I don't think people intentionally accumulate clutter. And every household accumulates clutter. The source doesn't matter.
I have a lot of excess. Some of it was a mistake and I'm getting rid of that. But we also keep a large stash of stuff because of where we live and how hard it is to just run to the store for some little thing, not just because we live out of town, but because the town we live near doesn't have any big box stores, resulting in things that are either high priced or completely unavailable. That's not an excuse, it's a necessity and part of our personal self-sufficiency. We've been diving into the home improvement stash a lot over the past few weeks and we've saved hundreds, not to mention the time we save not having to stop in the middle of a project and jump in the truck and run into town to get some little essential item that would cost us fifty cents and a gallon of gas and an hour of work time, if we can even get the item we need. Same with sewing, and I sew a lot. If I didn't have a large sewing stash, I would be severely limited in my ability to make so many of the things we need, many of which are not available anywhere at any price. And I know how much custom work costs, because I used to be the one doing it for other people and charged them plenty.
We've started limiting the spaces for different types of stashes, and once those spaces are filled, we don't buy any more of that type of item. And we're going through things and purging more often. Even with the mistakes we've made in buying, we feel we're still saving money. Everyone makes mistakes in their purchasing or else they would never purge or donate anything. I'd rather make a mistake with something that cost a dollar than the same item bought retail that cost me twenty dollars. But we've reached a stage in our lives now where we have most of what we need, so we don't go to garage sales nearly as much as we used to. A lot of what we buy now, also is upgrades so we get nicer things on the cheap and then donate the less nice things. But we're still paying way less than retail for both things, so why not?
I don't like tea, iced, sun, or otherwise, so I'd have left both the sun tea jar and the iced tea maker there.
