I'm doing a quick field poll to get an idea where (if any) you purchase your paper shredders from.

Thanks!

 

With identity theft being such a problem, everyone should own at least one paper shredder. Besides, you can usually find deals on them where they're less than $20!

 

Staples.com (with mail-in-rebate, which arrived in the mailbox < one month after submission - )

It's the one on the left in Mingster's sig, and it's still running like a champ.

 

At the suggestion of the guy with the son that's way too cute I went to Staples and picked up a cross cut shredder several months ago.

 

After hearing the horror stories of friends who had ID theft problems, I bought one at Costco....

 

Yup. And there's something oddly satisfying about shredding something.

 

----RANT MODE ON----

You know, they can make a shredder that will practically vaporize car bodies.

They can grind stumps to pieces.

They can shred engine blocks.

But they CAN'T seem to make a paper shredder that can handle FIVE STINKING SHEETS of paper!

----RANT MODE OFF----

 

i'm gonna vote no, but it's not because I don't worry about identity theft. It's cause I'd rather rip the paper a couple times and crouple it up then buy a shredder....

 

Fortunately for me, I'm in the Navy and work in submarine communications and have access to a shredder/disintegrator that turns paper documents into a fine powder. It is NSA (National Security Agency) approved to destroy up to and including Top Secret and authorized to destroy cryptographic material. (The stuff we use to encode and decode messages and voice traffic) It will also destroy media like CD-Rom's, floppy disks and even your cell phone if you want to! Not cheap though, we just got it about 6 months ago and it cost us (or should I say all us tax payers) $40,000. We also have a cross cut shredder that will shred documents into 1/64 x 3/64 pieces of paper. It's a relative bargain, about $7,000

 

Which shredder did you buy? Are you using the maximum allowed capacity (sheet counts), what kind of paper are you shredding? The weight of the paper has a LOT to do with the capacity.

The problem is with these things made cheaper and cheaper, if you go above & beyond the stated capacity you will either break it or jam it.

In the old days everything was overbuilt (like the big V8s), now these things are calculated down to the plastic grams (trust me, I know). We make a million shredders a year, and if you saved a penny, that's at least 10 thousand bucks that will go into my boss' pocket and not yours.