The Office Depot was very excited to announce that one of their shredders is was a “Best Buy” in Consumer’s Digest. Consumer’s Digest defines a “Best Buy” a product that has a combination of performance, ease of use, features, warranty, efficiency, style, and maintenance and service requirements. The shredder in question can do 12 sheets at a time and costs $80. In the past Consumer’s Digest has been pretty accurate with their ratings. So for this post we will assume they are correct and this is a good shredder. But I am more interested on how a “Best Buy” shredder would compare to shredding service on some basic office shredding.

Lets contemplate a small office. They aren’t going to generate a tremendous amount of shredding. If they have the basic account reports they print out and then customer lists or other correspondence that contain private information. This can be to protect the trade secrets of the business or to protect their  customers’ information.  Shredding is required by FACTA for almost every business. The exception is one that deals exclusively in cash.

So our hypothetical office has one box worth of paper to shred. At 12 sheets at a time it would take hundreds of passes through the machine.  A low paying office worker is going to make at least $10 per hour. So you have a couple of hours in wages to go through the box. The company should budget $20 into their shredding budget or $240 every year.

Now lets compare that to a shredding service. The business wants to see it shredded so we will look at mobile shredding. The larger the volume the better the pricing. But this is a small office so lets say they only have 10 boxes to shred.  This is going to be on the low side and more expensive per box. But even so you can expect to pay less than half of what the shredder costs.

In the end the “Best Buy” shredder cost more than a shredding service. The shredder will require capital spending. It needs maintenance and replacement. Shredders require assigning the work to an employee and supervising the work which can hardly be considered efficient. This shredder may be good when compared to other shredders but it doesn’t measure up when compared to all the options to finish the job.