Got Junk? Canadian Company Cashing in on SF Consumerism

Now in the department of unnecessary commercialism: KELO reports the expansion of a Canadian company into the South Dakota garbage market. 1-800-Got-Junk, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company, has found a couple guys to start a franchise in Sioux Falls. The company's business model: take advantage of lazy urbanites who don't have easy access to a pickup truck and who just can't be bothered to dirty their hands tidying the garage or the basement themselves.

I know this company well: I worked in their continental call center for three dreary months in Vancouver in 2004. That call center is a key part of the business model: when you call 1-800-Got-Junk (it's the company name and the number—good branding!), you talk to some young marketer in Vancouver. That young marketer will use every manipulative marketing trick she or he can to get you to make a junk appointment—that's how we got our commissions. Unless they've changed since I worked there, you never talk to someone local, and you never get a firm price. You never talk to the person who picks up your junk until that person arrives on your property. Then they tell you the price, and even if you don't like it, well, gee whiz, they've driven out to your house, and you hate to say no to someone's face... ah, marketing.

I also recognize the marketing/propaganda strategy in the Sioux Falls franchisers' interview with Don Jorgensen. Get the local media to mask an advertisement as journalism, get some nice video of the cute little blue mini-dumptruck and the clean blue uniforms. Talk about how easy it is ("You point to it, we take it out"—straight from the training script), emphasize how much the company recycles (even though lots still goes straight to the dump)... yadda yadda yadda.

1-800-Got-Junk markets itself as something better than "Bubba in a pickup truck." That elitism was one thing that bugged me about working for 1-800-Got-Junk. My dad is Bubba with a pick-up truck. A lot of the fellas I grew up with around here are Bubba with a pickup truck. If we have junk to get rid of—assuming we can bring ourselves to part with our precious scrap lumber and metal and other treasures that might still come in handy someday—we get the truck, hook up the trailer, and haul it out ourselves.

1-800-Got-Junk builds its business model on denigrating that do-it-yourself spirit. When I worked for them, I was always bothered by the tension of selling a service that my dad would never pay for. I thought there might be fun in starting a franchise and hauling junk myself when I got back home to South Dakota, but I figured such an enterprise would never fly here, given South Dakota's high pickup-to-people ratio, not to mention the prevalence of rough and ready neighbors with all the rakes, chain saws, and other equipment you would ever need to borrow to bust up and haul away the junk in your yard. Alas, Sioux Falls is growing, and that means more elite consumers who just don't have the time or the work gloves to handle disposing their own junk... maybe enough to provide the critical market mass to sustain the 1-800-Got-Junk business model.

What worries me most about 1-800-Got-Junk's business model is not the elitism, but its basis on consumerism. For the franchise to fly, there have to be folks in Sioux Falls buying, using, and throwing out more junk than the city garbage service can handle. If people stop filling up their garages and basements with useless junk, the boys in blue dump trucks don't have a job. Once again, we see our economy relying on buying more than we need... and getting someone else to clean up our mess.