When you buy a tech product, it usually comes in its own box. Many normal people will throw these boxes away, realizing that they’re highly unlikely to ever need them again. Some of us, however, find it harder to say goodbye.
When I buy tech, I almost never throw away the box
I love a good box. When I make a new tech purchase, there’s a real thrill as I open the box and unwrap the treasures inside. I’m sure I’m not alone, if the popularity of unboxing videos on YouTube is anything to go by.
Some boxes are so beautifully designed that it almost seems a shame to touch them. The main product and accessories are perfectly laid out with such precision that once you’ve taken them out of the box, it never looks quite the same again.
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At some point, however, the tech has to be removed from the box and put to use. At this point, I have two options: throw the box away like a normal human, or squirrel it away somewhere like an obsessive hoarder. So, of course, I always choose the latter.
I have boxes for devices that I don’t even own anymore
The most recent boxes end up in a pile on top of a shelf in my home office, so that I have them to hand if I ever need them (which of course, I almost never do). When this pile of boxes gets so tall that boxes start to fall down whenever I breathe, it’s time for them to be transferred to their final resting place.
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My garage has an old wooden shelving unit that’s made up of smallish compartments. It’s huge and takes up one entire wall of the garage. It would be perfect for storing items that are genuinely useful, such as putting different types of tools in each compartment.
Naturally, then, this shelving unit is filled with rows upon rows of empty tech boxes. Each compartment is usually big enough to fit in two or three boxes, with some larger boxes ending up in a long pile on top of the unit. It’s a huge amount of storage, and it’s getting to the point where it’s almost full.
The dumbest part is that some of the boxes on those shelves are for devices I don’t even own any longer. There are plenty of boxes for old phones that I’ve either sold or passed on to relatives long ago, but the empty box still remains on the shelf.
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There’s no good reason for keeping these boxes
Keeping boxes for tech products I no longer own is mostly pointless. I can’t imagine many scenarios where a box for an iPhone 4S is ever going to be of any use to me when I haven’t owned an iPhone 4S in years. I could use it to store random things, but I have the boxes for all the phones I’ve had since 2011 that I can use instead.
Credit: Hannah Stryker/How-To Geek
Even if I still own the devices, there aren’t many good reasons for keeping the boxes. You rarely get any more money for trading in an old phone in the original box. If you’re selling a device privately, such as through eBay or Facebook Marketplace, you might get more for a device in its original box, so keeping a pile of recent boxes in my home office isn’t completely insane. Moving these boxes to store in the garage just may be, however.
It is true that some people are willing to pay for some old tech boxes for whatever reason. On eBay right now, there are empty iPhone 4S boxes selling for around $3, and people are also willing to buy boxes for popular game consoles, Apple computers, and some computer components. I could sell some of my boxes and make a little money out of them.
The type of boxes that are in demand only make up a tiny fraction of my hoard, however. The majority of my empty boxes are effectively worthless, as bizarrely, there’s very little demand for an empty box for an off-brand smart bulb or generic router.
I have no plans to stop any time soon
I always assumed that I was the only person who had a mostly unnecessary hoard of empty tech boxes gathering dust. I also thought I was the only person who had a box full of cables that I’m never ever going to need again, but I was wrong about that, too. It turns out that there are other How-To Geek writers who also have the same hoarding instinct, and if you’re reading this, you may also be “one of us.”
Credit: Oleksandr Lytvynenko/Shutterstock.com
The thing is that despite being fully aware that what I’m doing is mostly pointless, I’m not going to stop. Once in a blue moon, my box of old cables proves very useful, such as when I inherited a couple of old second-generation iPads. Suddenly, keeping that old 30-pin to USB cable wasn’t so dumb after all. The same might one day apply to one of my boxes.
I’ll almost certainly never need any of the boxes in my garage ever again, but there’s a very, very slim chance that I might need one of them one day. While that minuscule chance exists, I’m going to happily carry on filling my garage with boxes full of nothing.
