MY experience - a relative who works in a liquor store in Canada, we discussed this once - there’s a limited amount of space, they have a machine, a giant press that flattens loads of boxes, then they bale them. They don’t keep a huge pile of intact boxes around and the few they do are, as mentioned, for customers with large purchases- easier to handle, less likely to fail than a bag. Add to that they don’t want to have to let people rummage around behind the counter or into the warehouse area to select boxes, or have an employee take time to go fetch for them. Shopping floor space is at a premium nowadays, the marketing people stuff the floor sell display options to assorted alcohol manufacturers.
The boxes are designed to hold a heavy load often in glass, so fairly sturdy. I have a few from the good old days in the basement, some are not just glued but have copper staples on the bottom.
They might be more willing to give up the boxes when they are doing stocking. That’s when they are keeping a few for customers and cutting up the rest for disposal. They’d be happy to give you the ones for disposal. Grocery stores are similar. Come out when they are doing stocking and you can get all the boxes you like. But as others have mentioned, they will be lots of random sizes that might make moving more challenging.
One possible reason they might not want to give them up is that they might be getting paid for the cardboard. Rather than having to pay for disposal, they might actually be making money by selling their baled up cardboard to recyclers.
Good places to get cheap moving boxes are on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Nextdoor. You can frequently find people trying to get rid of their moving boxes for free or very cheap.
Costco stores have piles of boxes near the registers. Mostly they are used by their members to carry stuff, since Costco doesn’t have bags. (I just take everything in the cart to the car, and either bag stuff there or carry it into the house without a bag.) Note that some of the boxes at Costco are partially cut open so the product can be displayed.
I agree. A few months ago, the spouse and I decided to do a “Swedish Death Clean” on our house. We don’t have any kids, and while we’re not exactly old, we’re not young anymore either. Plus, we have too much crap. We’ve tried this before and the thing that stopped us (mostly me–most of the crap is mine) was the sheer psychological barrier of trying to sell it. I have a lot of collectibles that are somewhat valuable and I didn’t want to just give them away, but also a lot of stuff that could probably sell for modest amounts if I cared to take the time and effort.
I finally decided my time is worth more than that modest amount of money. We ended up throwing away probably 20-30 big trash bags full of junk (real junk, that nobody would want) and taking at least that much stuff to Savers to donate. I didn’t want to do Facebook Buy Nothing because that still requires dealing with other (flaky) people’s schedules, hence the thrift shop. I culled out the more valuable stuff and have already made over $5,000 selling some of it, and there’s a lot more to go.
We had two storage lockers crammed full of stuff, plus our garage and a couple of closets - now we’re down to roughly half that. I can’t even describe how liberating it was to divest ourselves of a bunch of stuff we no longer wanted or needed. And the scary thing is, we’re not hoarders. Most of the stuff was neatly packed away for a “later” that never came. I think a lot of people are like us–just accumulate a lot of stuff and shove it out of sight.
As an aside, I took a decluttering course (which was actually the impetus for this, even though I ended up diverging wildly from their instructions), and one of the most valuable things I got out of it was the concept of “Real Self vs. Fantasy Self.” As I sorted through each item (like craft supplies, hobby stuff, etc.), I asked myself if this was something my real self wanted to do/have, or if it was a Fantasy Me thing. It made the whole process surprisingly easy.
Sorry for the long reply, but I’m feeling really good about this, so I wanted to give my perspective.
I’ve said it before here. I’m coming up on 68. I own almost nothing I didn’t buy in the last 2 years. I started over from scratch 2 years ago with about three armloads of possessions.
It is remarkable the psychological benefits of not owning a museum that only you can curate. And must curate.
And frankly I’ve overbought what little I have bought recently. I could probably jettison half what I now own and not miss almost all of it. There was / still is a bit of retail therapy going on. And a bit of “collect the whole set” when 1 or at most 2 would do.
And virtually none of my new stuff is a direct replacement for any of my old stuff. Beyond obvious necessities like a couple coffee cups, it’s new stuff representing new interests. Unsullied by piles of old stuff from old (read “obsolete”) interests.
I’m dreading the day my brother and I have to empty our parents’ house. They have so much stuff and we don’t want very much of it. I think the thought is discouraging me from acquiring stuff myself. I don’t have many tools or any sort of collections. It helps that I live in a one bedroom apartment so there’s little room to begin with.
Estate sales are your friend. When my dad died several years ago, we had the same problem–lots of stuff from him and my mom who had passed before him, almost none of which I wanted. We took a few sentimental items and hired an estate sale firm. They took care of everything. We didn’t make a ton of money (I think we only ended up with like $600–my parents didn’t have much really valuable stuff) but it was all gone and we didn’t have to lift a finger.
My spouse and his siblings did the same thing when their mother died last year, with the same results. Everybody in the family got the chance to take anything they wanted, and then everything else was sold.
A couple months ago, I went to Total Wine for boxes, as I’ve occasionally done in the past. This time I was stopped and told they were for paying customers only (like the cucumber water in Better Call Saul). They directed me to a small pile of cut apart boxes which were useless for any box purposes.
They had easily a hundred boxes I wasn’t allowed to touch. There was no way that customers would use them all. Unless you’re buying more than 3 bottles at a time, there’s little point in bothering with a box.
No idea whether this is a new policy, or whether I just got lucky all the other times.
40 years ago when we moved within town and needed boxes we got them from the grocery store, which had a pile on the loading dock. We got permission. That was before recycling. We still have some of our stuff in some.
I’d think that a lot of the paper from copy stores goes out in small batches, so they should have boxes. But the last time I was in one it was a lot less crowded than a while ago. And copy paper boxes are not a great size for lots of things.
When I last moved (decades ago) I bought a bundle of six or ten bankers’ boxes. Like the copy paper boxes, they’re not very big, but I think that’s a good thing. You don’t want boxes that are so big or so heavy that they’re hard to move.
