Dude, You Were Shredding!

The other day, customers entering the Office Max in St. Paul’s Midway
were greeted by bold signs bearing an urgent message: “Avoid Identity
Theft. Protect Personal Information.” Next to them were sprawling
displays of home paper shredders, all bearing names intended to invoke
fear, awe, and consumerism: The Sentinel. The PowerShred. The Paper
Monster.

Lynne, a short, bespectacled Office Max employee, shuffled by and
offered packets of coupons to customers. Mail-in rebates on shredders
were among the deals. Sales were brisk last month, she said. And for
good reason: A section of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act
that went into effect June 1 requires all employers to shred the
redundant personal information of all employees. This law isn’t just
for haughty CEOs, however, or even neighborhood record stores—it’s for
you, if you hire anyone for any purpose, like a babysitter, lawnmower,
or housecleaner.

Lynne doesn’t own a shredder. She tosses bills and credit-card receipts
in the trash, without even tearing them up. She’s not losing sleep over
it, either. But others are, and shredding companies, concerned
businesses, and advertisers have capitalized on this. Consider
Citibank’s ad blitz that features victims speaking with voices of
identity thieves, describing the merriment of truly risk-free spending.
Couple the new law with these rising fears, and you find a booming $350
million shredding industry prospering both in offices and at home,
where the paper trail, despite the wonders of online billing and
communication, continues to grow.

No technology seems able to render paper obsolete. There’s been a ten
percent increase in the volume of workplace paper during the last
decade, in defiance of “experts” who expected its use to drop
dramatically with the rise of networked computers. Ironically, email is
the main culprit. The irrational impulse to send much of your inbox to
the printer has been the biggest boon to the pulping industry. As a
result, the average cubicle farmer uses ten thousand sheets of copy
paper each year. Print. Read. Repeat.

All those reams generally end up in two places, trash or recycling,
which creates security headaches for business espionage experts (yes,
people have this job). Similar headaches exist for individuals, with
dumpster diving celebrating several years of legalization. Thus
shredding, once limited to the paranoid, the neurotic, the
ultra-responsible, and the occasional chief executive scoundrel, is
becoming wildly popular.

Now that the shredder is destined to acquire a domestic status
somewhere between the refrigerator and the waffle iron, drab just won’t
do, and on the consumer level, there are hip home alternatives. Michael
Graves has designed a lustrous, smiling basket that is sold at Target,
and there are handheld personal shredders for on-the-fly jobs. But even
the most expensive consumer-level shredder can handle only a dozen
sheets at once, and this causes difficulties, since paper must be fed
manually, with all paper clips removed.

For the really epic, corporate scandal-level jobs, there are the
professional shredders. Shred-N-Go, a company in Plymouth, owns
specialized mobile shredding units—trucks—that can demolish three
hundred pounds of paper in less than four minutes. That’s about two and
a half tons of confetti in an hour.

There are several other local companies with equally fanciful names
(could you think of a better one?), including Document Destruction in
Lakeville and Minnesota Shredding in Edina. As they are happy to point
out, their services are inexpensive, considering the estimated cost of
identity theft for a typical individual is around fifteen hundred
dollars. Plus, according to Document Destruction’s testimonials, the
“professional, yet fun” employees leave everyone “totally pleased.”

The law is clearly on the side of the shredders. A few weeks ago, the
U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Enron’s accounting
firm, Arthur Andersen, whose shredding spree was thought to be an
obstruction of justice. It turns out that it’s completely lawful for
higher-ups to instruct employees to regularly shred or otherwise
destroy incriminating documents. This holds perhaps the most important
lesson for novice shredding enthusiasts. If you’re shredding documents
because you know they could be deleterious to you, then just lie—and
make sure you’re shredding something valuable every day.—Brian Voerding