Comment by istjohn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by istjohn | Hacker News Reader

The storage unit industry is one of the most awful, customer hostile industries I've encountered. It's impossible to get the local facility on the phone, publicly listed phone numbers are all redirected to a national call center where reps are unable to even accurately quote prices. TFA covers the insurance kickback scam. Then after I moved into my unit, I discovered 75% of the units in my facility could be broken into with zero tools because the padlocks provided by the facility had enough slack in the shackle that if you rotated the lock 90 degrees there was room for the bolt to slide the half inch needed to clear the bolt hole in the strike plate. Then there was the rodent infestation.

The paradox is that the monthly cost of a unit will quickly exceed the value of whatever is stored there unless the items have sentimental value or are very expensive. In TFA, their losses from theft was $500 and their insurance limit was $2,000. Within two years they would exceed that in rent payments on the unit. A Google search suggests the average storage unit tenancy is only 10 months. That's reasonable. Long-term storage only makes sense when the value exceeds what can reasonably be entrusted with the lax security of a storage facility.

I think there are three use cases:

1. You are temporarily moving to a place outside your local area, or to a much smaller place. I was moving around for a year and a half, so I left my furniture and non-valuables in a storage unit until I would be settled again.

2. You live in a small unit in a big city. $100-$150 for an extra 50 square feet a month might be cheaper than the equivalent space and is a great choice for occasionally used items. if it's 4 dollars a square foot for living space or 2 dollars a square foot for storage space, that's a deal.

3. Short term holding: You're moving out of your rental in July, in AirBnbs until September when you've closed on your house.

If you're in a suburban house and don't have enough space, that's a bad reason to have a storage unit.

4. Liveaboard who wants to keep some stuff on land just in case a boat sinks.

Wow, that's a somewhat rare edge case. Let me see if I can beat that (hold my beer): 5. Astronauts for Boeing Starliners who are not certain when their return flight will be.

Welcome to my world :)

I live in a boating town and there's a whole line of houseboats in one of the marinas, the others have plenty of boats that people seem to be living on board. No property taxes and the marinas always have bath/shower (and sometimes laundry) facilities; portable relatively efficient refrigerators now exist that can be either shore or battery powered, etc.

Undoubtedly, some of these rent storage facilities.

I've used them in situation 1, my lease was up in current city and I had a new place in the new city so needed to move but the new job was paying for the move but it wasn't organized yet. I just put everything in storage and left the key with a friend.

For situation 3 I was able to leave stuff with family but I would have paid for storage again. I lived in a few furnished places for a year.

I plan to use it again for situation 2 when my free storage situation ends. My place is tiny and I can just store something in the facility next to my office for cheaper.

They have their place. The argument that people pay more to store something then the value probably applies to all the junk in people's homes/garages. Must be billions in real estate in the bay area storing old junk.

I could also see seasonal storage for things that you might not want to leave outside for 1-2 months a year.

I worked with a startup in Seattle that was essentially this. Store your skis/kayak/whatever for a flat fee a month depending on the item. They did door to door delivery/drop off as well.

Pretty sure it’s out of business now. They were owned by a big local storage unit company looking for a new market.

Lots of Burningman groups and theme camps pay for storage for the 50 weeks a year their camp stuff isn't needed.

I was driving in the burbs yesterday and saw a giant skeleton… like 13’ tall and the skull being 2’ wide. I said to my friend “where do they store that stuff? I’m guessing their Christmas lawn stuff is just as extreme.”

a lot of people love their holiday decor. Not how much resale you can get on a giant skeleton, but it’s not an easy lift. Seems like a good use case for storage… a few thousand a year to make you happy thinking you’re bringing holiday cheer to neighbors and kids.

That stuff can easily fit in the attic of most suburban houses I've lived in.

These giant skeletons have become sort of common out in my rural area. I had assumed you could break them down easily into manageable pieces but since half of them seem to end up left out year round I think the answer to "where do they store that stuff?" is nowhere!

At least one house the owner seems to dress the skeleton up with current holiday attire and decorations which is an amusing solution.

4. You are a hoarder and have run out of room at home (I knew a hoarder with multiple storage units for this exact reason).

5. You are trying to hide things from your spouse.

For #3 the interstate moving company held our stuff. (We were in an AirBnB for about a month while looking for a house.)

6. You're homeless, and have a place to sleep, but not for your stuff. Maybe you have bad credit, an eviction record, whatever. A small amount of cash income is enough to pay the rent on the storage unit.

7. You're storing the tools / materials for a small business.

> The paradox is that the monthly cost of a unit will quickly exceed the value of whatever is stored there unless the items have sentimental value or are very expensive.

This is a tough one to manage psychologically, although it’s almost certainly also true of nearly anything you are storing in your own home. The difference of course is that home space is bundled inflexibly—you usually don’t have the option of paying 2% less for 2% less space.

That's why it isn't true of your home. The cost of storing an item in your home (assuming you didn't buy a bigger house just to store the thing) is 0.

Not actually zero. Closets stuffed full of stuff means more time wasted trying to find what you need and more time spent finding a place to store a new item.

But you could downsize if you didn't store so much useless junk! I'm guessing billions in Bay area real estate is storing junk.

My point was that you could try to think of your storage unit as if the size and monthly cost of your home was more flexible, i.e. you can just pay 2% per month for 2% more space.

When you chose your house there were presumably several options with different amounts of storage space at different price points. You could just treat the addition of a storage unit as increased granularity between those housing options.

Storage space is really just tacked proportional to bedrooms, for the most part. My house has what feels like a bunch of extra space because I wanted enough bedrooms for my family. They didn't need to come with so much extra, that's just how they build homes with more than a few bedrooms now.

The stuff I use every day (work/entertainment electronics, cooking stuff, some furniture, and clothes) can fit into a small-ish apartment easily-enough.

But the stuff I use occasionally (like camping gear and car-fixing/woodworking tools) would not fit also into that same apartment, nor would my collection of hobby-related stuff like my (small, but non-zero) collection of vintage audio and computer gear.

I mean: I'm not hoarding MicroSD cards here. I, like many others, have things that take up space.

In order to keep these seldom-used things out of the way while maintaining the hope of having a tidy, presentable home, I need a place with a garage or a basement or an extra bedroom -- or a storage facility. Those things all tend to cost extra.

We call thrift stores "offsite storage" because it's almost always cheaper to buy a thing like a keyboard or furniture, use it until it gets in the way, then just return it until we find we need it again.

Sometime the storage places are not what they seem. Some are really about doing something with the land until its value goes up, hoping some developer will buy it the future. That is, it just has to be a low effort to pay for some management and property taxes, while waiting for the value to go up. They won't bend backward to "satisfy" customers, so speak.

> The paradox is that the monthly cost of a unit will quickly exceed the value of whatever is stored there unless the items have sentimental value or are very expensive.

Sometimes, the best place to store something... is the store.

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