Number of words: 609
But if you can’t re-gift, what are your other options? The obvious response is to stick the stuff someplace. But where? Our lofts, closets and garages are already chocker. The answer, increasingly, is to pay for more space to stash it all. Last year, the wife and I found ourselves in the absurd situation of paying £75 a month to rent a boxroom-sized lock-up facility in a converted factory to store things from our pre-marital attics that we would probably never need. As well as the old furniture, books, mementoes and photo albums, there was sufficient bedding to tackle a minor humanitarian crisis. Why do this? Well partly because our self-justifying egotistical brains tell us that the problem looks like this…
“I don’t have enough space. You have too much stuff. He is a hoarder.”
Our rented room is only one of 900 lining the facility’s clanging corridors. Almost all of them are taken. The company that profited from hosting our unwanteds, Yellow Box, is expanding rapidly across Britain. Its winning formula offers householder-friendly storage, rather than the traditional industrial-scale units. Since it launched in 1998, it has opened 39 massive facilities. Another 19 are being built. The entire UK self-storage industry made £ 310 million in 2005 and is growing by up to 40 per cent each year. Buy shares in it. The average Briton now accumulates more than a ton of unwanted possessions and a quarter of us have been forced to stop using a room in our homes because of the amount of stuff crammed into it. Adrian Lee, Yellow Box’s operations director, says the missus and I are typical customers: ‘As people have become more wealthy, they’ve gained many more material possessions, But they also want to de-clutter and have nice homes with dear wooden floors. They are surprised by how much they have amassed. The high season is spring, when people decide to purge their home of items whose allure or novelty won’t last another season. Or they’re moving house and realise that many of their possessions would best be consigned in perpetuity to a dark, distant place.
Lee says his company was inspired by the United States storage boom, which shows us the way we are headed. American self-storage space occupies three times the area of Manhattan Island. There are more than 40,000 depots and the industry makes more money than the nation’s movie theatres or its music business. And you don’t have to be rich to own too much – a third of American units are rented by people earning less than £15,000 a year. Most renters also have storage space in garages, attics or basements just not enough. Such grab-and-stash behaviour is apparently “essential” to the health of the world’s economy. Joseph Quinlan, the chief stock market strategist for the Bank of America Corp, has declared that our ability to squirrel things away in storage units is a ‘critical prop to global growth’ because people will only keep buying as long as they have somewhere to hoard their purchases. ‘If US consumers run out of storage space,’ he said, ‘the global economy is doomed. Tony DeMauro, a former psychotherapist, sees a solid future for this consumer quirk, too. He spent a decade shrinking heads until he spotted this lucrative trend, jettisoned his couch and started his own American storage business. “We learn to pursue material goods as a way to happiness,” he says. ‘If we lose our stuff even if it’s an old blender – many of us believe we are somehow diminished.”
Excerpted from pages 92 to 94 of Enough: breaking free from the world of excess by John Naish