Technology can sneak up on you...

When I was a kid, I carried around some kind of pocket knife everywhere.  I never took it to school, but when we'd play in the hundreds of acres of woods around my house, I always had one on me.  It was something like this:

Just a typical Buck pocket knife.  Now one like it goes for around $40, so I'm not sure what it was when I had it.  When I got older, I got a little Swiss Army knife that I carried through high school until I lost it.  It was the only knife I ever lost, so I bought it again soon after.  It retails for about $25 now.

A couple of months ago, there was a sale on woot.com for a Kershaw Compound.  Granted, woot.com sells things way, way below retail, but I paid about $13 for it shipped:

The leaps in technology from each knife are pretty staggering when you think about it.  The first knife is the same one my grandpa carried and was considered the top of the line kind of pocket knife to carry for years.  The second one is a little more 'Boy Scouts' than the first, but it has multiple blades and is built to last.

If you would have showed me the last knife when I was a kid, it would have been nothing short of science fiction.  The design is enough to make a kid's heart go aflutter but it also has a speed release which is nearly a switchblade.  The handle is 'glass filled nylon' making it noticeably lighter than the other two knives, though it is much larger.  And it is half the cost of the other two.

So today when I saw this article on Boston.com about families and their clutter I wasn't as shocked as many people seemed to be.  The big bullet point:

• The rise of Costco and similar stores has prompted so much stockpiling — you never know when you’ll need 600 Dixie cups or a 50-pound bag of sugar — that three out of four garages are too full to hold cars. 

It references a new book out from UCLA on the subject.  Life at Home in the 21st Century is meant to be a time capsule of sorts, a way for people in the future to show how families live today.  I'm not sure the cross section of the people chosen is correct, but I like the idea.  Regardless, the articles written on the book seem to paint it as a study on how consumerism has displaced the family.  While this is undoubtedly true, I feel like it is because people my age (mid 30's) and above are seeing things for sale that literally don't make sense in the context we were raised in.  This isn't to say that having clutter is OK, but seriously: CostCo is freakin unbelievable.  Places like that just didn't exist when I was growing up.  It is really easy to stockpile because it is a really, really good deal.  So good that we can't say no sometimes.  If you have a family, it makes sense to buy big and I can see that getting away from you. It takes a monumental effort on my part not to stockpile these things, but when I see something like that Kershaw knife, I falter hard.