Everywhere I look I see new Dollar Stores and Self Storage Facilities. Why? The dollar stores I have been in typically have crap that is worth around 37 cents selling FOR A DOLLAR. Does the fact that you can shop without having any rudimentary math skills create that much of an attraction? Do people really want little animals made out of seashells?
And the self storage places…don’t people have basements any more? What are people storing? Have a god damned yard sale if you have more crap than your house will hold. Sure, if there is gonna be a month or two between selling and buying homes, a storage place would be handy. But I can think of six new sites built within the past few months.
And the local newspaper has classified ads every week about the contents of self storage lockers being sold to the public because of lack of rent payment. If you have too much shit and not enough money to store the shit, then WHY NOT SELL THE SHIT???
Hmmmm…what’s the chance that all the storage lockers are filled with crap purchased from dollar stores?
And what’s the deal with airplane peanuts? You get on an airplane, the first thing you want is some peanuts? What’s up with that? Am I right?
Is this thing on?
One of the biggest reasons for the proliferation of self-storage units is the profit to be made:
The units are inexpensive to put up (usually - I have seen some brick ones that were very nice)
They don’t require water or sewer services
They don’t require employees to man them
Vet, since this is The Pit, I’ll throw in a gratuitous ‘fuck you’.
We move to Virginia about 2 years ago, selling a 1400 sq foot house with garage and outside shed, to move into a 1000 sq foot apartment. Despite filling a 20 yard dumpster with shit we threw out, and a moving sale that cleared $800, we logged 7000 lbs in the moving van. Naturally, about 4000 pounds went into storage, and the rest to our crackerbox apartment.
Prior to the move, and prior to the shed, we had a much smaller unit for the stuff that wound up in the shed.
I won’t debate the fact that I’m maried to an insane packrat.
Do you fly Liability Air? They don’t serve peanuts anymore. Somebody who’s allergic might eat them, not noticing the package says PEANUTS, then go into a gasping, throat-clutching, frothing coma. Bad for the upholstery.
Nah, they serve faux bar mix, but it’s really just chunks of cardboard.
At least with self-storage, it’s the case of a property owner finding a “highest and best use” for a property, rather than any massive demand for space. What’s a highest and best use? According to an online dictionary, it’s the “possible use of land that will produce the greatest net income and thereby develop the highest land value.”
Mini-storage is cheap to build (where zoning doesn’t ban prefabricated structures, at least), inexpensive to run, and the owner is not losing much when market conditions finally warrant an even higher and better use for the land.
Self storage and mini-storage warehouses are often consider temporary land uses by their owners, like surface parking lots downtown. In exurban and suburban areas, they’re built on commercial zoned land with the expectation that they’ll probably be removed when the underlying land becomes more valuable, and higher-end development is more feasible. In urban areas, they’re sited on parcels that would other wise be marginal, such as a narrow lot between a street and railroad, or in vacant multi-story structures such as a turn-of-the-last-century factory or old-fashoned neighborhood department store.
As for the dollar stores, I really don’t know. Perhaps fpr the same reason video rental stores took off in the early 1990s; it met a market need that wasn’t being satisfied by other retailers, filling a void left by the departure of five-and-dime chains like Woolworth’s, McCrory’s and Kresge’s.
Pathetic. My dog could muster more genuine Pittish sentiments. Considering the fact that he pretty much just sits around licking his balls all day in between feedings and walkings, that’s saying a lot.
Well, we just moved to a rental townhouse 2 weekends ago, and we took all the furniture that was stored. What’s left are my tools (will be used again), books (some will be kept, some not) lots of her fabric (she says she needs it all; I say she’ll never know that I trashed it) , and some other stuff.
Now that we have room, the stored stuff will be sorted, some gotten rid of, some kept in storage, and the rest will come to the new place as we find it. As it is, the past 3 weeks we’ve singlehandedly supported the local Salvation Army with our donations, which Is A Good Thing.
