Shortly before finding the multipack of brassieres, shortly after discovering two dozen picture frames, and at around the time I see a puzzled six-year-old inspecting a shiatsu massage chair, there is a moment of introspection.

Do I really need half a tonne of Amazon return goods?

That is when I come across a dog wetsuit and 60 golden forks and the question is answered for me. Of course I do. Adjusting my new floral tie and cravat, putting my new travel kettle in my new duffle bag, I start rummaging with renewed vigour. There are 300kg still to sort.

The idea for The Box began, as with so much that leaves one feeling inchoate self-disgust, on TikTok. There, you can watch viral videos of people who bid, sight unseen, on job lots of unsellable goods. They buy them by the pallet: things people have returned, things companies have written off. Now I have done so too.

But are we thrifty bargain hunters? Or vultures of capitalism?

My box comes from the website Jobalots.com. The company sells “pallets of unmanifested customer returns” through auction. How much are unmanifested returns worth? I decide to manifest £130 with my first bid. I have a wobble as the price tops £200. I stiffen my resolve. Whatever is inside is still less than 50p a kilogram.

A week later, I receive my mystery pallet. Or, rather, my parents do. When I had explained to my wife that I planned to, in her words, “fill the house with half a tonne of tat,” she looked at me with her divorce eyes. Then, she brightened. “Your mother would love it though.”

People react differently to The Box.

My children and their cousins go into a terrifying frenzy. Several neighbours stop to riffle through. Several others walk past bemused. Between playtents, headphones and drill bits, it looks like the middle aisle at Lidl has been dumped on the driveway.

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My mum, it turns out, doesn’t love it. As her grandchildren rip open packages she mutters lamentations about consumerism. “It’s obscene,” she says. “A sin.”

My dad is quieter. He inspects the ground with the precision of a wading bird seeking tasty morsels in the mudflats. He has a cellar to stock.

Like Europe after the Congress of Vienna, their marriage has spheres of influence. My mum, the hegemonic power, got all parts of the house above ground. My dad was given a small damp cellar that occasionally floods.

Here he stores his wood collection, his copper piping, and his nail and screw library (the secret of the filing system to die with him). There is a set of chisels that were old when Britain lost its empire.

As the day progresses the chisels are joined by a laser surveying tool, a heavy duty battery, a battery charger (not matching), and an electric screwdriver. The cellar also gains something else.

At around the time my youngest son finds the “buttock and thigh massager”, I hear a muted exclamation from a different pile, and see my dad holding a ratchet. “It could come in useful,” he says thoughtfully. If you want to picture the poignancy of the human condition, it’s a man into his 70s imagining a possible future in which he needs a strap tightener for an articulated lorry.

Where, though, has it come from?

To understand the mystery half-tonne in my parents’ drive, I need to understand two things, says Martin Heubel, founder of Consulterce, an Amazon consultancy. The first is that for private companies using Amazon, it costs money to store goods that aren’t selling.

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Especially with seasonal products, if the season is over, they think: “Instead of paying Amazon six months of inventory costs, I’ll push the dispose button.”

The second is that some returned goods aren’t worth the hassle for companies themselves to resell. For electronic goods, for instance, “because of data protection they have to ensure your data is cleaned. That includes a lot of manual labour.”

As lunchtime becomes late afternoon, The Box depletes. My children take monoculars and a floating moon night light. The Times’ photographer leaves with a saucepan and reading light. A laundry basket is filled with clothes for the charity shop.

A local school takes camping equipment, six woks, 70 paper fans for arts and crafts and most of the three dozen animal magnet sets for animal magnetism purposes.

When dusk falls, we stand amid the detritus. A smattering of screws. A broken fan. The wheels of a buggy. Empty cardboard boxes.

Half a tonne has become a few kilograms. We are indeed vultures, I think. But, then, ecosystems need vultures. We need the final layer of scavengers to eat the carrion of capitalism, to derive the last bit of value.

As all scavengers know, though, there are always the tougher, more sinewy bits at the end. So it is that as Christmas approaches a few boxes still remain to be allocated. Surely there’s someone in my life who fancies waking up on the 25th to fifty crystal doorknobs and some polyester hair extensions?