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Comment by chasingthewind | Hacker News Reader

I try to be pretty slow to criticize people for taking advantage of a service that they find valuable. Calling things in these storage units "junk" is a moral judgement that's repeated a bit early on and then cast off to make room for the more mundane rundown of the market analysis.

In the end, there's no way to know the ratio of people getting good value out of this storage to the number of people throwing good money after bad.

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It's junk if you don't know what it is. My sister's mother-in-law spends about $1000/mo on storage units in 6 cities. They were a military family and moved frequently.

The problem is that they don't remember what is in the storage units, and the cost of traveling across the country to go through a closet is steep and of questionable value. So she is stuck in a cycle of paying for things that she may or may not need. My understanding is that many people are in similar circumstances.

That is an astonishing amount of money. Is it not possible to have everything packed up and shipped to their current location? Even if paying someone to do this cost $2000 for each unit that would still pay itself back after a year.

My guess is that there are other personal issues at play. I think that there is "heirloom" furniture involved, etc.

From articles I've read and conversations that I've had with different folks, I don't think that scenario is uncommon.

A common theme with hoarders is that they'll acknowledge they have too much stuff in general, but when it becomes time to get rid of an individual item, they always have a reason to hold on to it. For my mother, the reason she hoards is 100% due to things being "heirlooms" and every individual item having a story. After her dad died she couldn't throw away any of his old stuff because she grew up with most of it and it reminded her of her parents (who were at that point both deceased). It's a difficult situation because it's quite reasonable to hang on to a large number of old items, just not all of them. But each individual item still seems incredibly important to her

In the case of my grandmother, she'll definitely make up a story behind an item she doesn't recognize (and you happen to.) It's just a simple fear of throwing or giving things away - but so disguised that I couldn't tell until I noticed her clinging onto some of my old things that I had thrown away, and her not knowing that they were originally mine.

What's astonishing is that the military would pay for each of those moves and they still didn't do it.

My (non-tech) small business uses "warehouses" (mini storage) for temporary and long-term storage. In one unit you can find crates of inventory, in another you can find equipment we produced for a one-off event job. We don't have enough to warrant an actual warehouse, and the units are significantly cheaper than renting extra office space to store this stuff. I keep it there to keep it out of my garage.

My mother has an online business that has grown far beyond the capacity of her house / garage (which now includes 5 sheds in the yard for storage). She does the same, as storage facilities are still cheaper than a warehouse. She keeps an eye on commercial real estate as her business continues to grow, but in the interim, the storage facilities are as essential as they are affordable.

While your point stands as a whole, why are you storing the equipment for the one-off event. Storage is for things you will need again.

Sure, what if the rent/mortgage you pay per square foot in your home is greater than the rent for a storage locker down the road? And there are reasonable use cases for medium-long term storage, such as seasonal items. I don't know how many people use them this way, but I can see reasonable uses too.

To add another use case: I know a lot of military people who throw all their stuff in storage when they deploy. Faced with no costs except a storage unit and low-mileage car insurance, a lot of them come back after the better part of a year with a down payment on a house.

This is exactly the situation I'm in. My storage unit is about 200 yards away, and the size of a small walk-in closet. I visit it about once a week. It's, essentially, a detached closet for my wife and me. Mostly seasonal items, camping/backpacking gear, and a small number of keepsakes.

One is that I sort of accidentally ended up becoming the keeper of a whole pile of family history -- documents, photographs, memorabilia, handmade things -- and I trust the fire suppression and security systems in my storage unit much more than whatever small apartment I'm renting at the time.

For the documents and photos, could I suggest https://www.familysearch.org/ ? Pictures of the rest could go a long way to making the memory of them more accessible as well.

For documents have you considered donating to the local historical society? Depending on what they are they might be of general interest and the historical society is probably better equipped to save them.

I agree with you and there are short term reasons to put everything in storage. There is another group that just has stuff squirreled away "in case". I personally believe that most people would be happier following a less is more philosophy which can be approached simply by throwing out or selling or donating anything you haven't worn/used in the last year (or two).

Throwing stuff out is hard to do if you are poor or were raised poor. Everything you save now does not have to be bought later. There is a potential use for anything and everything, so you might as well keep it. Granted, at a certain point the cost of the storage facility exceeds the amount saved, but the mindset is still there.

Man this rings so true for me, even as I pull an engineer salary now. Keep moving a car around free parking spaces even though I haven't "used' it in a year, still squirrel away a bunch of useless shit because what if!

I still have trouble turning down free food even if it isn't in line with my diet x.x poverty habits just stay with you

I just finally rid myself of boxes worth of old computer parts and cables. But what if I need 7 VGA adapters???

Murphy's Law dictates you will need them next week.

> But what if I need 7 VGA adapters???

All depending on what they were - you might wish someday you had kept one of them!

As somebody who "collects" old computer crap (ok, ok - hoards might be a better term), I had a situation not too long back where I needed one of those old adapters.

I had purchased an AMD motherboard that had onboard VGA; having gone so long since I last upgraded, I didn't read the fine print saying that onboard VGA was dependent on having an AMD processor with VGA built in (APU I think they called it). I had purchased a different processor for the socket, without that feature - thinking "naw, don't need it, because I'm gonna drop my GPU in there - and switch the BIOS over to use it".

I get everything together and I boot it. I get nothing on the monitor, and beeping - POST code saying no video, and I'm like "wtf?". Some quick research and such reveals my mistake: Without the APU version of the CPU, I can't change the BIOS to use the GPU in the PCI-E slot. But I don't want to spend a boatload more money on a CPU just to get this setup. So I have a plan: Somewhere out in my junk I know I have a PCI slot VGA card (like an old S3 Virge or such) - I just have to find it.

An hour of digging around finally nets me the card - has 4 meg on it - I figure that's enough to see the BIOS, right?

I boot it - and it sorta comes up, but everything's all glitched out, nothing's really working right, then it dumps to a screen with a "not enough video memory" error, and now I'm wondering "huh?". So I go dig some more...

30 minutes of digging, I find a different PCI video card with 8 meg; surely this will work. I slot it in and boot it; finally it boots - and I am greeted with this entire super-graphical fancy GUI for a BIOS setup, complete with mouse and everything! That's how long since I last did anything PC building-wise (I was replacing a Core2Duo machine); my last BIOS was textual. It was pretty apparent why it ran out of memory; honestly, I thought it was stupid - but what'r gunna do, right?

So after some orientation and such - I find where on the BIOS it was looking for the video card (of course, defaulting to "on board" - but you would think that if it didn't find it, it would then try the PCI-E slot, but nooooo), change it out, save and shutdown, then re-install my GPU on the PCI-E slot, reboot...

...and it worked.

Had I not had that old VGA card (granted, it's not the oldest I have - I have an EISA VGA card somewhere) - I would've been hosed.

It is and I know what you mean (grew up in a house with 8 kids, hand-me-downs and cheap meals). I personally always feel better, the more stuff I get rid of or donate. I hate looking in my shed or closet and just seeing junk. Its value is so marginal and purging every year helps to prevent accumulation in the first place. It is tough and I have a lot more to do too.

A lot of these ideas assume childless adults. Bringing kids into things makes everything a lot different.

Yet most of the world manages to live in much smaller homes than Americans, and without self-storage. Getting rid of thing is a necessity especially when you have kids, since their current needs take so much space.

Yeah, I've seen the reality TV shows where they auction these things off, even the cherry-picked units for TV are like 1/2 absolute junk that literally goes strait into a dumpster.

Sure, but that's a somewhat self-selecting group of units -- ones that the renters let fall behind and get auctioned off.

In fact that is one solution to the junk problem sometimes recommended: if you are not sure put something in a storage unit, pay rent for a year. Anything you haven't gone back for in a years must not be important so let them clean it out for you. In theory you could clean it our yourself for more value (craigslist/ebay), but you run the risk of trying to justify keeping something.

How would throwing stuff away that is in storage make you happier? I mean, I understand saying it is a waste of money, but if it is in storage and you never look at it or even think about it really, how would it make you happier for it to not be there?

Everyone is different, but it feels like a weight is lifted off my shoulders when I get rid of stuff I don't need or can't justify keeping. Marie Kondo wrote a book on this: The Japanese Art of Decluttering.

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Changing-Magic-Tidying-Declutter...

Exactly, I once had one for a couple of months midway between my condo and the house I was moving into, because the house wasn't going to be empty until the day I was moving into it.

Before that I had another one to keep things like decorations (like you said), but also all the kids stuff that my older son had grown out of, but the younger hadn't grown into yet (plus seasonal swap outs). Condo living didn't leave a ton of storage.

As we have all learned from reality-TV, a good quarter of the units are choke-full with anything but junk: you will find sculpted furniture in pristine condition, civil war artifacts, expensive professional equipment and tens of thousands of dollars in rare baseball cards. The industry must be really struggling to provide adequate security.

But they show only the cream of the crop. never gonna air that episode where they found water-logged bundles of newspapers, old Byte magazines in mouse-chewed boxes and a raccoon mummy.

They're also not going to show the storage units that students use to hold furniture while they go off for a summer internship elsewhere.

Dunno, that too would make for some compelling TV drama.

your sarcasm filter is broken

yeah its harder in print to detect. If it had been a tad more over the top I would have got it!

America Junk Season 4 debuts tonight at 9PM EST.

Alternative titles: Junk in America, or Billion Dollar Junk

I once watched an episode with a unit full of money ( on a pallet ).

I think that was Breaking Bad.

No it was The Shield... I guess this a common trope?

No, it was Breaking Bad.

I agree that "junk" might be heavy handed.

That said, if it's in storage 6 to 12+ months, you haven't need it, life has gone on with it, __and__ you're paying some multiple of it's value (i.e., it would be cheaper to replace) then what would call it? It, based on said math, has no value.

Obviously, we're not talking about personal items (e.g., family photos) but stuff that could be replaced via a few bucks and perhaps freecycle.

I don't think you can call it senseless, can you? :)

Wouldn't call it all junk, but there is a high statistic of storage units filled by people who "set it and forget it"

> Calling things in these storage units "junk" is a moral judgement (...)

Junk is just what you call other people's stuff.

"Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?"

George Carlin on Stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

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