Alas. My rented storage unit will never become a celebrity.
It’s not just that A&E’s ludicrously popular Storage Wars is based in California and I’m in Colorado. If that was the only barrier, I could cling to the hope that A&E would create a spinoff—much as they did with Storage Wars: Texas or as they might do with Storage Wars: New York. It’s not just that I plan to pay my rental fee on time for the foreseeable future, presumably negating the likelihood of it being auctioned to the highest bidder.
No, what will keep my tiny storage facility—called a “locker” in Storage Wars lingo—from becoming famous is the fact that the stuff I store is so woefully boring. It’s so boring that if I listed even a partial litany of contents here, you’d immediately lose consciousness and hit your head on your keyboard, resulting in you filing a costly lawsuit against Plugged In. And we certainly wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?
But that’s the case with most of the stuff we keep in storage, right? We don’t ordinarily keep gold coins or important family heirlooms in these concrete-and-tin bunkers. We keep old bed frames there. Unused bikes. Not-so-flat computer monitors. You know … stuff.
I’ve admitted in previous “Month of Junk” posts that I like stuff. And, as such, I find shows such as Pawn Stars, American Pickers and others strangely compelling. But for me, Storage Wars gives us a glimpse of the dark side of stuff—and not just because it’s locked behind a metal door and there’s no electrical sockets available. Storage Wars illustrates our sometimes disturbing preoccupation with stuff—how much we’ll dote on it even when it’s not doing anything for us at all.
Of the estimated 58,000 storage facilities in the world, 46,000 are located in the United States—a place known for both its prosperity and prodigious consumption. All told, the U.S. boasts 2.35 billion square feet of storage space—enough to cover three times the landmass of Manhattan Island. That’s about 7.5 square feet for every man, woman and child living in the country.
And what do we store? Well, if Storage Wars is any indication, not much: Old tools. Old furniture. Old pants. And that’s the exciting stuff. For every rhinoceros-horn cup found in a storage locker (an item really found on the show), there are probably hundreds that contain not much more than a wobbly dresser, a couple of mountain bikes and some rotting two-by-fours. Granted, many of these more dowdy storage units never make it to the small screen … but now that I think about it, maybe my hopelessly boring storage unit might not be so boring after all. Not that it has the weird factor that some units might potentially boast: According to the SpareFoot blog, some auctioned lockers have reportedly been found to house pillowcases stuffed with lima beans, toolboxes filled with crayons and coffee tins full of fingernail clippings.
People pay good money to store fingernail clippings? Really?
Oh, lots of folks have legitimate reasons for renting a storage unit of course: Maybe they’ve got to store some extra gunk while they’re moving, for instance, or maybe they’ve run out of room to house their valuable collection of Happy Meals toys.
I am not one of those folks. None of the gunk we store is particularly useful: If it was, it’d be at our house. And I don’t keep it around because it’s valuable or nostalgic: If it was important to me, I’d likely try to stash it away in a crawl space or the attic. The accumulated resale value of what we store is probably less than what it costs, every month, to store it. I don’t need, or even really want, any of this stuff … and yet I’ll pay to have someone else watch it for me. In essence, I’m paying someone to babysit a couch I’ll probably never sit on again.
I know I’m not the only one in this unfulfilling situation. Most of us keep more than we need or use on hand, even if we don’t rent a facility to house it. We find ourselves trapped by our treasures: It’s too good to throw away but not good enough to give away. It’s too important to shed, but not important enough to really keep. We attach so much importance to our material possessions that we have a hard time saying goodbye. It’s like a teenage relationship gone bad: You know you gotta break up, but you’re too scared to do so and maybe you don’t even know how. So you just try to store your concern away and hope, maybe, that it’ll go away on its own.
Which makes me wonder … maybe some of those lockers on Storage Wars don’t have such sad stories after all. Maybe the owners just finally decided to break off an unrewarding relationship—as any relationship with stuff is bound to be—and simply walked away.
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