Behind the locked door - self storage secrets

It’s long … it’s thorough … and it’s vintage Moo!

Jon MooAllem’s well researched article, The Self-Storage Self - Storing All the Stuff We Accumulate, provides an in-depth look at the birth and relatively short history of the self storage industry. As usual, the off-beat freelancer does an excellent job spotlighting how America’s penchant for excess has contributed to the extraordinary growth and sustained volume that created more than 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage (SS) space in the U.S. in the last fifty years.

The New York Time’s piece also takes a peek under the under the closed doors and behind many of the personal stories that motivate SS users to lock their stuff up in these huge toy boxes and giant junk closets. After reading it, I have to admit I felt a tinge of guilt and a flood of intense memories for still hanging on to some of the kid’s early toys, old books, parent’s furniture and forgotten school assignments.

The guilt originated in the wallet and lingered long after paying the bills two days later. The memories lasted … well…long enough to be replaced by another thought.

Having had a glimpse inside thousands of temporary and permanent full service storage vaults, and hundreds of do-it-yourself mini-stge lockers, it’s easy to understand why the industry managers interviewed for the article classified much of the contents taking refuge under their facility roofs as junk.

Unlike those interviewed, however, I think the SS industry is now going through the same metamorphosis that the full service moving and storage industry has been experiencing for the last two decades.

America’s self storage industry was fathered by the excesses of the Greatest Generation after WW II and nurtured by the affluence that Boomers have languished in it for the last twenty five years. But now that most of my mother’s and father’s generation have been laid to rest and me and my friends settle down to watch the setting sun, the excess baggage cause by our self-absorbed, greedy lifestyles doesn’t seem as important anymore.

Just has the full service relocation industry has seen a contraction in their business model caused by a changing economy and more frugal national attitude, I think the new generations of budget conscious consumer’s won’t find much personal value in hoarding all the unknown or forgotten stuff stuck behind closed doors all across the country.

My kids and grandkids certainly won’t appreciate my great-great grandfather’s ashes, grandmother’s carnival glass ashtrays, mother’s hand-stitched appliqués, or former lover’s letter’s with the same detail that my wife and I do. And that’s the attitude conveyed in the feedback left by many of the younger readers who left comments in response to a follow up article at the Consumerist entitled Consumers Reevaluating Their Decision To Pay To Store A Bunch of Junk. To them, the memories aren’t worth $200 -400 a month!

What do you think? If you’re part of the 1 in 10 Americans who have ‘stuff ‘stored in a self storage facility, it is worth the regular monthly expense?