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There is a trope that can be found in many articles discussing topics such as consumerism or minimalism: the average number of items that can be found in an average household. The number that is usually cited for the average American household is 300,000 items, and 10,000 for the average European household. Unfortunately, these articles don't provide any reliable source for their numbers (the LA Times article quoted below is sometimes named as a source, but that article itself just names a "professional organizer" as their reference).

Here is a small selection of the many websites claiming the 300,000 items in the average American household:

Consider these statistics cited by professional organizer Regina Lark: The average U.S. household has 300,000 things, from paper clips to ironing boards. (LA Times, March 21, 2014)

The average household has 300,000 items. Yes, you probably have around 300,000 items in your home, maybe even more. (makingsenseofcents.com, Nov 10, 2017)

MJ Rosenthal, a professional organizer based in Newton, says the average American home contains 300,000 items, from sofas to salad forks. (Boston Globe, May 18, 2017)

And a selection of articles quoting the 10.000 items in the average European household (click here for a Google Search for '10000 dinge OR gegenstände haushalt durchschnitt', i.e. "10000 things OR items household average"):

There are 10,000 items in the average European home—and we'll bet you can find at least one that’s currently broken or deserving of a better life. (iFixit Europe via Facebook, April 12, 2020)

Es war nur eine Zahl, die sie irgendwo aufgeschnappt hatte, aber sie sorgte dafür, dass Judith Gebbe begann, sich zu hinterfragen: ihre Art zu leben - und ihre Art zu kaufen. 10.000 Dinge, sagt die Statistik, habe der Durchschnittseuropäer in seinem Besitz. (my translation: "It was just a number that she came across somewhere, but it was the starting point for Judith Gebbe to start questioning herself: her way of living, and her way of buying. 10,000 items, according to statistics, are owned by the average European.") (Spiegel Online, March 28, 2017)

Kein Mensch muss 10.000 Dinge besitzen. Aber im Schnitt hat jeder von uns genau so viel angesammelt. (my translation: "Nobody has to own 10,000 items. But that's exactly how much each of us has gathered on average.") (Zeit Campus, May 20, 2020 – paywalled)

Rund 10 000 Gegenstände besitzt ein erwachsener Westeuropäer im Durchschnitt – Menschen mit ausgeprägter Sammelleidenschaft oder auch nur einer halbwegs gut sortierten Bibliothek sind es deutlich mehr. (my translation: "An adult Western European owns about 10,000 items on average – people with a passion for collecting or even a reasonably well-stocked library own considerably more.") (Hannoversche Allgemeine, Feb 26, 2016)

I'm not really bothered that some of the article use the numbers to refer to households, while some of them talk about the possession of individuals. The numbers reported for American and Europe differ by an order of magnitude so that this ambiguous wording doesn't really matter much. The fact remains that if these numbers were to be believed, the average American household would own 30 times as many items as the average (Western) European household. I'm just not willing to accept this conclusion given the lack of trustworthy references.

So, is it true…

  1. …that the average number of items in an American household is in the 300,000s?
  2. …that the average number of items in a Western European household/owned by the average Western European is in the 10,000s?
Schmuddi
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    Photos of households and all their stuff: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0871564300. – bishop Jan 04 '21 at 19:53
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    Paper, pasta, sugar, flour, bread, grass, tissue paper, and salt are all substances, contrasted with items. Water and milk are also substances, but we aren't questioning whether any hypothetical counters tallied the individual molecules, are we? Why then the obtuse comments about counting bits of other substances? Seriously, the question is about disparity between two societies, not plainly the exact numbers. If some research be found, determining consistency is for *answers* to resolve. As such, **further comments discussing this will be considered pseudo answer noise and then deleted.** –  Jan 05 '21 at 03:41
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    @fredsbend: The question about counting, or at least my question, is because I have lived in and visited parts of Europe, been in both European and US homes, and did not see any such great disparity. – jamesqf Jan 05 '21 at 05:43
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    @fredsbend - and lets not count transistors... – Jon Custer Jan 05 '21 at 17:42
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    For contrast on the 'sniff test' of the 300,000 number, obviously 'counting methods may vary' but this guys house was literally filled with stuff (so much so that he couldn't physically fit in any more) and the reported count was 60,000 items https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/britains-biggest-hoarder-amassed-60000-22806776 – JeffUK Jan 05 '21 at 19:40
  • @JeffUK That might make good info for an answer. If you can also determine whether there's validity in the disparity claim, even if the numbers are wrong, that would be a good answer. –  Jan 06 '21 at 22:11
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    Please note the difference in size between the average house in the US and in the EU. – Mast Jan 07 '21 at 12:23
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    While american homes may be bigger, the difference for sure is not 30-fold – Manziel Jan 07 '21 at 14:36

1 Answers1

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The sources quote Regina Lark who in turn quotes unnamed sources. The specialist in organizing and productivity writes:

Are there 300,000 Things in a Home?

One thing I remember reading impressed the hell out of me: The average household contains about 300,000 things.

In order to grow my company, I needed clients, which I found by speaking to numerous groups and organizations about clutter, and where I often referenced “300,000 things.”

[... much speculation about what they could be...]

I’ve often wondered if I had it in me to conduct a study about the average number of items the average household contained. If 300,000 things is where we land, it would be nice to finally put the query to bed. And I will never be out of work again.

Clearly the author cites that figure to clients without any firm basis, and then they repeat it, and round it goes.

This is mentioned by Jason Maynard in

You Can’t Have Too Many Books

You see, that 300,000 stat infuriates me a bit. Everyone who uses it quotes the L.A. Times, as that is where it appeared. Of course, if you go to the original article in the Times, you find this: “Consider these statistics cited by professional organizer Regina Lark: The average U.S. household has 300,000 things, from paper clips to ironing boards.”

Who the hell is Regina Lark? Where does she get her stats from? Doesn’t matter to all the minimalism supporters touting the statistic. They just state that the L.A. Times says …. And oh by the way, I’d say more than half of those minimalism folks are also pushing their new book on decluttering or living the minimalist lifestyle. Consumerism irony for the win!

A possible source of the claim:

I've been looking for an original source for the 300,000 items figure. I found a book called Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors about a survey done by UCLA of 32 family homes.

There is a supporting video about the survey and the book: A Cluttered Life: Middle-Class Abundance. It explains why there is so much stuff, but does not mention 300,000 items.

I don't have the book, perhaps it does say, but all the reports look like a clear case of having "read it on the internet and repeat it as if true", and the trope feeds itself.

More on the UCLA study of 32 households by the Center on Everyday Lives of Families. The UCLA's own newsroom has a feature on this study here: Clutter Culture.

It shows that the study was interested in how many items there are in the home:

The typical Life at Home refrigerator front panel holds 52 objects.
...
As they moved deeper into their study, the researchers noticed a correlation between the number of objects families put on their refrigerators and the rest of the stuff in their homes.

and they have a fascination with with numbers:

The project generated almost 20,000 photographs, 47 hours of family-narrated video home tours and 1,540 hours of videotaped family interactions and interviews. But Life at Home is not just a scholarly catalog; it also delves deep into the psychological and social meanings of our possession obsession.

Yet for all the interest there is no mention (in the article) of what might be the most interesting number of all: the total count of all their stuff.

The need for a counting rule is obvious: let's say a box of 3 ink cartridges is 3 items; a tub of 100 paper clips is 100 items, a jar of lentils is ... how many items? Suppose then you try to set down some rules for counting, and you have

Rule-22: if something was priced and bought by the packet, that is one item.

So a packet of 1" nails is one item; but 6" nails are several items. Then you find two 1" nails loose in a drawer. Were they from the packet in the garage, or were they from a different packet that was all used up? Every small item is subject to this uncertainty even if it can be identified as a distinct item.

Then we come to the lounge suite: there are obviously 3 items? No! The suite cost $2000 as a complete item. They were not available separately and Rule-22 says they are 1 item.

Google Books has the text of the book Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors, and a search for the book title and "refrigerator" brings up this snippet at the top of the search results

We grouped the six households with the highest refrigerator display counts (all with at least 80 artifacts) and the seven households with the lowest counts (all with fewer than 20), then aggregated the artifact counts from the main rooms of each house. Houses in the first group yield a mean of 1,448 visible objects in the main rooms, whereas families in the second group, with their tidy and minimally decorated refrigerators, tend to have only modest assemblages of objects (a mean of 322) visible in the home, a striking difference. The other 19 households reflect neither extreme, as would be expected.

Yet when searching for the book title and either "300000" or "300,000" the book does not even appear in the first page of results.

Moreover, the page image shown above talks about "visible objects" and mentions

1,448 visible objects in the main rooms

Whether that refers to a single main room, or all the main rooms, 1,448 does not scale up to a total of 300,000 objects in the home.

So the only potential and credible source I can find to support the figure of 300,000 does not bear it out.

I suggest that is impossible to come up with an exact number in any household with a significant amount of possessions. Different study groups on different continents may have very different counting rules, and the 300,000 / 10,000 disparity is remarkable as a piece of trivia.

Laurel
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Weather Vane
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    Oh, the good ol' [citogenesis](https://xkcd.com/978/). – Eric Duminil Jan 05 '21 at 05:40
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    This fits into the category of - "That's what google says, so it must be true. You can google yourself if you dont belive me." – ClassCastException Jan 05 '21 at 09:04
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    Regarding your last paragraph: or you could as well - still counting correctly - arrive at 10.000 items AND at 300.000 items in the same exact household – Hobbamok Jan 05 '21 at 10:14
  • Just cast an eye over my sewing kit. There must be a few hundred pins, but I only ever bought two packets. Ditto needles, you can't buy a single needle... Safety pins, buttons, poppers; should I count them all? If I buy two metres of cloth and make two shirts and a scarf, how do I count that? If I combine two small pieces of cloth to make one shirt...hmm – RedSonja Jan 05 '21 at 10:57
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    Are physical objects you own but did not purchase count (perhaps they were gifts)? What about all the junk I get in the mail and haven't thrown out yet? I didn't purchase them but they are clearly "items". To say nothing of virtual items - if an "item" is some individual unit I purchased, would that definition not also include software and data files? Is every song you purchased and keep on your phone an "item"? Are apps? If so, what about the free apps? Why would that make a difference? – Darrel Hoffman Jan 05 '21 at 15:55
  • "if something was priced and bought by the packet, that is one item." Hmmm, my jar of coins must be hundreds (or more). – chux - Reinstate Monica Jan 05 '21 at 16:01
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    @chux-ReinstateMonica that is my point: the counting rules would need to be extensive, and even then, would they cover all situations? – Weather Vane Jan 05 '21 at 16:04
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    A key point in the last quote is that it's counting **visible** items, and that is very different from the total number of items. Depending on the definition of item, the kitchen will have few visible items, but will likely have the largest number of total items. – Leland Hepworth Jan 05 '21 at 16:19
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    "Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something." - Mitch Hedberg – JimmyJames Jan 05 '21 at 17:09
  • @LelandHepworth It took me 5 minutes to find a spatula in our kitchen drawer. When I asked why she has all that crap, my wife told me "because I keep the linen in the hall closet." "Huh?" Now my back hurts.... the couch is uncomfortable. – CGCampbell Jan 05 '21 at 17:13
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    I spreadsheeted a significant portion of a 2-person home when moving last time, 795 line items such as "2 x Nails, box". Counting the multiples (the "2 x", there), there were 1,857 counted items. But those two boxes of nails contained 174 and 276 nails respectively, for 450 nails total. Counting individual paperclips implies also counting individual pieces of paper: given I had 15 line items for various types of paperwork, each at least a small box, then by that measure, 300k is certainly well within the realms of possibility. – Dewi Morgan Jan 05 '21 at 17:23
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    Do individual transistors on chips count as items? If not, do surface-mounted components on a circuit board? How about individual grains of rice in a cupboard? – Kaz Jan 06 '21 at 00:37
  • I think your Rule-22 is too restrictive. I don't think being sold by the each is enough to make each 6" nail to be counted separately. I would modify it to say that identical items that are supplies normally kept together in a single container are one item. For example, my box of drip system parts--I'm ok with counting each type of part, but each compartment holds one type whether or not it was purchased as one package. – Loren Pechtel Jan 06 '21 at 05:23
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    @LorenPechtel it was an example to show that the counting rules would need to be extensive, and even then, would not cover all situations. – Weather Vane Jan 06 '21 at 09:10
  • One could also consider something like a bucket of assorted toys, including lego and other small objects to be presumably counted as a 'mass', but also larger toys. Where is the line? – SomeoneSomewhereSupportsMonica Jan 06 '21 at 12:10
  • I'll accept this answer. It argues sufficiently convincingly why there's probably no basis for the 300,000 figure, which was one part of my question. Unfortunately, it passes over the second part (10,000 for European households) apart from a half-sentence in the conclusion. But I see that this is on me: asking about two claims in a single question was probably a mistake. – Schmuddi Jan 08 '21 at 08:11
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    Thanks. While @Fredsbend [commented](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50133/are-there-300-000-items-in-the-average-american-household-and-10-000-items-in-t/50134?noredirect=1#comment233157_50133) that the question seemed to be more about the disparity between two societies than exact numbers, since the US count could not be verified there was no point exploring further. The most likely source seemed to suggest their counting method would not support 300,000 items, and the 1,448 items per room is more in line with the 10,000 items in a European household. – Weather Vane Jan 08 '21 at 08:34
  • In a deleted comment thread I pointed out to @fredsbend that my primary interest was not in the disparity, but whether either number per se had an empirical basis. Unfortunately he didn't respond to that. Instead, he posted the comment you linked, in which he claims that "the question is about disparity between two societies, not plainly the exact numbers". Oh well. – Schmuddi Jan 08 '21 at 10:45
  • https://everythingwhat.com/how-many-pennies-are-in-a-5-gallon-water-bottle - have 2 x 5 gallon buckets of pennies, so there’s nearly 80,000 right there. – JTP - Apologise to Monica Jan 10 '21 at 03:53
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    Yeah, I'm not sure even if this were true, it would be a useful statistic or a good measure of materialism. Does the average American household have more individual thumbtacks, paperclips or boxes of nails? If so, does that really make them more materialistic? I'm not sure it makes sense to put say a single tack on the same level as a television for example, but both are "items". – PC Luddite Jan 11 '21 at 14:54
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    You can buy a 42,000 piece puzzle on Amazon. Great retirement present (not) and four times the number of items in an average EU household. Bucket fulls of nails, paper clips, how do they count? – gnasher729 Nov 01 '22 at 17:34
  • BTW I am told that KdW (Kaufhof des Westens) in Berlin has about 480,000 items on sale. – gnasher729 Nov 01 '22 at 17:38
  • @gnasher729 yes, but, the quote refers to the **average household** and a jigsaw puzzle is one item. Or should we be counting dust particles... even atoms? – Weather Vane Nov 01 '22 at 17:44