I would feel uncomfortable about having sensitive documents shredded at Staples, unless I could see the documents being shredded, and knowing that the shredder was a cross-shredder. Some shredders have very large pieces in the output that could be reassembled much easier than tiny pieces.
If you end up needing to replace the shredder, I recommend buying the replacement shredder at Costco. Make sure to save the receipt in a place where is not lost or thrown away. I bought shredders from OfficeMax wore out in a little over a year, and had to keep buying new shredders at OfficeMax. The shredder I bought from Costco lasted almost two years, and Costco replaced it for free.
I bought a Fujitsu IX-500 scanner to scan all my documents, statements, and receipts. I also scanned hundreds of magazines and books. The scanner can scan one sheet at a time or a stack of 50 double sided sheets. It’s like a printer in reverse. I store the scanned documents, statements, receipts, magazines, and books on my MacBook and a copy in the encrypted cloud. I removed boxes of paper and many bookshelves of paper from my life. The unbound magazines and books filled up my recycling dumpster several times. I ran boxes and boxes of documents, statements, and receipts through my shredder.
That decluttered my life of a lot of paper. I keep a few documents, statements, receipts, magazines, and books in the original paper form. I learned about digitalizing the clutter of paper from your life on YouTube videos. Most of the paper, from the books and magazines were directly recycled, but there were many boxes of paper that needed to be shredded. You also need to let the shredder cool down after about 5 to 10 minutes of shredding.
Decades ago, I shredded old paper work and boxes of tractor feed paper printouts through an industrial sized shredder, which was the size of a washing machine. That shredder could shred many layers of paper for hours, non-stop. The corporation had to shred old documents and records that were older than a certain date. In the corporate world, it’s possible to have a court ordered discovery. If you keep too much data on paper or digitally, the court ordered discovery can bankrupt even a large corporation, if you save all documents, paper and digital, forever.
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