The liquor store has your moving boxes

At the liquor store first — eighteen separate conversations name it, far ahead of any other source. Boxes built to carry twelve bottles of glass are built for weight, they're small enough to lift when full of books, many have handles or cardboard dividers that turn out to be perfect for glasses and mugs, and staff often hand them over gladly because breaking them down is the tedious part of their shift. A few honest notes from the same conversations: the boxes are small, so they're for heavy things rather than bedding; a shop may keep the good ones for customer orders and only have battered ones spare; and if the person behind the counter says they have none, they mean it — one account says repeated asking is what makes staff hostile. Second, across ten separate conversations, the grocery store: the produce department's apple boxes (tall, solid bottoms, handles, often with shredded paper inside that becomes packing material), egg boxes (clean and thick), and boxes from the toilet-paper and kitchen-roll aisle, which stock staff say are made of far sturdier board than chip boxes. Meat departments and bakeries have large boxes and sometimes buckets. Timing matters more than anything here: produce boxes get crushed for recycling soon after they're emptied, so ask which night the delivery comes and who's on. After that the list gets long, and each of these is from one or two conversations: copy shops and offices for paper boxes with lids that stack; bookshops, if you ring the receiving department; bike shops, for the big flat boxes that fit a television or framed pictures; car-parts stores and dealerships, whose parts boxes are reinforced for heavy fluids; craft-supply shops after a delivery; fast-food places, whose fry and bread boxes are uniform and thick-walled; pubs and bars for bottle boxes; tobacconists for clean uniform ones; and, if you know someone inside, hospital receiving docks and university labs, which discard clean, strong boxes by the cartload. Two more sources that need no shop at all: local marketplaces and free listings, where people who moved last month are giving away exactly the boxes you need, across five separate conversations and with a habit of re-posting them when they're done; and truck-rental depots, which in two accounts keep a take-a-box, leave-a-box bin. Now the asking, which the accounts are firm about across seven conversations: call ahead or ask staff before you take anything. Taking boxes from behind a shop without asking is, in the accounts' own words, theft — the cardboard is often baled and sold — and at some big retailers handing boxes out is against policy, so a manager may say no even when the stock clerk would have said yes. Don't push if told no; the shop is doing you a favour. Take flattened boxes and tape them back up at home rather than turning them down, because a stack of empty made-up boxes is exactly what a shop has no room for. And if someone agrees to set boxes aside, turn up when you said you would.

Mostly, with one category to inspect and one to think twice about. Across eight separate conversations people warn that boxes which have carried food, especially produce, can carry passengers: spiders, cockroaches or their eggs, silverfish, and — in a few accounts — tropical spiders that arrived with the fruit. Banana boxes are the box the conversations argue about, and the argument is worth reading in full because it has good company on both sides. One side says banana boxes are excellent — sturdy, a comfortable size to carry, free by the pallet, used successfully for decades. The other side says avoid them entirely because they are the box most likely to have something living in it, and cardboard is nesting material for roaches. The people in the middle, who are most of the ones with experience, say what decides it: your region's pests, and whether you actually look. Tip each box out, check the corners and under the flaps in good light, and leave any box with droppings, webbing or a smell where you found it. Bed bugs are on the accounts' list of passengers too, which is the strongest reason to inspect. Boxes from electronics stores, copy shops, offices and labs never held food and are the clean choice if you'd rather not inspect. On chemicals, one account says produce boxes aren't soaked in anything — a box that had a spill on it becomes hazardous waste at the store and doesn't reach the pile. One more thing the conversations agree on: match the box to the load. Liquor and paper boxes for books and heavy kitchenware; bike and television boxes for anything flat and fragile; bedding and towel boxes for soft things; and one account packs books and discs in plastic grocery bags precisely because a bag stops you overfilling a container until it's too heavy to lift.

It depends on who is carrying them and for how long, and the accounts have argued this one enough times that the answer is clear. The case for free is the one this page opens with: a big move's worth of sturdy boxes for the cost of a few phone calls and an evening's driving, at a moment when money is going out the door in every direction. The case for buying, across several conversations and with professional movers among the people making it, is that mismatched boxes cost time. Uniform boxes stack in a truck or a storage unit like bricks; a mix of liquor boxes, apple boxes and a fry box doesn't, so the same load takes more trips, more shuffling and more swearing, and free boxes that are too small or a little soft add labour of their own. The decider both sides name: if you are paying movers or a truck by the hour, uniform boxes pay for themselves in the first hour and you should buy them, or buy used ones from a moving company that's disposing of them; if you're moving yourself with friends and a borrowed van, your labour is free and the mismatch is just a longer afternoon. Two middle paths from single accounts: rent plastic totes, which stack perfectly and — because they have a return date — make you unpack faster; and if you can get into the new place early, move gradually over several days, at which point uniform sizes stop mattering at all. One person's summary is the frugal one: for someone with limited money, free boxes of odd sizes beat paid uniform ones, and how much your time is worth is a fact about your situation, not a rule. What nobody here recommends is the postal service's free shipping boxes, for reasons the caveats cover. Remedies vary between moves more than any list admits — the mixed pile that slowed one person's truck was no problem for another, who had early access to the new place and moved a carload at a time over several days.