There is a Kallax unit on my landing in E17. It has been there since a housemate moved out in February, along with two bin bags of winter coats and a bread maker that worked fine the last time anyone plugged it in. I know roughly what all of it is worth. I know which apps it goes on. I have listed none of it.
As far as I can tell, this is the normal condition of anyone living in a city where floor space costs money. Ask around your building, and you will find the same pile in different forms: the bike with the buckled wheel under the stairs, the box of DVDs nobody has opened since the move, the pushchair being kept for a second child who is now eleven. Everybody means to sell it. Almost nobody does.
The usual explanation is that we are lazy, or sentimental about objects. I think that lets the actual problem off the hook.
The maths nobody does
Londoners pay for square footage at a rate that would look absurd written on a receipt. Divide your rent by the floor area of the flat, then work out what the stretch of hallway occupied by that Kallax costs you every month. Do the same for the loft, the under-stair cupboard, the corner of the bedroom stacked with boxes from two moves ago. If you have gone as far as renting a unit in Bermondsey or Park Royal, the sum gets worse rather than better: plenty of those units cost more per month than their contents would fetch on a good day.
There is a second bill most people never connect to the first. London tenancies turn over faster than almost anywhere else in the country, and removals are quoted by volume. So the boxes you did not open in the last flat get carried down three flights, driven across two boroughs and carried up again, at a price per cubic metre, to sit unopened in the next one. I have paid to move a snowboard I last used in 2016 twice.
None of this is news to the people paying it. What is strange is how rarely the obvious response follows. The stuff is worth money, there are buyers within three postcodes, and it stays exactly where it is.
Demand was never the bottleneck
Watch what happens when something does go up. A decent chest of drawers, priced sensibly on Facebook Marketplace, gets a message within the hour, usually from someone who will come tonight with a borrowed van. eBay clears specific things quickly: a lens, a chainsaw blade, a discontinued kitchen gadget with a small devoted following. Ask anyone selling vintage on Etsy and they will tell you there is an audience for items that would look unsellable in a charity shop window.
Demand is fine. The secondhand economy here has been normalised for a decade, between eBay’s long tail, the rise of Vinted, and a generation that finds buying new slightly embarrassing. The bottleneck sits somewhere much less romantic.
It is the form.
Anyone who has listed anything knows its shape. Title, which has to contain the words a stranger would actually type into a search box. Category, chosen from a tree that holds firm opinions about whether a food processor is a small appliance or a kitchen tool. Condition, described honestly, chip on the lid included. Then the item specifics: brand, model, colour, material, dimensions, capacity, power rating. For the drill in my hallway, that means finding a model number half rubbed off the casing, which means fetching my glasses, which means the drill stays in the hallway.
Twenty minutes an item, give or take. For something you hope will sell for £18.
Where the twenty minutes actually goes
Not on photography, which is the part most selling guides fixate on. Phone cameras are good now, and a white sheet taped up by a window does most of what a lightbox would. Nobody abandons a listing because the photo was slightly imperfect.
They abandon it at the blank fields underneath.
Listing AI tools have changed the arithmetic on that part, in a way that has gone fairly unremarked outside seller forums. Photograph an item from a few angles and software of this kind reads the shots together rather than one at a time, so the brand and model come off whichever picture happens to show the label. It checks what that particular marketplace asks for before filling anything in, then hands back a title, a description, a category, the specifics and a suggested price range in roughly the time it takes a kettle to boil. Backgrounds get cut to plain white in passing, which is worth distinguishing from the image-generation everyone assumes is involved: the item itself is never repainted or invented, only lifted off the carpet it was photographed on.
Direct posting is rarer than the marketing around this category suggests. Most of the time you get the finished text back and paste it in yourself, with the occasional shop connection, usually Etsy, that posts straight through. Which sounds like a downgrade until you notice the paste takes fifteen seconds and the writing took twenty minutes.
The speed is not the interesting part. What the speed does to the threshold is.
The £18 item becomes worth listing
Every household has a line below which selling something is not worth the trouble, and for most people it sits somewhere around thirty quid. Above the line, you list. Below it, the object drifts towards the tip, the charity shop bag, or the landing. That line is not a judgement about what the object is worth. It is a judgement about your Sunday evening.
Drop the cost of listing to a minute or so and the line moves down with it. The lamp, the four hardbacks, the drill with the missing battery, the pushchair, the Lego set with two figures gone. Individually trivial. Cumulatively, they are the reason bulky waste collections across most London boroughs are full of things that still work.
I am not going to pretend software fixes consumption. We would all be better off buying less to begin with, and no tool resolves that. But there is a real difference between an object that finds a second owner and one that goes into a skip because filling in a form on a Sunday night felt like too much, and for years we have treated that difference as a character flaw rather than a design problem.
The Kallax went last month, in the end. Twenty-five pounds, collected on a Saturday by a man from Walthamstow with a Berlingo and a ratchet strap. It took him nine minutes to dismantle.
It had taken me seven months to write four lines about it.
