America’s Things

Over on Grant McCracken’s blog, he’s made a rather intense observation
about the sheer volume of goods we own.

It is very hard to say how
many discrete consumer objects there are in the U.S. at the moment, and
even harder to know how many exist in the lives of any given American.
Though, when the English artist, Michael Landry, decided to destroy his
worldly possessions, strictly in the name of art, you understand, it
took his team 2 full weeks.  It turned out that Mr. Landry owned over
7,000 things.  By this unreliable metric, there are now some
2,108,408,113,000 consumer-owned objects in the U.S. But even if we run
this calculation at half-Landry (3,500 things), we would be a nation of
1,054,211,392,500 objects.  I feel certain there are this many things
in
Susan’s garage alone.

Grant McCracken: Wisdom of Clouds II

Related PSFK articles:
Brand Abstinence