In a current thread on buying a used pool table, one poster recommend not buying one because there’s a good chance they won’t use it nearly as much as they think they’ll use it. I agree… I know a couple of people w/ pool tables in their basements, and they’re used for stacking laundry.
Another I thought of are treadmills and exercise bikes. I know a number of people who own one or the other and never use it.
And then there are timeshares.
Have you ever purchased something moderately or very expensive and ended up not using it? Or only using it very rarely?
Bissell lil’green clean machine. It’s a small carpet cleaner. Used it once. I have wood floors (dumb me). I gave it to my DIL, I noticed it’s been in their carport since they took it home. I assume they never used it.
I bought the lil’wrekker a Polaroid camera. It’s cute, pink and takes instant small pix. She’s used one roll of film. That dang thing was almost $200. I shoulda known better on that.
Treadmills are a big one. I know when my aunt had the choice between a treadmill and an excercise bike, she chose the treadmill knowing full well that the treadmill would take up less space (folded up in the corner) or at least she’d be able to pile more on it than a bike.
Cake pop makers and probably most other novelty stuff yeah. But a George Foreman is nice. I haven’t used mine in a while, but I keep it in my kitchen and from time to time I’ll break it out and use it for a few months. It’s nice to be able to cook things in a few minutes that would otherwise take considerably longer. And it’s really easy to clean.
I hope the novelty of the Instant Pot doesn’t wear off any time soon.
I have carpet, and two cats. This kind of thing is VERY practical for me, because cats just don’t seem to like to hurl in the litterbox.
Remember chord organs in the 1960s and 1970s? How often did people use those? (They’re almost always on the “we do not take” lists by the donation area of thrift stores.)
Ditto on that. I have a Spotbot. I got it when I got my first dog and was housebreaking her. Had it when I got my second dog. Still used it when I had a kid (small spills etc), then my dogs got older and started having accidents again and I’m still using it 15ish years later.
It really does work great for spills or stains that are about 6 inches across or less. Bigger than that and you just move it around, plus, being able to just hit the button and do something else for 5 minutes is nice when the other choice is trying to clean up dog pee.
I think I’m the only person in the world who has an exercise bike that gets used, a lot. It’s actually one of the original Schwinn Spin Bikes. I’d been going to classes at the gym and decided I wanted one at home. Mr. Athena, who I was living-in-sin with at the time and as such our finances weren’t shared, refused to pay for half of it saying he’d never use it. Fast-forward 15 years, and we have to schedule time for us each to use in in the winters because we both get on it a fair bit. And no, I never fail to remind him he still owes me half the cost.
OK, back to the OP. I’ve actually been getting better at getting rid of stuff I really don’t use. I had a panini maker for a long time that I rarely used, and a whole heck of a lot of fancy kitchen utensils. Console games are another one - I convince myself I need an XBox, buy one, then realize I hate most console games. That’s kinda changing though, I’ve gotten a fair bit of use out of the PS4 I bought around Thanksgiving.
We had a foosball table in the basement forever that never got used, but that’s sorta different; it belonged to a friend and we offered to store it. I would have played more, but Mr. Athena doesn’t like playing. So I blame him on that one.
How about encyclopedias, back in the day, or did you use them?
We had the family-budget-friendly Funk & Wagnalls, and did use those. I’m talking about the big Encyclopedia Britannica (which is still available in dead-tree form) and the like.
Here’s another: Coupon books, usually for restaurants or other goods and services, sold as fundraisers by schools and other civic organizations.
My folks had a big set of Encyclopedia Britannicas. They used to get quite a bit of use in our house. They were in the den, and when I was watching some boring show with my family, I would take one at random and read through it.
But, as far as things that got little use: My dad’s telescope.
He bought a pretty nice 4" reflector from Edmund Scientific, but it was:
a) Heavy
b) Awkward
c) Difficult to align.
Also, we lived in the suburbs of Washington DC, in one of the most light-polluted parts of the country, so you couldn’t use it for anything dimmer than Saturn anyway. It got very little use, and my mother used to throw that in his face all the time. When I got old enough to realize what she was doing, it really pissed me off. He made plenty of money - if he wanted to waste some of it on a hobby, that should be OK. But, no, she had to constantly bring up the big, useless telescope wasting space in the corner…
Let’s see, I have a ping-pong table that hardly ever gets used but takes up a lot of space in my garage, even folded-up. We have a couple sets of golf clubs that have not been used in several years, but they take up less space. My wife insisted on getting a $750 camera about 5 years ago - it has taken maybe 150 photos in that time, and none of them are visible anywhere. My son has a couple of championship sports rings that he had to have and will never wear, at $200 a pop.
Lot’s of kitchen gadgets as mentioned - bread maker, juice maker, electric griddle - all have passed thru our kitchen nearly unused.
How about fine china or crystal? Like the kind you get in a set from your wedding.
Here’s another - and I know this because the library I volunteer at gets these by the boxload: movie sets and educational films, whether on VHS or DVD, or other formats. The box sets are usually in the shrinkwrap.
The weirdest part about this is that a surprising number of the VHS sets have online resale value, and I list them on our library’s Amazon account. We aren’t authorized to sell DVDs (too many hoops to jump through, because too many people have been caught selling couterfeits) so the valuable ones are placed in a locked display case.
I bought my dogs a pair of nice dog beds with their names in embroidery on them. Nope. The cats have stolen them. Where they go the dogs never are allowed. (Not by me). My poor obese beagle is on the bottom of pecking order. She never gets the good spots. Unless I notice and let her sit by me. Then she’s queen for a day.
Oh yeah! for a while I thought I didn’t have anything (I actually do use my exercise bike, and it didn’t seem fair to count expensive lego sets that sit boxed for years without holding my hundreds of movies against themselves too), but there are board games that get way less use than they ought to, especially for their price. Though the real shelfwarmers are the ones you get as unasked-for gifts.
We have had boats over the years, and it wasn’t till the last 2 years we owned the last one that it sat mostly unused. Heck, we lived aboard 2 of them at different times.
My folks had an RV and used it at least yearly. Mom sold it after Dad died. My sis and bro-in-law are constantly traveling in their RV.
I use my George Foreman and my bread machine - not weekly, but frequently.
BUT, when I had an exercise bike, it was a clothes rack. And I’ve moved my piano more times than I can count since I bought it in 1977 but I haven’t played it hardly at all in the last 20 years. I’m kinda hoping my granddaughter will play… It’s a good place to put artsy stuff on display, tho.
My coworker, who’s married and has two children, bought a new RV last year. She told me the make model. I looked it up, and the price was around $100K.
I think they’ve used it three or four times over the past 12 months. From what she tells me, it sounds like a real pain in the ass. She said storing the RV at an indoor facility is “not cheap.” (And since we’re in Ohio, it’s in storage much of the year.) It gets terrible gas mileage. Her husband is constantly adjusting and doing light maintenance on the all the systems (generator, water, sewage, etc.). During the summer it is very difficult to find a spot at the popular campgrounds. And if you do find a spot, it can be up to $100 per night.
When I was kid in the 80s, my parents bought used sets of World Book Encyclopedia and Funk and Wagnalls. I’m pretty positive I actually read through the every volume of the World Book set and very rarely used the Funk and Wagnalls.
My family also had camping equipment we used once. Camp stoves, camp dinnerware, tents, all just set in storage in for years. Though me and my siblings did use one of the tents in our backyard for a while. We used the sleeping bags repeatedly as well. I still remember my Star Wars sleeping bag. We also had an exercise machine(one of the ones with a stack of weights) in our basement for years; one of my dad’s relatives gave it to us but we rarely used it.
