alt Hacker NewsThe American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities
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I live in a small downtown condo. I don't have room to store a whole lot of extra stuff but I also have hobbies like camping, watersports, etc. I keep all of that stuff in a storage unit and I access it fairly often. Since I have it I also use it to save all the boxes for my electronics (77" OLED is impossible to move safely without original box for example), car maintenance stuff, larger tools I use less frequently, etc. It is about 3 minutes drive 10 minute walk from my house. I definitely do not use it to hoard stuff I will never touch again.
I'm in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, and self storage facilities are popping up around here like weeds. I have a storage unit and I'm trying to clear it out. I'm tired of the monthly fees that keep going up. I got it when I had to clear out my late sister's house and I wanted time to go through things and decide what to keep. When I moved last year, I got a larger unit, thinking I would need to declutter my townhouse prior to showing it. It turned out my agent wasn't that concerned about my clutter, but I did move some idle tech stuff into the unit. I was hoping to get a house with a big basement for my future tech hoarding needs, and I wanted to keep this stuff. As it turned out, I ended up in a rancher with no basement, so now I'm getting rid of old tech I'll never have space for. I'd have saved a lot of money if I'd just done that a year ago. I now have a much smaller unit that I hope to be rid of next year. Self storage units are definitely a mixed blessing.
I also have all of the family antique furniture, some of which goes back three or more generations. I have no heirs and no idea what I'll do with it all, but I don't want to leave it for my executor to deal with. At least it's in the house and not in an expensive storage unit.
Taking this moment to remind everyone that 'Swedish death cleaning' is a healthy, holistic way to not give a storage unit your money.
There was a solid analysis of these facilities done by Modern MBA. https://modern-mba.com/case/self-storage
tl;dw - As far as businesses go, they require low capital to construct, have low operational costs, and also operate as a way to hold real estate/land while also generating revenue.
The people that use them are usually dealing with some life event such as moving, a death in the family, divorce, and just want some solution to house possessions.
Near my house I saw two large blocky buildings being constructed on a main thoroughfare. Different construction companies, but within about 100 yards of each other.
"Fantastic!", I thought. New apartment buildings. That means new restaurants, stores, and other conveniences. Not to mention desperately-needed housing.
I'll never forget my despair upon learning that they were BOTH going to be large multi-level self-storage facilities.
My personal experience with this is my father, who lives in a rural area with 10+ acres, has placed several shipping containers on the property as storage for his junk. He's charged just over $500/mo for them. He's had them for 18 years. The value of property in those containers is maybe $5000.
Consumerism is a disease, and the USA is super good at it.
We call these "above-ground landfills." After watching (and helping) my parents shuffle stuff around these facilities for years, we drew a hard line in our household: no external storage. If it doesn't fit in the space we live in, we're not keeping it. Great article!
Storage space inevitably fills up with stuff. I have the stereotypical "garage too full of stuff to park the car in" but it's one side of a 2-car garage and the other side, and this the wife and I are in perfect agreement on, is reserved for the car.
Then I inherited a second car, which for various reasons is barely practical to keep while it works. It lives outside so that the stuff in the garage (a clutter of far too many bicycles, mostly) can stay accessible. But in winter, it is possible - barely - to park the car inside, with bicycles hanging only inches above it. Some stuff had to be disposed of to make this possible, and I fear some additional stuff will have to go this fall. But you have to set yourself limits or the stuff will grow infinitely.
Meanwhile premium locations all over town are sprouting Dymon Self Storage units. That's the local brand of "premium climate controlled storage". There's one less than a mile, as the crow flies, from my house.
He liked travelling in it, but what he really liked was hanging out inside it while drinking cocktails with friends and family, and if he could have done that while parked in an air-conditioned man cave he might never have taken it on the road.
Most people I know with a self storage place are not using them like the article. (though some do - YMMV). Some use it as a warehouse for their business - they rotate stuff in and out. A carpenter might buy a pallet of nails once every few months and use the storage every few days to refill the truck. Several people keep off-season holiday decorations in storage and rotate it back home for the season. Others keep fishing stuff in storage and stop by storage on their way to/from the fishing spot.
If you have anything in storage you should look at it at least once a year to decide if it is worth saving. It is okay to say that "I love this thing from Grandma even though I don't have room for it", but you need to decide it is still worth it.
My late father was a child during the depression era and so he grew up to be very resourceful/thrifty, hard working, and epitomized the "waste not, want not" slogan. So yes it can come off as hoarding and it was a lot to go through after he passed. Yet after a lifetime of scrimping, saving, reusing, and repurposing, he ended up with quite a lot to show for it. He never paid for storage, didn't clutter any open spaces, but every closet or spare room of his home was packed.
If you have the storage then by all means keep whatever you value. If it would require paying a recurring fee to keep it, then it better be worth it.
Macys went out of business in Sacramento. In a built up area, near a movie theater grocery store mall etc. The best thing that could fill this multi floor space in a developed area is a storage unit.
I have 2 kids in college and I'm trying to sell my house. So I've decluttered to make the house presentable and I'm waiting for my kids to graduate and get their own places so I can give them their crap back. Storage unit makes sense for me. But this is likely to last only 2-4 years and then I'll have downsized enough.
> There’s probably a fifth D: the delusion that your children will want the items you’re planning to bequeath to them, especially the kind of furniture that used to be called antiques
I'm at the age where a lot of friends are starting to deal with parents passing away, and it is very stressful for the next-of-kin to not only have to deal with the grief of loss, but then have to figure out what to do with houses and storage units full of junk. Some attempt to pick through the crap to find the 0.1% with legit sentimental value, others have more energy and try to do yard sales / estate sales, but most just call the truck and haul everything to the dump.
I don't know where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture, "fine china" and 1970s era stereo equipment. If you want to pass on something to your children they will appreciate, pass them a cleaned-out home or pre-arrange a junk hauler.
The US population is anxious [1]. The last thing an anxious person does is get rid of stuff they "might need one day".
> An estimated 19.1% of U.S. adults had any anxiety disorder in the past year.
[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disor...
When I moved to a big city from a medium sized town I had to put some stuff in storage while we lived in a small apartment and searched for a house to purchase. My bbq, lawn mower, other random stuff. Two months later I went to the office to move out and they couldn't find the paperwork. No one does that!
According to George Carlin, "that's the whole meaning of life, trying to find a place for your stuff".
They're good for small/independent businesses who need to store a few things instead of renting a full space or have no spare storage at home.
Wendover made a nice video about this 10 months ago: https://youtu.be/uEVv8SOJ6Is?is=Er27clBvXZ4TzAlj
I'm a big Wendover fan, I think many here would like it.
I rented one of these for a while after my wife and I moved in together. After a bit, I realized what we had paid for it was close to exceeding the value of the items stored within .
Just get rid of your stuff when you can. Life will be better.
I've seen a few American self storage units on Youtube and a lot of times their units are open at the top. Which blows my mind. All it takes is for one bad customer to setup a ladder and just loot whatever unit they want.
> A self-storage facility is a business that rents lockable space to people who own more stuff than they know what to do with
This has turned into another topic where people look down upon others or culture in general while assuming the worst.
Self-storage facilities can be really nice for those of us who like to live in areas where larger houses or garages aren't easy options. I can put the winter gear in there during the summer and the summer gear in there during the winter. If I need to renovate a part of the house, I can rent a storage unit for a few months and move that room's contents into it and free up space. When an older family member passes away and the estate needs to sell the house, moving the important belongings into a storage unit while the family works on dividing them up or selling them is something that happens all the time.
I don't currently have a unit, but when I was making a lot of trips to the self-storage place there were a lot of people doing all the things I mentioned above. I'm sure there are a lot of units with forgotten and unnecessary things that are basically hoarded because their owners can't let go, but I have to roll my eyes at articles that talk about it like an "American religion".
Its interesting in America because we are both a very throw away society but also want to keep everything.
Personally I have an almost neurotic aversion to recurring monthly payments. I'll cancel a $6/mo Netflix subscription if I feel it's not being used, and start it up again later when there's something I want to watch.
I also hate junk. If anything I own doesn't get used for more than a year, I'll sell it or trash it (with a few exceptions).
So even the thought of paying a monthly fee to store junk gives me real anxiety.
It's to the point where whenever I see vacant land being cleared around me in NY, I assume it's for a new storage facility.
> the delusion that your children will want the items you’re planning to bequeath to them, especially the kind of furniture that used to be called antiques but that young people for some time have referred to derisively as “brown.”
This is madness talking. A nice "brown" bookcase or dresser is made of solid wood and will last your entire life. The alternative these days is either insanely priced and still of questionable quality or cheap, badly constructed particleboard that outgasses formaldehyde and other toxins into your home and needs to be replaced every few years.
There used to be a much larger amount of inexpensive high quality furniture on the second hand market, but now its harder to find locally. If you have kids who are allergic to the color brown, you should donate any good furniture you have. Someone will absolutely want it.
i always thought they were a neat idea (they only barely started appearing where i live in the last ~10 years) but it seemed a bit strange that they were so common
So much stuff and so little soul.
It's crazy the kind of crap people keep, of course is not crap to them, but I've known people that have literal container loads of unorganized crap they will never ever see again... Most of the people I know that have loads of stuff store always claim they'll need these things at some point and so they rather have them there in storage instead of dumping or giving them away, and I have never seen them pick a single item, because of course after a few years of storing things there is literally no way to know where things are.
It's infuriating... I dump stuff all the time... I probably have like 50 things in my life including t-shirts, which obviously contributes to my enragement.
I often think about this while watching Hoarders, and this is hitting similar neurons so if you'll forgive the off-topic-ish nature...
I think more than anything this is the ooze you get out of the sides of societies that focus so terribly much on consumer culture. Advertising nowadays is absolutely incredible at driving the creation of what feels like "needs" in people. In my thirties I started transitioning to a woman, full time, and as a result I've bought and donated shit tons of clothes. This experience has made me realize how bizarrely attached I am to those clothes, and also to so many other things I own that I wouldn't have remotely called sentimental. Yet between growing up in a heavily consumerist society, and my environmental side, I feel so much regret and shame when simply throwing things away. Worthless things. Things my rational mind knows damn well I have no use for, that have no reason to exist in my home.
Mind you I'm someone who is familiar with facing down my inner demons. I can't fathom trying to deal with this if you're not someone like me who has gone to lengths to educate myself, to get therapy, and not only gone those lengths but had the resources to do so!
Then I watch hoarders and I see these old, broken down people who have massive, beautiful homes I would love to have, and they've stacked every room to the ceiling with... shit. Sometimes literally shit, but more often it's just junk. Things that were on sale. Each thing advertised to them, promised that it would make them the person they were meant to be, or to help them lose that weight they've been trying to lose for 50 years. That piece of furniture that would finally complete the room. And they did that on, and on, and on, and now their beautiful home is ruined, and most of the stuff is too. And oftentimes the person themselves are harmed too, with early onset illness and injury.
America needs to get our shit together. And worse still we've exported our disease in great quantity to the rest of the world, both as trash, and as the vacuous hollow culture that consumerism drives.
We also happen to have an extremely serious homelessness problem, which is not relegated to CA.
Go to any warm state in the country and ride through the parking lots at night. If you are the observant type, you should see an astonishing number of folks living in their vehicles.
And home ownership is not only downward, but no longer part of the American dream for most people now. Storage facilities for many, are a place to lay down, or rent hope that things won't always be "this way".
We need to fix this. It's not just drugs and mental problems anymore.
Great business model but terrible thing to actually use. If you have so much junk you need a storage unit, you probably need to declutter. Most people have too much junk.
On the other hand, new homes are not being built and this may be a way to compensate for so many people still acquiring the same level of junk but not owning enough homes or space to store it all. Previous generations wouldn’t have had as much of an issue when real estate was much cheaper.
In Europe we just fill the garage to the fucking ceiling and park the car outside. And of course nothing ever gets out of the garage until you die, then it's your kids problem and usually everything goes straight to a landfill.
It must be valuable if an earlier version of myself bought it kept it found it or stored it
Viewable from the commuter train (BART), there is a large storage facility in Oakland which advertises air conditioned units. Outside is a large homeless encampment. Sigh.
I have never paid for self-storage and have never understood why they are so popular. I've known people paying for a self-storage unit to store furniture they are also still making payments on.
tl;dr; version:
While there are good use cases -
> The United States is the world leader, with roughly ninety per cent of global capacity. [...] there are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined. Annual revenues are estimated to be more than forty billion dollars.
> I asked a Welsh facility manager I met in Las Vegas what his customers keep in their units, and he said, “It’s . . . it’s . . . rubbish.”
> My wife and I have a friend whose mother died in 2006. She and her siblings decided to sell their mother’s furniture and donate the proceeds to a charity that she would have approved of. “We put everything in storage temporarily, and it’s all still there,” our friend told me. She figures that they’ve spent at least fifty thousand dollars in rental fees so far—more than they could get from selling the furniture.
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This article takes the view of the consumer, "Why do so many people pay to store items they almost never use?". But in actuality, the interesting part of this is why is there so much supply of self-storage businesses?
The answer is: cash flow. Self-storage businesses are the almost perfect solution for someone with a good size (but not enormous) bucket of money that they want to put to work generating cashflow:
1. Cheap build out (cheap land, cheap facilities) 2. Almost entirely hands-off (no employees, automated entry) 3. Low liability (low risk of customers suing you) 4. Low overhead (just pay for taxes, electricity, minimal maintenance) 5. Reliable monthly cash flow
The abundant supply of these businesses, I suspect, tends to generate demand: it's easier to pay $80/month to store your junk than spend the time and emotional labor of picking through what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. That ends up being captive long-term revenue.