Buy Nothing Groups Seem to Offer Everything—Except a Chance to Get to Know Your Neighbors

This is Checking Out, a column about how we shop, what we buy, and how it all makes us feel. “Since I became a parent, everything is refining: What are my values actually?” she said, explaining that she didn’t want her search for community resources to involve so much sifting through online posts about stuff. While my local parenting group has been overrun by the stuff people want to get rid of, I’ve found that baby stuff occupies more conversational ground in my life than it ever had before. As much as I might want to, I have never actually replied to say, “I don’t like Funfetti much, but you seem fun and I love a test kitchen project, are you normal and do you want to be friends?” It’s yet another missed connection with someone who I seemingly have common ground with—we both, after all, are in the neighborhood parent group. I’ve seen both of these families post on the online local parent group about their stuff, and I just felt very lucky that I actually knew them—and that they have so much more to give.