How did the storage lockers at bus depots etc. work?

Factual Questions
1

Back in days of old, they had areas with grids of storage lockers in places like bus and train stations and airports and so on. I’ve vague memories of noticing them when we were seeing my dad off on business trips, but he never used them that I saw, and they’ve been gone for a long time. (I think fear of terrorism/bomb threats did them in.)

Going on what I’ve seen in old movies and TV shows, the idea was you located one that wasn’t in use (it would have its key in the lock?), put whatever you wanted to stash into the locker, then put some money (a coin? several?) into a slot which allowed you to remove and take the key away with you. Later on you’d use the key to retrieve your stuff, and then the locker would be freed up for someone else.

Basically, it seemed to be totally done by the person storing the whatever, anonymously, with no records of any sort created.

Is this correct?

What makes me curious is that it plays an important role in a mystery I’m reading. (Darkness Take My Hand, by Dennis Lehane, if that matters.) A woman has been killed. The P.I.s (who are naturally much cleverer than the police) find a key hidden in – well, maybe I shouldn’t say, might be a spoiler for someone.

Anyway, they find the key and immediately recognize it as the key to one of these storage lockers (I guess they look different some way?) but all it has is a number on it so they don’t know where the locker is. They set out to find it by visiting all the train and bus stations in the area and all the terminals at Logan Airport and so on until they find the right locker #whatever where they find A CLUE.

Fine.

But going by events in the story, some time has passed since the woman was killed. A couple days at least. So…whatever minimal amount she put into the slot was good for all that time?

That doesn’t seem practical as a business model. It must cost thousands of dollars to buy and install those lockers, and I’d imagine you’d be paying some sort of rent to the owner of the terminal/station for the right to have them there.

And yet someone could take over the use of a locker indefinitely for a single payment of a couple of coins?? Why wouldn’t all the lockers get filled up by people wanting to stash whatever secretly? Not as safe as a bank safety deposit box, sure, but a heck of a lot cheaper, plus anonymous, and accessible 24/7.

What am I missing?

2

See this old thread (“Storing things in public lockers for years”).

3

As I recall it, the coins you inserted allowed you to remove the key just once. If you wanted to keep control of the locker after adding or removing an item, you paid the full amount again.

I believe there also may have been a posted notice that the lockers were for short-time use - if more than some specified time (a few days?) had elapsed since you stored something, your locker could be opened and your items removed.

4

You still occasionally see these sorts of rental lockers: I know I’ve seen them at a roller skating rink, a theme park, and the zoo in the past five years. I think generally these lockers are owned by the premises and the rules of them say that items can’t be stored overnight. While I doubt they are checked that often, it saves the site from hassle of being responsible for items left for an extended period of time, and probably once every few months, the lockers are all cleared out at the end of the day and those missing keys are rekeyed so they can be put back in general circulation.
If the site itself is doing the rental of the lockers, the only cost is the initial investment, and I imagine they can make a pretty tidy sum if there’s halfway decent turnover.

5

We used to have them at stations over here too. They came in different sizes and big ones cost more. As I recall, one paid for 24 hours and after that, they could be opened by the staff. In practice, they tended not to be over rigorous, especially if there were plenty of unused ones.

6

I used a keyless one a few years back at Union Station in Chicago. You open the door, put your stuff in, close the door, put in money (cash or card), enter a PIN, walk away. Price varied by how long you planned to use it; I believe it was a couple of bucks an hour or $9 for the whole day, with a 24 hour limit. When you return you enter the PIN, get your stuff out, close the door.

It’s my understanding those lockers aren’t there anymore.

.

7

Decades ago they had them at the Greyhound Bus Station in Pittsburgh. A friend used them to sell “drugs”. You gave him $$ and he gave you a key. That way he was never with his buyer and the dope. Worked for him until they did away with the lockers then the bus station.

8

Last time I was at the Amsterdam Airport (Schiphol) I used one of these lockers to store my bags so I could go downtown during a 12 hour layover. The back of the locker opened up to allow access to the immigration fellows. I thought to myself this must be a racket to get tourist to Amsterdam, most of the flights from the US arrive in the morning and have late afternoon/evening departures. I love that city, Heineken taste so much better there.

9

I’m surprised he got buyers to go for this. How would they know they wouldn’t find an empty locker after the seller and their money is gone?

10

Word gets out on the street that the dealer can’t be trusted.

11

Yeah, what running coach said. He was a well liked, honorable dealer.

12

Shopping malls here used to have them. I live in the great white north, and it was convenient to pay 50 cents to stash your winter coat and mittens and hat and scarf, instead of hauling them all over the mall.

Pick a locker that has a key in the lock, open the door, deposit your stuff. Close the door, insert change and remove the key. If you opened the locker, you had to pay again to relock it. The notices said that lockers could/would be emptied every night.

13

:dubious:

14

The reality that the authorities went through the lockers after a certain amount of time and placed the contents in a central lost and found storage area was a plot point in many 30s and 40s mystery novels.

15

“To live outside the law, you must be honest.” - Bob Dylan

16

Interesting answers, thanks! It does sound like they used to fill real needs, legal and non. (I’d be happy to pay a few bucks not to have to babysit my bags during longer layovers.)

I still don’t understand the mechanics of it would work, as in, how the manager would know which lockers had overstayed their rental. Nowadays, sure, you could easily have some digital display that said when a rental was started, but back in the day? You could write down the numbers of all that didn’t have keys in them at the close of a business and compare with the next night, except that the previous renter could have retrieved his stuff at noon, and then a new person rented it just a little while ago.

And the new guy would be legitimately peeved to find his stuff pulled out and dumped into Lost & Found just a few hours later.

Still, maybe just the threat that your stuff could be confiscated was enough to keep most people from risking it.

17

Maybe it was based on emptying the fee box. Any locker that was full but no money by the next collection was emptied. Though what would be done about the missing key?

18

I assume most of the clientele were repeat customers, so business would fall off pretty fast if he cheated. Plus new customers were word-of-mouth from existing customers, so you either were trustworthy or quickly found another line of business… and if you are a cheat, don’t do deal with guys much stronger than you, or leave town.

19

I used them back in the 70s.

First of all, the keys were quite distinct, with the metal outside the lock encased in orange plastic, making it more like the knob on a stove than a key. The number was on the plastic.

There really weren’t a lot of repeat customers; I used it in Penn Station because I had several hours between trains and wanted to see some of NYC (and get dinner) and not carry my suitcase around. But I wasn’t going to use it again, certainly not enough for them to worry about losing me as a customer.

OTOH, you’ve left your belongings behind. Pretty poor trade for a little key.

I would say that the money brought in by auctioning off abandoned items more than covered the cost of the new keys.

20

I wonder why no one has developed simple debit card lockers. You have a reader for every stack of 30 or so lockers. You stick your stuff, press the latch button and it locks for 30 seconds to give you time to put your card in and enter your PIN. It might charge you a dollar for half an hour, accumulating. Your card is your key to open it, and they might not even need numbers on the door: you put your card in and it pops the door. The stacks are tall and narrow enough that you can stand in front of your locker while using the closest reader.