Thursday, May 28, 2009

Shred Stop: One of those smack your head against the walls, why didn't I think of this ideas

I hate to shred papers. They pile up for months before I do it and then I employ my kids to do it which inevitably ends up with shredded paper all over the house by the time it's done. And, we've gone through a few home shredders with burnt out motors - what a waste.

Someone has come up with a brilliant idea -
The Shred Stop. It's a machine that will be put in grocery stores that will shred your papers (even the ones with staples in them!), credit cards, disks, and more for $2/minute. I just read about this on the Ecopreneurist blog, and I thought, what a brilliant idea!

Think about it. Most of us let the "to be shredded pile" pile up for months to the point where it takes a couple of hours to do it all. Then you've got to dump the trashcans full of shredded paper into some other throw away container. That's always a huge hassle and mess. You've got to make sure it gets recycled, too.

OR for $2/minute (it's supposed to take 6 minutes to shred an entire file box full of papers), you can have it done quickly and someone else deals with the mess and the recycling. Yes, the paper materials in the Shred Stop get recycled.

Some people might not want to spend the money on something they could do for themselves for free, but I think this would be well worth my money because it would save me time and aggravation.

Right now, there is one Shred Stop being tested in Washington State, but according to their website, they hope to expand rapidly. You can put your zip code in
here to let them know you are interested in having one in your area. If you live near me, please go there and put your zip code in even if you're not that interested because I want one. Come on, think of all that I do for you ; )

Image:
Ecopreneurist.com (which I'm sure was originally from the Shred Stop site!)
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4 comments:

Unknown said...

Robin, I'm surprised that you don't see the gap in the market here which could make your fortune:

DRIVE-THRU SHREDDERS!!

(I expect 10% for coming up with the idea)

Stephen Hershman said...

Thanks for writing about my company, you can see the actual kiosk in the store on my blog, ShredSpot.

Humorously, our original idea was a drive-thru unit, but it's wrought with issues that we couldn't overcome.

Robin Shreeves said...

Stephen - put one of these in my area, please!

That's funny about the drive-thru. Despairing, who left the comment above yours is from Scotland, and he finds it hysterical that we have so many drive thru businesses here in the US and always gives me a hard time about them. So he's going to get a big kick out of the fact that you really did think about making them drive thru.

Stephen Hershman said...

Now that's even funnier. Best I can say about getting to New Jersey is that we're trying. We're looking at expanding throughout the Seattle area soon and we're still deciding the best way to grow from there. Hopefully you watched the YouTube video seeing the kiosk in action - although it's even more impressively fast when you're actually using it, if I do say so myself. Please keep looking for us!