Fear Feeds Millions of Shredders

Ever since an unknown thief ran up thousands of dollars in charges on her family’s credit card, Cathy Chung has worried about snoops and criminals who snatch private information from the unsuspecting.

“You have people going through trash cans. Nothing is safe any more,” said Chung, a stay-at-home mother of three.

That explains one of her first purchases for the study of her new Woodland Hills home: a $35 paper shredder.

The personal shredder has emerged as a common business tool and home appliance--you have your toaster, your power drill, your shredder--and that says plenty about the world we live in.

For its growing ranks of enthusiasts, the shredder has become a cheap and satisfying way to register a protest against a society that is strangling them in paperwork, invading their privacy and making their lives more complicated.

Fellowes Manufacturing Co., a leading maker of personal shredders, estimates that nearly 7.8 million of the devices were sold last year, up from only about 100,000 in 1990. They’re sold everywhere, from Ralphs supermarkets to Bloomingdale’s, as well as at the big office-supply chain stores.

“I like to stick papers in our office shredder just to watch it,” admitted Richard A. Feinberg, an expert in social and consumer psychology at Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind. “There’s a certain perverse pleasure in watching things get shredded.”

Some users even enjoy the grinding noise their machines make while chewing up paper. As Eddie Wright of Simi Valley, who sells shredders for an office-supply chain, explained: “It’s like a bug zapper.”

More important, perhaps, the shredder gives people the feeling that they have regained some ground in a heretofore losing battle to keep their private information private.

Although many privacy advocates recommend shredding, there are so many other ways to get information on people nowadays that turning your bills, credit card slips and bank account statements into confetti every month may not be accomplishing much.

Then again, it can’t hurt--at least, that’s the calculation buyers make. (The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says it has received isolated reports of shredders catching fire and of people being cut or bruised in shredding accidents. The agency, however, has never found a shredder safety defect worthy of a product recall.)

Behavioral experts say there might be other, more personal explanations for the urge to shred: a touch of paranoia, or a desire to feel important.

“There’s nothing that people do that has a one-line explanation,” said social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the Claremont Graduate University.

“That’s what makes for a successful product: when you can satisfy more than one need at a time. A good car is not just one you go to the office with, but also one you can show off.”

And how might a personal shredder feed an ego?

“The shredder is another level of, ‘Look how important I am. I have these sensitive documents here that I have to tear up in little pieces because people want to know what I’m thinking,’ ” said Gerald Celente, director of Trends Research Institute, a consulting and publishing firm.

“This is the office equivalent of the electric can-opener. How often do you need the damned thing?” scoffed Celente. He said he occasionally tears up documents but has never owned a shredder.

White House Memos, Banana Daiquiris

Shredding has a colorful history going back long before the buzz of the personal shredder came into millions of American homes and workplaces.

It emerged as an issue in the Senate investigation of the 1972 Watergate break-in. An aide in the Nixon White House, Gordon Strachan, testified that he shredded incriminating documents after the Watergate burglars were arrested.

The 1979 nonfiction best-seller “The Falcon and the Snowman” recounted how convicted spies Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee had used a shredder in a vault containing secret government papers to mix banana daiquiris.

Perhaps the most famous shredder was former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, President Reagan’s National Security Council aide. He told congressional investigators in 1987 that he fed memos discussing the secret Iran-Contra arms sales and other information through a high-speed shredder that “eats ‘em pretty quick.”

More recently, Christoph Meili, a former Swiss security guard, emerged as a hero to many when he exposed the shredding of Holocaust-era documents by the Bank of Switzerland.

Shredding once was performed exclusively by costly, heavy-duty machines owned mostly by businesses or governments. But a new market was created about 10 years ago when smaller, cheaper machines--the so-called personal shredders--were introduced.

They sell on average for about $50, with prices ranging from less than $15 to as much as $250. The costlier machines generally are sturdier, devour more paper in a single pass and reduce the documents into confetti, rather than the thin strips produced by the cheaper shredders.

Personal shredding is a logical offshoot of the “information destruction” industry that has grown up to meet the enormous needs of business, government and other institutions to destroy stuff.

Their fodder is not merely private documents, but society’s vast stores of unwanted or illegal paper: everything from overprinted sports trading cards to shopping coupons to pornography seized by police. Even outdated vitamins are run through the machines.

The roughly 600 document-destruction contractors across the country took in about $400 million last year, double the level of eight years earlier, according to estimates by Robert J. Johnson. He is the founder of a Washington-based industry trade group, the National Assn. for Information Destruction.

One of the biggest companies in the commercial shredding industry is Burlingame, Calif.-based Instashred Security Services Inc., owned by investors Don R. Thorne of Newport Beach and Issie Rabinovitch of Los Altos.

Although still a modest-sized operation with annual revenue of about $30 million, it has expanded by buying smaller contractors around the country.

In a business where the goal is simple destruction, companies compete largely by keeping costs down and providing dependable service. But many of the more sophisticated competitors also emphasize security.

At Instashred’s plant in Pomona, managers go to extraordinary lengths to prevent people from coming in with a hidden camera or leaving with, say, pornographic material stashed inside their clothing.

There’s a daily strip-search of plant workers who do the shredding. At the end of their shifts, workers wait around wrapped in bath towels while company security officers check to make sure nothing has been hidden inside their uniforms.

Workers also must pass through a chamber known as the “man trap,” where all of the security doors around them can be locked so that they can be stopped before exiting with sensitive documents.

“We don’t let one thing out of here that’s not shredded,” Thorne said. “It’s like Ft. Knox.”

The real shredding boom, however, has come on the personal side of the business.

Machines Prove to Be Hot Gift Item

During the recent holiday shopping season, personal shredders were a hot gift item at many stores.

At its “early bird” sale the day after Thanksgiving, Staples offered a five-sheets-at-a-time machine for just $20--a markdown of more than 40%. At the Woodland Hills store, all 22 machines in stock were snapped up in less than two hours.

One of the buyers, software developer Ho Tran of West Los Angeles, said he bought one because “I’m trying to get rid of everything with a Social Security number, bank account numbers and credit card numbers. There’s a lot of shredding to be done. There’s a big stack of paper at my house.”

Many buyers are already on their second machines. Chung, the security-conscious shredder from Woodland Hills, received a small, battery-powered shredder as a gift about two years ago. But it was too small and too slow, so she bought the bigger and faster machine.

Herschel T. Elkins, consumer chief in the California state attorney general’s office, pointed out that personal shredders are far from a comprehensive defense against most of the ways that personal information slips into computer databases, onto the Internet or directly into the hands of criminals. In actuality, he said, shredding is of only “marginal benefit” in protecting consumers.

But consumers and business owners shred on, some of them with mixed feelings. Gary Kaplan, head of his own executive recruiting firm in Pasadena, said it can be a nuisance to constantly have to shred the paper generated at his office and home.

He muses, “We’ve all become more conscious of this kind of [data theft] stuff, but you wonder how much of it is based on real-life experience and how much of it is subliminal, because you’re hearing about it all the time.”

Still, Kaplan said, he keeps shredding, just in case.

“I don’t know if it’s a major problem,” he says, “but why take a chance?”