"Stocking up" vs "Hoarding"?

MorrisonCorner and Ode, I can empathize with each of you. My Mother hoarded to the point that there really was just a path through the house. It got worse as each child (there were seven of us) grew up and moved out. It seemed as though an empty spot "needed" to be filled. Neither us kids nor my Dad ever felt comfortable having friends over. After my Mom passed, it took all seven of us nearly a year to deal with her things. Looking back now, I see it as a huge waste. A waste of space, a waste of money, a waste of a happy home, a waste of a childhood. Yes, I am still bitter. I am not alone among my siblings to think/feel that she cared more for her "stuff" than she did for her family. In fact, after a move my father started calling the accumulation mom's "nears and dears".

Oh my, I do apologize. I didn't realize that those feelings still ran so deep. I sure didn't mean to dump on you.

Marilyn.. I hear you. When my grandmother died I filled pickup trucks with newspaper which she'd been saving for years because "someone might need it." For what was never specified. Theoretically newspaper is useful stuff.. you can mulch gardens with it, set fires with it, read it when you're bored... but at some point the accumulation of newsprint borders on a mania.

I'd be interested in knowing if anyone has done a study to see if this kind of hoarding was a phenomina spawned by a generation which lived through two world wars and a great depression, or if we still have the same percentage of people in the population who go over the top with "it might come in handy someday."

I just concluded a "post season" interview with one of my clients who has had a very successful year of growing her seasonal business. But her last gasp end of season job was to house sit one of her client's places. She'd never really been in the house before agreeing to house sit for them and she spent two weeks in the house absolutely appalled. These are wealthy people. And apparently the second floor is, literally, knee deep in "stuff." Like a tidal wave of clothing, bedding, boxes of unopened tech toys, jewlery, washing out of the bedrooms into the hallway, the bathroom is unuseable... she was appalled. She spent two weeks trying to dig her way through it and gave up. Her whole perspective on this couple has changed, and she surely doesn't respect them any more.

But I think it is "an issue" as they say. Acquiring "stuff" fills some need for them, but it isn't "having" the stuff, but the aquisition of it that makes them happy. For my grandmother it was the having. The woman had a bag of string marked (no joke) "pieces of string too short to use." Hun? And when you asked her about it she would say that they were "too short to use to make packages, but long enough for candles."

Nevermind that the last time the woman made a candle was 1938... should she ever need to do so again, by golly, she had the wicks. A whole bag of them. And wax, which she used to seal jelly jars and would scrub off and throw into a tin for the candles she might need to make again someday.

Both ends of the same need to feel secure I think.

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Icelandic Sheep and German Angora Rabbits

Hoarding- Collecting a bunch of useless stuff that just clogs up space.

My MIL has dementia and her hoarding instinct is VERY strong. She keeps :

used baking paper, i found a bunch of them under the stove and she could of burned down the house

empty margarine containers, i have to throw them out because currently she has about 7 shopping bags full

50+ winter coats that none of us can fit and should be donated to the poor

glass jars, boxes upon boxes of just stuff....

She hoards homemade jam too. She has stuff that went old in 1998 and still hasn't cleaned out the fridges. She actually has filled up a bakery fridge full of these things, it's bonkers!

Stocking up- keeping things that you know you'll use, beneficial to have in hard times

We grocery shop with about 100 euros a month so we have alot of pantry items, including baked beans/tuna/pasta meals. They don't go bad and we're pretty healthy.

We're due to have snow this Friday and I guarentee there will be pile-ups and wrecks because people haven't stocked up and freak out. No one has winter tires either yet.

Katrina

The only thing that makes something Hourding insdead of stocking up is the viewer. If you are storing up then keep doing that but when You think it is Hourding then don't.

This guy that you know needs to learn how to do things in secret. If a few people know what he has the "entitled" mob will eat him out of house and home in a few days. Then in a few weeks or months he will starve if the mob let him survive at all. Might be better to be very quiet.

I was telling the lady at my favorite fabric store about the attic of my art studio which is filled with huge rubber tubs full of finished quilt tops and fabrics. Her suggestion was for me to put her in my will.

Wheat berries were not really a "ridiculous" purchase. They were cheap, and people COULD live off just them for a good while (& longer yet if some other supplement existed, like dried beans or vitamin supplements). The only thing ridiculous about it was that certain people..... mostly yuppies too ignorant to know WHERE to buy bulk foods..... were paying exorbitant prices for bulk wheat in 5 gallon plastic buckets, JUST LIKE they were paying exorbitant prices for similar buckets full of beans & field corn & buckwheat & so on. The only ridiculous part was paying $50 or whatever for a $5 plastic bucket and fifty cents worth of grains, not WHAT they bought.

And you CAN use wheat berries in bulk during good times.... all they'd have to do was buy a grain mill (most did, if you'll recall danged near every company was out of stock of grain mills, along with generators & such) to be able to make fresh bread in their automatic breadmakers Or crack it slightly to make dishes using bulgar wheat, or crack it more and make couscous. Or SPROUT it, and eat it in salads or sandwhiches. Sheesh, a tenth of a penny's worth of wheat suddenly becomes worth several bucks when it's lying sprouted inside a health food store! Or boil it in soups, the taste is much like barley soup.

Besides..... the real point is that bad times AREN'T "good times". People might like ice cream and filet mignon..... but in bad times, if the power goes out those things turn into a gooey mess & some stinking green meat even the dog won't eat. Stuff like whole grains might not be the meal of choice, but they keep well. And if things STAY bad, they can be planted for whole new generations of food to harvest. And they're cheap, compared to many other items. Many people can't afford to stockpile 6 months worth of "regular food"..... but a measly $20 will buy 6 months of grain (unless you're a yuppy housewife, that is). So it was cheap insurance.

Close. Under non-emergency conditions, "stocking up" is when you only have enough to reasonably expect to use it all, while "hoarding" is when people irrationally obtain more than they can use, to the point where it's going to go bad or cause some kind of (storage? living space?) discomfort for them.

But under EMERGENCY conditions, "stocking up" describes what you did to get the supplies you have, while "hoarding" describes what everybody else is doing with THEIR supplies (especially if they still have something after you run out).

Here's a tip. The day after Halloween, grocery stores (& likely Walmarts, etc) place their pumpkins on sale. Usually this is just jack-o-lantern types, but I've also seen luminas (the white pumpkins), exotic heirloom types (cheese pumpkin types like Rouge Vif D'tempes & Musque du Provence, etc), & mini-pumpkins heavily discounted like this.

They CAN be canned. Or sliced thin & dried (keeps just about forever, quickly rehydrates when boiled in water.... great base for soups).

For that matter, you CAN make pumpkin pie out of them, but the jack-o-lantern pumpkins are usually too stringy for my taste.... too much effort to process for pies (especially when the canned pumpkin usually does on sale right after Thanksgiving).

The "ridiculous" part of it was that city people with no conception of what it would take to prepare such foods for human consumption were stockpiling massive amounts.

It would be sensible for many of us to have a ton of wheat laying around. Makes great chicken food lol.

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This is very true.

Laying a lot of food that you are not accustomed to eating, don't have any good ideas of how to prepare into attractive foods that folks will want to eat, and maybe not have the equipment for being able to render it into a form to be eaten is simply foolish. Learn how to use it first, then stock up on it.

As for paying $50.00 for a $5.00 bucket and fifty cents worth of wheat, well that depends largely on where you are. In some areas of the country you can buy bulk grains cheap and if you're inclined to do so, package them up for storage yourself.

Many other areas of the country bulk grains cannot be cheaply found unless you have access to something like an LDS Family Cannery which most do not. That five gallon bucket of wheat may be worth fifty cents in Kansas but it's going to be worth considerably more here where I am in Florida because it has to be shipped here long distances. What I end up paying for is really the shipping costs and the packaging costs. The grain itself turns out to be fairly inconsequential so far as its part of the price breakdown is concerned. Cheaper if I simply bought it by the bag then packaged it myself, but then to get it put up the way I want it put up I'd have to buy the packaging anyway so cost wise it's cheaper to simply get it already put up that way. Whole grains such as wheat berries and whole kernel corn are the longest rotation period foods that I keep so I am particular about its packaging.

.....Alan.

We inevitably run into the issue of spoilage when we are storing food. We try not to stock more than we can cycle through before shelf life becomes an issue. I think the line between stocking up and hoarding would be when you have way more layed up than you can possibly keep rotated and start having to throw stuff away.

We tend to hoard non-perishable stuff for a lack of willingness to dispose of something that is still usefull. Once a year we do a purge and get rid of anything we haven't used for more than a year. ( and we usually end up discovering a few things that we didn't remember having that are put into immediate use)

I love MRE's. When I lived in Germany there were always dumpsters full of unopened cases of them from the guys returning from field excersizes. I don't think I bought groceries more than once every six months while I was there, and then it was just for a change of pace. My dad would occasionally bring home C-rations when I was a kid. The MRE's were a definite improvement, IMO.

I don't know where you draw the line between hording or not, but more than one person has laughed at the size of my TP stash. I just remind them that Sears does not send catalogs any longer.

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"Stocking up is what "we" do.

Hoarding is what "they" do..."

hehe - I like that.

As for me, depending on budget, I keep 4 to 6 months of food and most necessities. If without power, or the gas stations and grocery stores are closed for a couple of weeks, no problem.

*note: Don't forget CASH folks. If power is out you won't be able to use those credit cards. Even a can of change, in case cell towers are out and we must lower ourselves to use a pay phone.

But if "IT" hits the fan we best be prepared. I would expect (in the worst case scenario) the other 299,950,000 people that DIDN'T prepare will be our biggest problem.

Ozarkguy

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You might add... Stocking up is when you purchase more than you can consume( in a reasonable time- to be determined by the individual) when said supplies are readily available to the public.

Hoarding is when you have purchased more than you can consume ( in a reasonable time- to be determined by public opinion) when said supplies are not readily available, or in limited supply, to the public.

Buying 4 loaves of bread, when you normally buy 2, the day before a week long snowstorm is stocking up.

But when an individual attempts to buy bread the day of said storm, and none is available due to 'stocking up'... The individuals who are breadless would probably have the opinion since you have 4 and they have 0.. that you are hoarding. (because you have the desire not to share or sell your bread)

On a side note...
Are rich people hoarding their money, or simply stocking up ? Are they irrationally obtaining more than they can use ? When is enough, enough ?

Is eminent domain someone who just stocked up on land, or are they hoarding it, so the govt gets to take it?

The haves and the have nots will always breed controversy.. and opportunity.

Its all in the eye of the beholder..

Amen.

Stocking up is when you're the one doing it----hoarding is when someone else is doing it. Look foreward to this weeks purchase.

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~Only the rocks live forever~

According to the dictionary stocking up is hoarding. I don't agree. I consider stocking up is a reasonable approach to taking care of yourself and your family in a cost effective way. Hoarding is waiting until there is a shortage and grabbing all you can while others do without. Stocking up during times of plenty is scriptural -- Joseph stored grain for coming shortages.

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This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

Regardless of what the dictionary says, the real definition of a word or phrase is determined by common usage (which is why dictionaries must be revised frequently).

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