In alt.home.repair, on Wed, 19 May 2021 19:35:33 -0400,
wrote:

On 5/19/21 7:06 PM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
AARP magazine has an article about self storage units.* I guess as a
society we like out junk and are willing to pay to keep it.* The US has
90% of the storage places in the world.

One in 10 household rent space.* Total of 1.9 billion sq. ft.

Average rental is 15.8 months

Six of 10 boomers visit the storage unit one a month

In a recent year. 1550,000 units were auctioned off for non payment and
abandoned.

As a society I guess we put a lot of effort into keeping crap.* I would
never keep that much and when we moved about 2 1/2 years ago made many
grips to Salvation Army.
even after moving, I still got rid of stuff.


Ever watch the cable TV show "Storage Wars" ? It is amazing how much
valuable stuff people abandon to later be auctioned off.

Some places lock people out if they don't pay their rent, and if they
still don't pay, they sell their stuff. My impression is that almost
all places do that, but my friend and her uncle who owned 3 of them,
hundreds of units each, never did that. (She managed one, he managed
another, and by the time I met them, he'd sold the third, although it's
still where it was.)

When someone wasn't paying his rent, eventually she, or he at the other
location, would call and tell him to get everything out and that would
be the end of it. And I'd say that was one big reason she never had a
fight or even an argument with any of the customers in 20 years. She's
5' or 5'2".

But people did abandon things and she had a regular and a asubstitute if
the first guy was busy that she'd call and he'd clean everything out.
If she saw something I might want, she called me. One time there were
six nice good-condition 2-drawer file cabinets. I screwed two of them
together to make a 4-drawer cabinet. No truck but I was able to put 4
of them in the back and front seats of my convertible, or maybe it was 6
in two trips.

A couple times she had someone living in his locker, but she would tell
him he had to go.

Lots of junk too ;-)