Our Stuff in America

In America, we consume twice as many material goods as we did fifty years ago. Over the same period, the size of the average American home has nearly tripled, and today that average home contains about three hundred thousand items. On average, our homes contain more televisions than people. And the US Department of Energy reports that, due to clutter, 25 percent of people with two-car garages don’t have room to park cars inside and another percent have room for only one vehicle.

Home organization, the service that’s trying to find places for all our clutter, is now an $8 billion…