Why Pack for the Same Trip Twice?
Travelers often repeatedly visit the same family members, the same friends. Each visit normally requires two packing sessions: You pack the stuff you’ll need, then repack the stuff you brought. Each leg takes time and energy, and possibly – depending on the airline – $25 to $50 per bag in out-of-pocket cost. Worse still, each packing session entails a risk of aggravating memory lapse. One time, you forget a belt; another, your toothpaste. Grrr.
There is a better way. Unless your family or friends live in very confined quarters, politely ask to permanently store one trip’s worth of supplies at each destination. If your hosts appreciate you, they’ll probably say yes. From then on, you can visit them without traditional packing. The out-of-pocket cost is modest. And in any case, if you have the means to travel in the First World, out-of-pocket costs should be secondary to your time, effort, and aggravation costs. Truth be told, you probably have several suitcases worth of clothes you rarely wear; why not pack them up and store them in several destinations you frequent? One fixed cost can save you years of marginal costs.
Sure, if everyone did this, it might cease to be good advice. You probably don’t want to store twenty suitcases for your twenty closest friends – and your closest friends probably feel the same way. But so what? Hardly anyone follows my strategy now, and that’s unlikely to change. And even if my idea caught on, triage is the obvious response. Store your stuff at the five places you visit most often, and reciprocate for your five most frequent guests.
Right now, I store a lot of stuff at my parents’ house, and several useful items at Fabio Rojas’ place. But I plan to take this a lot further. Next time I visit my parents, I’m leaving a week’s stuff behind. I’ll encourage them to do the same at my house. And when my kids have places of their own, I hope each will provide a few cubic feet for Grandpa Bryan.
Question: Why do so few people use my strategy? The awkwardness of asking? Hostility of the hosts’ spouse? Or just plain old-fashioned status quo bias?
The post appeared first on Econlib.
Another tip is just to have a "go bag" prepacked with the essentials. Don't pack a toothbrush and razor - just buy duplicates and leave them in the go bag. I use a backpack.
I think many (most?) people don't have or don't want to wear those clothes which they "never" wear. They want to wear the clothes which they like most which is why they carry them everywhere.
My brothers and me basically used to do something like your suggested strategy at my parents' house when I was younger (and I reckon many others do this). This was not out of some grand design but just because we had all left some clothes and other stuff behind when we moved out of my parents house.
In addition, the ownership status of many of these clothes was contested (at least in the mind of at least one of us).
This is what happened: gradually, my thieving brothers and I started "appropriating" items we liked. After a while there was only stuff left that nobody wanted to wear. That eventually got donated. Now we bring our own clothes every time.
One solution to this would be to buy many copies of ones favorite item and place them in the various destinations. But for some super-efficient reason, the Great Allocation Mechanism has come up with this thign called "fashion" which induces us to only buy few of each item at a time. And even when you do want to buy more copies of a specific item, fashion has moved on and it is no longer available.
You still have to find a way to deal with your thieving family, though!