Strategies to help you get your hands on some moving boxes in London absolutely free. Moving can be expensive enough as it is. There are storage costs to consider, as well as hiring or buying moving equipment, last but not least the cost of transportation. By the time we’ve added all these up the final figure can be eye watering. Not helped by the fact it is hard to even estimate how long you’ll need storage or how much equipment you realistically need. In turn there can be a few nasty surprises that come up that eat well into our moving budgets. Knowing these facts it’s in our best interest to try and keep the cost as low as we can wherever possible. If we can reduce the up front costs, it gives us more leeway down the road to tackle those unexpected cost should they arise.
A great way of reducing costs is getting our hands on free moving boxes in London.
1) Facebook Marketplace
Facebook is an app used by a huge percentage of Londoners. The marketplace section offers a great peer to peer service. Here you can purchase used items from locals in a flash. On the Facebook app, the marketplace has a ‘free’ section. This section is where users are willing to giveaway their unwanted items at no cost to you. Take the opportunity to reach out to some recent home movers. They’ll likely be looking to offload their moving equipment to someone like you to clear space in their home. You’ll likely be pleasantly surprised at the great finds you’ll come across here.
2) Nextdoor London
Nextdoor is a neighbour app that allows you to network in a new way with those that live close by in your community. Using these connections Nextdoor users offer giveaways of items they no longer need. Conduct a search on the app for cardboard boxes, moving boxes, and packing boxes and you’ll likely come across multiple users willing to share their resource with others in your community. Reach out to them and ask if you can take it off their hands for your own use.
3) Freecycle London
Freecycle is a grassroots non profit organization that aims to reduce waste across communities worldwide by encouraging free sharing of stuff between people. The goal is to promote a more sustainable use of items, keeping the stuff from reaching landfills.
The Freecycle London community has over 100,000 members and growing. Join the community free of charge and search free moving boxes to get a list of results from other users willing to share their stuff with you. Many recent home movers use this community in order to get their used moving boxes out of their hands. You can likely find a good set of quality moving boxes that you can pick in London.
4) Costco
Costco is a warehouse marketplace that sells items in bulk quantities that offer great bargains for shoppers. Getting free boxes from Costco can be done in two ways. You either pick up some empty boxes from a shelf in an aisle. Otherwise asking the customer service counter if you can take a few that they have around the shop. Most of these will be broken down later regardless. So you’ll likely be doing them a favour taking it off their hands to save them the time and effort of doing so.
5) Supermarkets
How to get free moving boxes in London from supermarkets easily? You can pick up some empty boxes from the fresh produce area. Let a member of staff know beforehand that you’d like to pick up a few boxes going spare.
Fresh produce boxes such as banana boxes are a useful box type for you to pick up if you can get your hands on some. These can fit inside one another making them easy to carry multiples of them in a small space
6) Fast Food restaurants
Fast food restaurants and restaurants that sell food in high volumes with a high customer count per day, typically deal with a high volume of deliveries daily to keep up with demand. These deliveries for the food items and other necessities required to serve the food and for upkeep of the restaurant will usually be in the form of cardboard boxes.
These boxes are ideal for you to use as moving boxes that can help you move home. How you go about getting them from one of these restaurants is by asking soon after opening hours when deliveries have just been made. Requesting to take boxes from counter staff, as they’ll likely have a few hanging around which they’ll end up tossing out.
7) Coffee Shops
Moving boxes from coffee shops can be picked up from your small local shops and big chain stores alike. Starbucks are known to use quality boxes for their big inventory deliveries. As with restaurants their daily demand is high. This demand must be met via frequent delivery boxes to their stores to keep up with this demand. Typically delivered in these quality moving boxes that you can make use off for your own home move. But how do you get your hands on these boxes? Ask a staff member at the counter if they could spare any to you and they’ll likely help you out the best they can.
The same goes for any of your local coffee shops. While it is more unlikely they will have as many since their demand is much lower, if you can figure out when their deliveries usually come in, you can then go in and ask immediate after for a higher probability that they’ll have some spare to give out.
Conclusion – How to Get Free Moving Boxes in London
You can get free boxes in London by making use of apps that connect you to your local and wider community. Asking in shops where inventory is high, increases the likelihood they’ll have some spare to giveaway.
Start with social and community internet apps such as Facebook marketplace, Freecycle, and Nextdoor. These apps allow you to get in contact quickly with locals in your community. You’ll be able to share each others unwanted resources that others could put to good use.
For in person efforts, try your local supermarkets in the fresh produce section. Both fruit and vegetable carts offer great utility for carrying items. Ask staff in store and see if they have any to give away. This also applies to fast-food restaurants and coffee shops, where delivery of stock happen often. Therefore this increases their need to get rid of the boxes the deliveries came in.
Most will gladly give away their unused and unwanted boxes. It saves them the trouble of breaking them down to recycle or throw away later.
When you’ve finished making use of the moving boxes, return the favour to your local community. List them on the mentioned apps to help out someone in need for their own upcoming home moves.
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