Japan is home to a variety of weird shops, but there’s one that definitely stands out. Dark Past Final Disposal Site is a unique shop where anyone can safely destroy their potentially sensitive digital data by crushing their old hard drive in a special machine, for just 100 yen (80¢). The shop opened in 2020 when a growing number of personal computer owners began raising questions about what happened to their personal data when they changed their PCs. The owners of Dark Past bought a professional hard drive destroying machine and began offering people the chance to safely dispose of their potentially compromising data. Customers merely go to the shop and hand over their hard drives, which are then placed into the machine, where four hydraulically-powered steel rods pierce the data storage, rendering it unusable. When the service originally went viral on Japanese social media, most people were using hammers to pound their hard drives or a drill to puncture them. Both of those methods proved to be dangerous, with plastic and metal debris flying off and striking people. With Dark Past, there’s no danger of that happening, and you can’t beat their price. Although the company was created to destroy hard drives, SSDs can also be crushed there as well, for the same price. When the destruction process is over, customers can opt to leave the drive in the shop to be properly disposed of, or they can take it home as a souvenir.
