This trend got a lot of press. But what we didn’t hear of quite as often is another behavior trend. Some people reacted in the opposite way. Organizing, decluttering, purging, and making everything just so also spiked during this second phase of the pandemic. Squirrels don’t practice the magic art of tidying up. But we do. Donations to the Salvation Army doubled. The amount of non-garbage items people threw out from July through September 2020 in New York City rose roughly 10 percent.
