Have you heard of Freecycle? All over the world there are Freecycle groups. A freecycle group is an email group for a local area and people send messages offering items for free and other people in the group reply to that person saying they want it. I recently posted messages for a friend who wanted to give away some furniture because she was moving. I also got a Discman yesterday. The people who receive the item pick it up from the person's place. You can also post messages asking for stuff. The only rule is that everything has to be free. The Hobart Freecycle group has 1084 members so it's pumping along with heaps of messages each day (so i keep it going to my Yahoo account instead of my main gmail account!)
www.freecycle.org follow links to your local area
It's such a great community activity.
Buy less stuff, there's enough stuff around already.