gender care gap involved in procuring said grocery items to begin with. Influencer culture aside - the design of our communities and our broken agricultural system are far more the problems here.
Thanks for bringing this up. Being able to pop out to the store presupposes a certain kind of life. And also, as a kid some of my most tedious memories were of sitting in the car doing endless errands with my mom. Reducing errands isn't necessarily a bad thing.