Study Reveals The Most Common Items that Go Missing at Home

Forgetting stuff is easy. We’ve all spent mornings frantically searching for our keys or worse, left our phones or wallets behind somewhere. But what’s the real cost of being forgetful? According to the “Lost & Found” survey released by Pixie, a location app for iPhones, Americans collectively spend a whopping $2.7 billion dollars every year—two thirds of us spending up to $50 yearly—simply replacing the items they can’t find. And that’s not all, the everyday items we often misplace and more importantly, the amount of time we spend searching for them is pretty startling, too. Read ahead for a breakdown of Pixie’s more interesting discoveries.

Not so surprisingly, Pixie’s survey shows that more the 45% of us lose the remote controls to our TVs at least once a week—with 71% of us losing them monthly—making them by far the most misplaced item in the survey. Next come phones (33%); car and house keys (28%); glasses (27%); shoes (24%); and wallets and purses (20%), which means at least one in every five Americans misplaces something important every week!

Believe it or not, Pixie’s research reveals that Americans spend an average total of 2.5 days a year looking for misplaced stuff. That’s nearly half a workweek we lose just searching for things. But time lost isn’t the only costly consequence of being forgetful. The study also shows that 60% of people have either been late to work or school because of lost items, followed by 49% who have missed appointments or meetings, and even 22% who’ve missed flights, trains, or bus rides. Turns out misplacing things can be more than just expensive; it’s a major time drain too.

Of all the everyday items that frequently go missing, it seems that some actually take longer than others to locate. According to Pixie, the average search for a misplaced item takes about five minutes and twenty seconds of our time, but there are things that people spend a lot more time looking for. In fact, the study shows that there are several objects people spend more than fifteen minutes of their day trying to find, including: house keys (21.3%); wallets (20.2%); umbrellas (19%); passports (18.9%); drivers licenses (18.8%); and credit and debit cards (18.7%). That’s a whole lot of time and energy wasted on searching for stuff we need.