Using Industrial-Strength Shredders at Home

But one recent entry on the domestic front is just now getting its steroid moment: the shredder. As unlikely as it sounds, some people are willingly, even enthusiastically, spending upward of $1,000 on shredders heavy duty enough to reduce personal documents and other items to the consistency of confetti — particularly during tax season, or high shredding season, when shredder sales peak every year.

As concerns over identity theft grow, the shredder is emerging as a symbol for the Age of Anxiety, something akin to what the power lawnmower was to the 1950s.

For some, of course, shredding is simply another time-consuming chore, but for others, it offers a sense of security and accomplishment — the satisfaction that comes from decimating a pile of junk mail — however short-lived the victory.

“It’s very cathartic,” said Sam Gosling, the author of “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You” and a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Gosling owns a $50 shredder that he is not terribly attached to, he said, but he can see the appeal of shredding.

“I’ve always liked chopping wood and banging in nails,” he said. “It has that fascination of machinery and destruction. And with this, you’re destroying the very things that are the source of the frustration. With an annoying phone call or e-mail, you can’t do much more than just hang up or delete it.”

It’s impossible to know exactly how many people are buying heavy-duty shredders to use at home, since companies that make them rely on product registrations to track where they are being used, and many people never register their shredders. But Fellowes, a company that makes an array of consumer shredders in the $50 to $2,000 price range, reports that according to product registrations it received for several models designed for commercial use sold in the last two years, about a quarter of them are being used at home.

Maureen Moore, a vice president for marketing at the company, offered one explanation. “Five years ago, consumers were just becoming aware of identity theft and buying low-end shredders to protect themselves,” she said. “Then they shredded far more than they anticipated with machines that underperformed, and the result was frustration. For the second shredder, consumers traded up.”

Some are trading way up.

Isaac de la Fuente, the owner of Mono Machines in Brooklyn, sells the high-end Destroyit line, which is made in Germany and could be considered the Mercedes of shredders, since the least expensive one is about $380.

“People come to me for year three, after the $50 one broke and then the $150 one broke,” he said. “They realize that buying a new shredder every year adds up.”

Mr. de la Fuente’s sales of high-end shredders have spiked noticeably in the past two years, he said, even as the overall shredder market fell 32 percent from 2007 to 2009, according to the NPD Group, which tracks retail sales.

The MBM Corporation, the company based in Charleston, S.C., that distributes Destroyit shredders, ships 80 percent of its shredders directly to customers, so it has a record of exactly how many of those are going to homes.

“I am ever more stunned to find out how many people are buying these for their houses,” said Ned Ginsburg, the president of MBM. Two years ago, it was rare to see a Destroyit bought for personal use, he noted, but now, he estimates, “we probably see about 5 percent of our total business being shipped directly to a user’s home address, and that number is growing.”