WHAT’S THE POINT?
American consumerism is at an all-time high, thanks to the efforts of every major retailer that tells us we just can’t live without the latest gadgets and googaws. Things like the electric hot chocolate maker and the Coleman BBQ Caddy Radio, which allows one to carry the mayo and listen to the shrill rantings of Dr. Laura Hypocrite at the same time, are clogging the lifestyles of America today.
This mad rush to acquire more, hold on to everything and buy an electric tool to do what grandma used to do with her hands, is creating a fat, bloated, lazy, physically weak society filled with people scared out of their wits that they might lose out on something that will change their world and finally make them happy.
We have been beaten over the head with a message of fear and potential loss for so long that we are now incapable of letting go of our useless junk and, instead, we store it.
My partner and I have just moved. I carried with me boxes of old letters, my Freshmen Greek manual (for when I have time to go back and study some more... yeah, that’s likely) and other junk. There are other boxes of stuff I have moved from West LA to Burbank to Venice to Santa Monica and now to Topanga, and yet I haven’t used any of it once in the last 15 years. I have a old china cabinet from my mother. It doesn’t even vaguely fit in with the style I like, yet I am having a hard time deciding what to do with it. I don’t want to store it, yet I don’t want to use it in my house.
Why do we have such an easy time collecting things and such a hard time letting go of the past? Is it this vain idea that someday I might be famous and my “papers” will be good fodder for a retrospective?
What is the source of our societal passion for hoarding?
I think it comes from two places. One is our desire to keep up with the neighbors. If they have something, we want one just like it, but a little better. It is this constant competition that allows marketers to introduce new products every year with the ever popular “new and improved” moniker that is so cherished, particularly for soap. Seriously, does soap ever get improved?
The second one is the sense of fear that we are fed on a daily basis. Not just of the Al Qaeda variety, but the fear that we might need something and not have it. We get this message from our parents, from our Scout leaders, from the television and newspapers. My parents grew up in the Depression, and my mother instilled in me a sense of, “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.” Which probably applies more to extra food supplies than that old wooden monkey head Dad got in the Philippines during the war.
Reporters are always warning us about some dire emergency right around the corner and asking us if we are prepared for the next firestorm, winter storm, earthquake, hurricane, tornado or depression. It is this sense of impending doom that keeps us always wanting to hold tighter to the past. This feeling that somehow we will lose out if we let go of the junk.
All this fear mongering results in a tremendous business opportunity. There is a staggering amount of money to be made in the “storage business.” There are several companies that do nothing but take investors’ money to build these boxes of boxes for storing boxes, and they make money hand over fist. It is a great business in which to be. They buy a piece of low-cost land, like under a freeway, where no one wants to build housing, or office or retail space; they then build a cement block square building of rabbit warrens. This is the cheapest development, because all they have to run is electricity and enough plumbing for a fire sprinkler system. There’s none of that expensive sewage and gas plumbing to do, no windows, and only interior walls and doors.
Property is rented or leased on a per-square-foot basis. That translates into a value for the land and buildings on it. When regular office space is renting for $2.65 a square foot, that is considered to be a medium to high price. An example would be an office located in a nice building close to, or on, the Promenade.
In the storage industry, people are paying $100 a month for a 5-foot-by-5-foot cement block closet in which to store their old wrestling shoes and ballet slippers or their latest eBay treasures. I know of people who have two or three of these storage units filled to the brim with old trinkets. That means that a storage unit is generating $4 a square foot in monthly rent.
This is a very good business in which to be. The storage companies have actually found a way to make even more money by using warehouses in outlying areas, and having you amass a pallet-sized tower of trash that they then store in an even more compact way, at a cheaper facility. But they still charge you a lot of money for it. At first it looks like a great idea to just get “a little extra storage,” but frankly, if you can put it away for a year and not need it, chances are you don’t need it at all and should just throw it out.
The other way to look at this issue is this: Is there anything you are storing for a year that costs what you are paying to store? If you pay $100 a month for a year, you’ve spent $1,200. If you threw out all that is in your storage unit, and then in the future had to replace something you’ve disposed, what would it cost to replace? If the answer is a few hundred dollars, you need to do a junk-ectomy and just toss your trash.
And in a year when you decide that you really need that electric hot chocolate maker, go buy a new one. It’s improved, you know. (David Pisarra is a business-development lawyer in the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He or (310) 664- 9969).
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 21, 2004. Read the original PDF.