The storage unit industry is one of the most awful, customer hostile industries I've encountered. It's impossible to get the local facility on the phone, publicly listed phone numbers are all redirected to a national call center where reps are unable to even accurately quote prices. TFA covers the insurance kickback scam. Then after I moved into my unit, I discovered 75% of the units in my facility could be broken into with zero tools because the padlocks provided by the facility had enough slack in the shackle that if you rotated the lock 90 degrees there was room for the bolt to slide the half inch needed to clear the bolt hole in the strike plate. Then there was the rodent infestation.
The paradox is that the monthly cost of a unit will quickly exceed the value of whatever is stored there unless the items have sentimental value or are very expensive. In TFA, their losses from theft was $500 and their insurance limit was $2,000. Within two years they would exceed that in rent payments on the unit. A Google search suggests the average storage unit tenancy is only 10 months. That's reasonable. Long-term storage only makes sense when the value exceeds what can reasonably be entrusted with the lax security of a storage facility.
1. You are temporarily moving to a place outside your local area, or to a much smaller place. I was moving around for a year and a half, so I left my furniture and non-valuables in a storage unit until I would be settled again.
2. You live in a small unit in a big city. $100-$150 for an extra 50 square feet a month might be cheaper than the equivalent space and is a great choice for occasionally used items. if it's 4 dollars a square foot for living space or 2 dollars a square foot for storage space, that's a deal.
3. Short term holding: You're moving out of your rental in July, in AirBnbs until September when you've closed on your house.
If you're in a suburban house and don't have enough space, that's a bad reason to have a storage unit.
6. You're homeless, and have a place to sleep, but not for your stuff. Maybe you have bad credit, an eviction record, whatever. A small amount of cash income is enough to pay the rent on the storage unit.
7. You're storing the tools / materials for a small business.
I've used them in situation 1, my lease was up in current city and I had a new place in the new city so needed to move but the new job was paying for the move but it wasn't organized yet. I just put everything in storage and left the key with a friend.
For situation 3 I was able to leave stuff with family but I would have paid for storage again. I lived in a few furnished places for a year.
I plan to use it again for situation 2 when my free storage situation ends. My place is tiny and I can just store something in the facility next to my office for cheaper.
They have their place. The argument that people pay more to store something then the value probably applies to all the junk in people's homes/garages. Must be billions in real estate in the bay area storing old junk.
> The paradox is that the monthly cost of a unit will quickly exceed the value of whatever is stored there unless the items have sentimental value or are very expensive.
This is a tough one to manage psychologically, although it’s almost certainly also true of nearly anything you are storing in your own home. The difference of course is that home space is bundled inflexibly—you usually don’t have the option of paying 2% less for 2% less space.
We call thrift stores "offsite storage" because it's almost always cheaper to buy a thing like a keyboard or furniture, use it until it gets in the way, then just return it until we find we need it again.
Sometime the storage places are not what they seem. Some are really about doing something with the land until its value goes up, hoping some developer will buy it the future. That is, it just has to be a low effort to pay for some management and property taxes, while waiting for the value to go up. They won't bend backward to "satisfy" customers, so speak.
> The paradox is that the monthly cost of a unit will quickly exceed the value of whatever is stored there unless the items have sentimental value or are very expensive.
Sometimes, the best place to store something... is the store.
My ex-wife demanded that we store some awful, terrible wicker furniture after a house move, so I put these cheap monstrosities into a $40/month storage unit in a semi-desolate area of town. The unit was broken into three or four times but the thieves didn't do me the favor of actually stealing anything. On the last break in I contemplated just leaving them a note with $20 inside pleading with them to just take the damned things.
I’m stunned by the idea of making the pawn shop whole.
As I understand UK law, if you buy stolen goods, the original owner can just claim it back and you take the loss - simply to discourage buying with knowledge it was stolen.
I guess the pawn shop would go out of business but it does seem if you let them act as a fence you are solving for the wrong problem
Often there is a fairly large delta between what they pay and what the sell for, I always assumed part of that premium was absorbing some risk the item was stolen and would have to be returned. Under this system, why not buy stolen goods and try your luck?
"Oh hello guy who looks like he sleeps rough, I would love to buy your thousands of dollars worth of power tools that you can't even tell me what they are for pennies on the dollar."
They're likely trying to prevent the situation where the pawn shops become entirely uncooperative, but there's still a tragedy of the commons situation occurring.
This is a periodic public service announcement that there is not, and never has been "a tragedy of the commons situation". Even the author of the concept, Garret Hardin, has acknowledged that he made mistakes in his understanding and research.
Resources held in common have historically been subject to significant control via social, civic and legalistic processes. What is typically referred to as "a tragedy of the commons situation" never turns out to be what Hardin originally suggested - individuals taking advantage of the lack of controls. Instead it is invariably individuals who first dismantle the control systems in place in order to pursue their own selfish ends.
This matters because the "tragedy of the commons" concept has been used to suggest (successfully) that communities cannot manage commonly held resources, which is false. What is true is that communities frequently cannot manage a sustained attack by selfishness and greed against their own systems of management, and that's a very, very different problem.
The pawn shop has to, at 'bare minimum' do the proper paperwork (typically copying ID and taking fingerprints among other things.) The general "way it's supposed to work" is that now the police have a clean lead to the thief or part of the ring; If the shop doesn't follow the procedures, at least where I live, you -don't- have to make them whole and there's a crapton of fines.
That said, it's still a bit of a sham in some ways. In 2011 a former niece absconded with ex-wife's <6 month old Laptop, <1 year old DSLR, Her TV, and the wedding ring [0] just after my ex moved in with her brother at the start of the separation (Ex BIL also had TVs etc taken). It wasn't until their Fourth trip to the pawn shop [1] where the wedding band engraving made it just too hard to pretend the stuff wasn't stolen [2].
[0] - kinda knew that's when it was over, lol.
[1] - Part of a chain that used to have their own show that was a bit of 'Pawn stars crossed with Jerry Springer'
[2] - Ironically this worked out; since the wedding ring was never recovered but gold had gone way up, Renters Insurance covered the pawn shop costs and the added value back from the ring handled the deductible (The rest of the ring amount went to her costs related to the separation.)
On Brazil if you are caught with stolen goods there's a specific section of the penal code for that and you will could go to jail.
Now, police is severly underfunded in Brazil and enforcement is a joke, but the law is severe, and sometimes some junkyard owner is arrested because of it.
> I'm not even sure what the notarization step was accomplishing: the inventory sheets aren't affidavits.
The percentage of people who see the word "notarized" alongside "inventory sheet" and simply give up must be quite high. Notarization accomplishes nothing besides causing a headache. Insurance companies don't make money by paying out claims, you know.
Notarization just proves it was you who signed something, it has nothing to do with the contents of the document.
Unfortunately a lot of people think notarization gives some kind of legitimacy to a document, or likely in this case, it's probably not the hassle of getting it notarized, but used as a scare tactic to prevent some people from committing insurance fraud by listing inflated or made-up items (people might conflate it with perjury).
Illinois did away with notarization requirements for almost everything a few years ago. Now you can just sign things under penalty of perjury and it's done, which is the right way to go about it.
That, and it would make it harder to claim mistake/accident if the insurance company tried to
Prosecute for insurance fraud.
The number of cases of people adding random expensive things that would be added to insurance inventories during a claim has to approach 90% if there is no potential for consequences.
It also makes it feel more serious, deterring insurance fraud. Since it has only upsides, no downsides, for the insurance company (except that they'll get bad ratings from customers which they clearly don't care about in this scenario, as most customers don't shop around for them), of course they demand it.
> Insurance companies don't make money by paying out claims, you know.
This is why if you want actual insurance (not "check the 'you must have insurance' box") you don't pick the cheapest company and check reviews, ignoring any reviews that don't mention a claim.
When I canceled my insurance after going carless, I was told that there would be a lapse in my coverage causing my rates to increase. So naturally I asked why would I cover a car I no longer own. Apparently, there is a type of insurance that covers you as a driver of other cars. Of course there is. Going on 4.5 years now with no insurance payments. It's been glorious
Some credit cards like American Express offer their own insurance as part of the membership fee as long as you pay for the rental with their card, and decline the coverage offered by the rental car company.
There are companies that will sell you rental car insurance as a standalone policy. Google "Rental Car Insurance". Last I was dealing with this problem myself, the policies were something like half the cost of what the rental car place wanted.
I tend to avoid the insurance and just pile up the money I would have paid to cover the losses. Depending on the type of insurance. But theft insurance tends to be problematic. The fraudulent buy expensive stuff, keep all the receipts, sell the stuff for cash to a friend and then claim on insurance with the proper paperwork. Normal people tend not to keep and file away all paperwork and lose out.
> Normal people tend not to keep and file away all paperwork and lose out.
Interestingly some of 'valuable property' insurance I have used for my camera gear encourages you to submit your invoices, photos of the item, etc on your policy profile. Makes it easy to remember to toss a photo of the item, photo showing serial number area, close-up of it, invoice alongside the other info.
I used to work security and making rounds in a place like this would give me chills. Running into thieves at 3 in the morning is one of the most terrifying things you will ever experience.
I feel it’s like walking in the woods in the south — you make a lot of noise so you don’t surprise a rattler? Were you walking stealthy so they don’t hear you coming?
I'm not the person you asked, but most people like that - opportunistic burglars, etc - are no more keen to run into the police than you are to run into them. They'll just run.
Granted, the equation changes dramatically when various drugs are involved.
Having to pay the fence to get your stuff back is so California. In the more civilized states pawnbrokers are expected to know the risks of buying potentially stolen property, and if they do they get to eat it.
Maybe that's why property crimes short of grand theft aren't really enforced in California?
That is the most surprising part to me. If the pawnbroker doesn’t bear the risks of buying stolen goods they are not disincentivized from buying stolen goods, which creates a larger market for selling stolen goods which in the end increases the market for property crime.
Yeah I was surprised about that one ‘Handling stolen goods’ is a criminal offence in Britain and if you can prove ownership of something you get it back. If you’re an innocent intermediary and you bought a stolen item without knowing you have to make a civil claim against the person you bought the item from to get the money back.
Same here. I believe in most U.S. states, knowlingly possessing stolen property is a crime. If you didn't know, you just have to forfiet it to the lawful owner.
I’m pretty sure most large storage operations (U-Haul, extra space, etc) have per unit door sensors which work in concert with customer check in/out to verify authorized openings.
I have never encountered anything like this at storage units from a wide scale of corporate ownership, different levels of newness, and different levels of affluence in the area. Not saying they don't exist but I've never seen any reasonably priced storage units that bother with this level of tracking.
I'm pretty sure they don't: source I've helped move people's stuff in and out of a couple of different places. My experience is very limited, so if you have more data points where you have seen such things, please share.
The local storage operation I use has exactly that. If you do not "badge in" and open a door - the alarm goes off. When the manager was showing me the unit he said "Hey, an alarm is going to go off when I open this door - don't be surprised" and explained the system.
Yup! My local U-Haul has a sign in/out system. In the main office there's a monitor/giant TV that shows a map of the facility, including alerts for all doors currently open and authorized.
If I don't sign in, as soon as I try to roll my door up the alarms are going to go off. If I don't sign out after closing the door and leaving, the next time I try to sign in I will be denied entry until I speak to a manager and be yelled at about signing out when I leave.
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The paradox is that the monthly cost of a unit will quickly exceed the value of whatever is stored there unless the items have sentimental value or are very expensive. In TFA, their losses from theft was $500 and their insurance limit was $2,000. Within two years they would exceed that in rent payments on the unit. A Google search suggests the average storage unit tenancy is only 10 months. That's reasonable. Long-term storage only makes sense when the value exceeds what can reasonably be entrusted with the lax security of a storage facility.
1. You are temporarily moving to a place outside your local area, or to a much smaller place. I was moving around for a year and a half, so I left my furniture and non-valuables in a storage unit until I would be settled again.
2. You live in a small unit in a big city. $100-$150 for an extra 50 square feet a month might be cheaper than the equivalent space and is a great choice for occasionally used items. if it's 4 dollars a square foot for living space or 2 dollars a square foot for storage space, that's a deal.
3. Short term holding: You're moving out of your rental in July, in AirBnbs until September when you've closed on your house.
If you're in a suburban house and don't have enough space, that's a bad reason to have a storage unit.
5. You are trying to hide things from your spouse.
7. You're storing the tools / materials for a small business.
For situation 3 I was able to leave stuff with family but I would have paid for storage again. I lived in a few furnished places for a year.
I plan to use it again for situation 2 when my free storage situation ends. My place is tiny and I can just store something in the facility next to my office for cheaper.
They have their place. The argument that people pay more to store something then the value probably applies to all the junk in people's homes/garages. Must be billions in real estate in the bay area storing old junk.
This is a tough one to manage psychologically, although it’s almost certainly also true of nearly anything you are storing in your own home. The difference of course is that home space is bundled inflexibly—you usually don’t have the option of paying 2% less for 2% less space.
Sometimes, the best place to store something... is the store.
https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...
Deleted Comment
As I understand UK law, if you buy stolen goods, the original owner can just claim it back and you take the loss - simply to discourage buying with knowledge it was stolen.
I guess the pawn shop would go out of business but it does seem if you let them act as a fence you are solving for the wrong problem
"Oh hello guy who looks like he sleeps rough, I would love to buy your thousands of dollars worth of power tools that you can't even tell me what they are for pennies on the dollar."
Resources held in common have historically been subject to significant control via social, civic and legalistic processes. What is typically referred to as "a tragedy of the commons situation" never turns out to be what Hardin originally suggested - individuals taking advantage of the lack of controls. Instead it is invariably individuals who first dismantle the control systems in place in order to pursue their own selfish ends.
This matters because the "tragedy of the commons" concept has been used to suggest (successfully) that communities cannot manage commonly held resources, which is false. What is true is that communities frequently cannot manage a sustained attack by selfishness and greed against their own systems of management, and that's a very, very different problem.
The pawn shop has to, at 'bare minimum' do the proper paperwork (typically copying ID and taking fingerprints among other things.) The general "way it's supposed to work" is that now the police have a clean lead to the thief or part of the ring; If the shop doesn't follow the procedures, at least where I live, you -don't- have to make them whole and there's a crapton of fines.
That said, it's still a bit of a sham in some ways. In 2011 a former niece absconded with ex-wife's <6 month old Laptop, <1 year old DSLR, Her TV, and the wedding ring [0] just after my ex moved in with her brother at the start of the separation (Ex BIL also had TVs etc taken). It wasn't until their Fourth trip to the pawn shop [1] where the wedding band engraving made it just too hard to pretend the stuff wasn't stolen [2].
[0] - kinda knew that's when it was over, lol.
[1] - Part of a chain that used to have their own show that was a bit of 'Pawn stars crossed with Jerry Springer'
[2] - Ironically this worked out; since the wedding ring was never recovered but gold had gone way up, Renters Insurance covered the pawn shop costs and the added value back from the ring handled the deductible (The rest of the ring amount went to her costs related to the separation.)
Deleted Comment
The percentage of people who see the word "notarized" alongside "inventory sheet" and simply give up must be quite high. Notarization accomplishes nothing besides causing a headache. Insurance companies don't make money by paying out claims, you know.
Unfortunately a lot of people think notarization gives some kind of legitimacy to a document, or likely in this case, it's probably not the hassle of getting it notarized, but used as a scare tactic to prevent some people from committing insurance fraud by listing inflated or made-up items (people might conflate it with perjury).
The number of cases of people adding random expensive things that would be added to insurance inventories during a claim has to approach 90% if there is no potential for consequences.
> Insurance companies don't make money by paying out claims, you know.
This is why if you want actual insurance (not "check the 'you must have insurance' box") you don't pick the cheapest company and check reviews, ignoring any reviews that don't mention a claim.
Insurance is for you and you should pick it from your own choice of company and you should tailor the policy for your own needs.
Same with financing.
In my case, I get a lot of my insurance from a guy in my town and he has an office that I can walk into if I need help.
I don't own and no local insurers will offer me non-owner insurance. I have to get the crappy expensive insurance at the rental car desk.
Some credit cards like American Express offer their own insurance as part of the membership fee as long as you pay for the rental with their card, and decline the coverage offered by the rental car company.
Deleted Comment
Insurance is for losses that will have a major impact on you. It’s putting a price on risk.
Interestingly some of 'valuable property' insurance I have used for my camera gear encourages you to submit your invoices, photos of the item, etc on your policy profile. Makes it easy to remember to toss a photo of the item, photo showing serial number area, close-up of it, invoice alongside the other info.
Granted, the equation changes dramatically when various drugs are involved.
Dead Comment
Maybe that's why property crimes short of grand theft aren't really enforced in California?
There is a hope we will undo this soon.
Just a phone alert to say "door to unit #xyz has been opened" would be a huge improvement. Wire up a cheap webcam for extra credit.
https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/K_IeKTxlLTzLBd4F9Ett...
If I don't sign in, as soon as I try to roll my door up the alarms are going to go off. If I don't sign out after closing the door and leaving, the next time I try to sign in I will be denied entry until I speak to a manager and be yelled at about signing out when I leave.