by Learning from America’s $40B storage industry
George Carlin, may he rest in satiric peace, had a classic routine on “stuff” that still resonates. In the riff, he asks why we think other people’s stuff is sh–, but our sh– is good stuff. So good, we’re willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month to store it in a big, climate-controlled metal box somewhere just off the interstate. Our homes? They are merely places to keep our stuff while we go out and . . . get more stuff!
Or, to update Carlin’s 40-year-old monologue, our house is simply the address to give Amazon Prime so the van knows where to bring all that new stuff.
We in the furniture industry are acutely aware of these opposing views of stuff. We know our furniture is really nice stuff. We have a Pennsylvania House dining room table in solid cherry into which I gaze and see hundreds of years of American history. We have a Kindel bedroom suite that should endure forever. But, our (full-grown) kids? They don’t view our furniture as really nice stuff. They don’t want any of it . . . ever.
I’ve spoken with several people in the past few months about this problem of having really nice furniture, but no one to whom to sell, give or bequeath it. In fact, not only does the next generation not want the furniture, they don’t even want the color “brown” anywhere in their homes.
A recent New Yorker piece on the self-storage industry, David Owen’s “The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities,” concluded that the two pillars of American culture are church and storage units. The numbers back it up: The U.S. holds about 90% of the world’s self-storage capacity, has more facilities than Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’ and Costco locations combined, and takes in more than $40 billion a year, according to Owen’s research.
The four D’s
The storage industry says its business runs on “the four D’s”: death, displacement, divorce and downsizing. Owen adds a fifth, delusion. Three of these D’s are pretty good for our industry. Death often means inheritance money to spend on more stuff. And travel. Displacement and re-lo’s mean a need to furnish some new digs. Divorce creates two households where previously there was only one, and at minimum it means another bedroom. Of course, downsizing doesn’t help us much at all.
So, it was a month ago that my wife and I road-tripped to see our West Elm-, thrift store-loving adult kids. On our way back, we stopped at a self-storage center in Kernersville, North Carolina, the fourth-largest city in the Triad, to pick up an adorable Pulaski desk from the Antique Roadshow licensed collection. HNN’s own Tom Russell gifted us the desk, steadfastly refusing any and all attempts to recompense him even in some token way.
To retrieve the desk, Tom had to remember into which of his three air-conditioned units arrayed in the pristine, three-level, steel-and-glass storage center he had placed it. Fortunately, on the second try, the roll-up metal door ascended to reveal the writing desk standing at attention on the front row, ready for duty. Had it been toward the rear of Door No. 2, we would have spent a good chunk of that steamy Sunday playing Rubik’s Cube just to Tetris that thing out of there. (And, again, thank you, thank you, Tom, for the wonderful piece upon which to pen future HNN columns.)
But, three storage units? All of them teeming with drop-dead gorgeous furniture pieces from the likes of Henredon, Drexel Heritage and White Furniture of Mebane? I saw them with my own eyeballs, and the metaphor I keep coming back to to describe all of that inventory is purgatory. After a lifetime of service in a nice home somewhere, this furniture now is relegated to await either a second coming or a trip to the curbside, in the meantime out of sight, out of mind, visited only every so often by a presumably penitent owner swearing to himself to sell some of this precious stuff . . . soon!
The problem here isn’t Tom’s passion for fine furniture. Well, it’s not just that. It’s the lack of an efficient aftermarket. Need to sell your car? The Kelley Blue Book will tell you how much it’s worth, and any number of aftermarket options await your call or click. But, your sofa? The moment it left the showroom, its value dropped to about zero. Or, even less than zero, because you might have to pay someone to haul it away.
What do you do with a John Widdicomb dining room? Facebook Marketplace? Craigslist? The office bulletin board? Why, this would be casting pearls before swine!
Cancellation friction
A friend of Owen’s put her late mother’s furniture in storage “temporarily” in 2006, planning to sell it for charity. That furniture is still there, according to the article, and she told the author the family has since paid something like $50,000 in aggregate storage rents. This is what a missing market looks like. That and what the article calls “cancellation friction.”
Economists have determined that hard-to-cancel subscriptions, like those funded by automatically recurring credit card charges, roughly double the seller’s or vendor’s revenue, because people cannot be hassled to end them. Just like streaming services and magazine publishers, self-storage operators profit from our inertia: “Oh, I’ll just do it next month.”
The friction that keeps a metal box rented is the same friction that keeps a sideboard out of the resale market and, as a derivative effect, a new sideboard out of somebody’s dining room. And credit-card billing makes it easier for us to overlook the rate increases.
“The annoying, time-consuming and often expensive chore of emptying a junk-filled storage unit is easy to postpone for a month, and then for one more, especially if an unnerving paper bill never arrives,” Owen writes.
A lawyer quoted in the New Yorker article, a storage entrepreneur, says we are a “stuff society.” Carlin knew this and turned it into a gag.
And the Pulaski desk? Released from purgatory, the little guy is now the star of the show. (Editor’s note: It also is a reproduction House of Representatives lift-top desk dating back to 1857). Yes, redemption is sweet. And so is Tom. But, it replaced a desk that after a few idle days on Facebook Marketplace just ended up curb fruit.
