"Window dressing" in stories --> fleshing out or bloating up?

I recently wrote (gah, READ!) a few books of Stephen King, and I found that he has a very interesting writing style in that he describes his world in such a way it seems very realistic and down-to-earth, like it was your neighborhood or something. One thing he does is to make the writing voice conversational and sometimes winding, and also make a lot of pop culture references. However, what really interests me is that he also fills his story with bucket-loads of details, some of them insignificant, so that his stories are actually extremely slow paced. A lot of them will be like "window dressing" -- you know, the story will be pretty much the same if you cut it all out. (One example is in Bag of Bones, where he has a little phone conversation with his brother. It is of marginal significance to the character, and probably none to the reader.)

My question is, does that help the story or harm it? When I'm reading his books I always tell myself: "well, I could cut this part out, it doesn't really affect the story that much." But if I did that, will I be taking away some of the magic the story has? I've wondered if these seemingly unimportant and cut-able descriptions actually lends the story a kind of hypnotic, everyday, neighborhood feel so that when the creepy things drop in, they really hit the reader. Is the "window dressing" meant to be there so the paranormal stuff can tear it down?

Or, is it the other way around? Does the extra description bloat the story? Is it possible Stephen King's stories succeed despite the "window-dressing" (most of the time it's just a minor annoyance), not because of it?

I'm asking this because I feel this particular aspect of his writing style is more subtle -- it doesn't have a clearly measurable effect in that you don't read these "window dressing" and go "wow, that's clever/intriguing" or "that terrifies me." Sometimes it's even a chore to read through, but is it possible that it is working its magic in the background, and that the chore-like feel actually accents the horror later on? Maybe the story would lose that if it was cut out? Maybe without them, the story becomes sterile and bare-bones?

Any opinions? You can use other writers who do a similar thing if you want.

That's a pretty significant rule of writing, actually. If someone hasn't invested something in a character (even something as simple as "Eh, this person is normal enough I could believe them existing"), they won't care when terrible things happen to them.

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I agree. Most writers, though, would put the character through a single event that illustrates their character, and puts them in a sympathetic situation. King, however, seems to go the extra mile, sometimes spending 80 pages or so describing a lot of different aspects of the character's life and setting, some important to the story, some simply a kind of decoration to color the story.