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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Interesting reading: Psychology by the Square Foot
  • Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2003 16:31:03 -0600


Interesting reading: Psychology by the Square Foot
Los Angeles Times MAGAZINE
August 10, 2003


What the Ongoing Boom in Self-Storage Facilities Says About Human
Nature, Uncertain Times and the Anxieties of American Culture
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-
storage32aug10,1,2664337.story?coll=la-headlines-magazine
By Victoria Clayton, Victoria Clayton is a freelance writer living in
Westlake Village.


Before those big orange public storage signs and others like them
dotted the sides of Southern California freeways, psychoanalyst Erich
Fromm had already posed this prescient question: "If I am what I
have, and what I have is lost, who then am I?"

It's not something veteran self-storage managers David and Tina
Fleming take lightly. The Flemings are itinerant self-storage
facility managers, and David recently found himself in Las Vegas
among the 3,700 self-storage owners and managers from around the
country who gathered for this year's annual Inside Self-Storage Expo.
The Flemings understand something deep and often dark about people
and the crazy ways they relate to their possessions. For example,
they will tell you about the customers they call the Queen Anne Chair
Couple. It goes like this: A husband and wife come in to rent a small
unit for a chair—just a single chair—they bought at an auction for
$200. "The wife promised her husband if he bought it she'd refurbish
it and they'd make their money a few times over," Tina Fleming
recalls. "Then his wife ended up passing away and he came in and told
us he hated that chair from the beginning, she never fixed it up like
she said she would, and asked us how he could get rid of it." But
that was after a three-year run during which the Queen Anne ran up
nearly $2,000 in storage fees. Tina sees an even more dramatic story
beneath the surface: a man dealing with disappointment and grief, and
finally deciding to move on.

The Flemings also could tell you about the Glider Family. The family
lost their home and rented two of the largest units—10 feet by 30
feet—to house about 10 rooms of furniture and the contents of a
garage. They crammed the units to the ceilings with couches, lawn
furniture, appliances, their little boy's toys. It took 2 1/2 years
before the family got back on its feet. "They finally found a place
to live, and they open their units and right away ask me if I have a
Dumpster or if I can take some of the stuff off their hands. My
husband and I bought a patio glider from them, but they gave away or
threw away most of the rest of the stuff," says Tina. "Over the
course of those two or three years, when they were hurting for money,
you'd think that they would've sold that stuff instead of paying to
store it."

But when it comes to material possessions, David Fleming says, the
ties that bind can be stronger than logic—particularly when the owner
is under stress. At 34, Fleming is the closest thing you'll find to a
self-storage sociologist. Named manager of the year by two different
trade publications (once in 1998 and again, with wife Tina, as co-
managers of the year in 2000), Fleming—with his booming voice and
brown flattop—is regularly invited to speak to other managers and
writes a column for Inside Self-Storage, an industry trade
magazine."They call self-storage managers 'bartenders without a shot
glass' because you're dealing with people and their issues," he says,
surveying the Inside Self-Storage Expo floor in Las Vegas. "You're
not only a storage counselor, but you're a psychological counselor.
Sometimes you learn more about people than you want."

The Flemings and others in the self-storage business have ringside
seats to what some consider a telling—and troubling—cultural
pathology. The symptoms aren't hard to spot in these uncertain times.
Drive a 10-mile freeway stretch and you'll likely be able to count at
least a handful of self-storage facilities discreetly tucked away.
There are, for example, at least six facilities visible from the 101
Freeway between Thousand Oaks and Woodland Hills. About 1,400 of the
estimated 31,000 self-storage facilities in the United States are in
Southern California, with each area facility averaging 55,000 square
feet.

The phenomenal popularity of EBay is fueled in part by those obsessed
with collecting everything from Disney ceramic bells to Tiger Woods
Wheaties boxes, then trying to sell it to others with the same
acquisitive impulse. A recent visit to EBay's "collectibles" category
found 1,562,773 items offered. Given the tendencies of the sellers,
it's not hard to imagine them doing a little compulsive shopping
while they're online checking the latest bids. One suspects they're
the same people fueling the scrapbook craze.

Russell Belk, a professor at the University of Utah who studies
possessiveness and materialism, says that our impulse to acquire and
keep things serves a function. "Our possessions remind us of who we
are," he says.

Much of the research about that impulse focuses on the
homeless. "Oftentimes what they carry around [isn't] just found
objects, but things from when they sort of gradually went from a big
house full of possessions to a handbag or cart of possessions," Belk
says. "Holding on to things is, in a sense, holding on to our past
lives and some of our dignity." Sometimes, as with the Queen Anne
Chair Couple or the Glider Family, it's even a hope that things will
get better. Stored stuff becomes life's place-holder—we may be down
at the moment, but someday we'll have a proper place for it all.

Some say the self-storage boom parallels the widespread erosion of
our sense of well-being. "When people are under stress and trauma, at
least in our culture, the last thing they want to do is get rid of
their stuff," says Tim Kassar, an associate professor of psychology
at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., and author of "The High Price of
Materialism (MIT Press, 2002). "Their stuff provides that sort of
security blanket and also a sense of identity, for better or worse.
Mostly for worse, from my viewpoint."

Kassar and other researchers have found that there are four basic
psychological needs we must satisfy in order to be happy, and they
have little to do with anything that can be pasted down or warehoused
in a 10-by-10 storage unit: security, community, competence and free
will. He compares America's bloated self-storage facilities to the
alarming epidemic of obesity.

"The food pyramid says, basically, you need to eat a lot of grains
and fruits and vegetables, and that you should use fats and oils
sparingly," Kassar says. "Really, what we most need to value and
concentrate on in our lives is growing as people, feeling connected
to other people, feeling connected to our community. Those are the
grains and fruits and vegetables of life in terms of providing us
with health." Just as the supersized American diet has left many of
us chronically overweight, he says, materialism has led us to that
moment of clarity when we realize, perhaps too late, that we're
uncomfortably full.

Nobody really wants to rent storage space. that's the first thing
David Fleming tells new managers. People typically rent out of
desperation. Loss of a home or forced downsizing are typical reasons
he gets business. Divorce and a death in the family bring in others.
All managers quickly learn the business of storage serves as a
barometer of the local community, and of society in general.

For example, Fleming notes that managers near military bases were
aware of recent troop deployments before they were announced because
of the number of soldiers and military families making arrangements
to stow their possessions. They're aware of layoffs, housing
shortages and increased foreclosures, as well as social ills such as
domestic abuse and divorce.

"We have an increasingly mobile society with increasingly complicated
issues—due to technology, due to relocation, due to the family
structures breaking down," says Fleming. "It means self-storage will
always be exciting." And in demand. Consider this: The industry has
existed for roughly 30 years, and there now are more than four square
feet of self-storage space for every man, woman and child in the
United States.

Pamela Alton, a petite redhead, thanks our messy lives for her Santa
Barbara home, new Jaguar and the constant ringing of her phone.
Twelve years ago Alton was a floundering Orange County realtor. "Real
estate in the late '80s was really bad. I was working the phones and
my husband calls and says he saw an ad for a [self-storage] relief
manager in Buena Park." The couple knew nothing about storage but
answered the ad out of desperation. They were hired as part-time
managers. By 1991 they were full-time managers for a facility in
Santa Barbara, where they received a $1,500 monthly salary, medical
benefits and a rent-free, two-bedroom apartment adjacent to the
office. They took Pamela's real estate sales and marketing
techniques, applied them to self-storage and filled the facility to
capacity within a month. "Nobody was doing that. The industry was in
its infancy and still is in many ways," says Pamela.

Alton's husband died in April but she continues to operate Santa
Barbara-based Mini-Management Services, a self-storage consulting and
headhunting firm that helps place managers at facilities
nationwide. "Managers are in a unique position," Pamela says between
cell phone calls. "They see this thing people have with their stuff.
They want their things and can't let go of them, but if you looked at
what most people store, you'd find that it's mostly junk."

Not that this troubles her. Alton has developed an interesting
philosophy on self-storage. Who isn't in the business of storage?
Vons warehouses our food, Chevron keeps our fuel and Target stores
everything under the sun, she explains. The self-storage unit,
though, is the last stop in the chain. She adds with a smile: "The
only competition self-storage facilities have is the Dumpster."

While he was manager of Airport Self Storage in Newport Beach, Tony
DeMauro painted the bathroom lavender, piped in Three Tenors music
and tried to evoke a homey feel by placing ceramic pots of bamboo
arrangements around the facility. He was a psychotherapist for a
decade before getting into the self-storage business, and he
understands the need to put stressed customers at ease. He does
everything he can to downplay the gates, locks and inevitable
Hannibal Lechter vibe at most self-storage facilities, and explains
the business of storage as one of dreams delayed.

"As Americans 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, he says, many of us believe we're somehow diminished. All of
this we could have learned from Steve Martin's 1979 comedy "The
Jerk." When Martin's character Navin and co-star Bernadette Peters
lose their fortune, she whines: "I don't care about losing all the
money, it's losing all the stuuuuuuffff." He tells her, "We're not
going to lose all the stuff. This is America!"

In the business of storing all that stuff, the Flemings often find
themselves playing good cop/bad cop. Tina handles the shell-shocked
customers: those sick from grief and hard luck—perhaps sporting
telltale signs of domestic disputes—who are desperate and grateful
for a place to park their stuff. David handles the ones who are
ticked off because of foreclosures, or because their soon-to-be-ex
has given them the boot, or because life has otherwise delayed their
dreams.

Either way, most of their customers have something in common: They're
in transition. That's something the Flemings and other managers can
relate to. In the past 12 years, David, Tina and their two children
have moved seven times. Until David's recent promotion to director of
operations for North State Storage in Durham, N.C., the couple have
always been employed as on-site co-managers. For four years—their
longest stay anywhere—the family lived in a 900-square-foot apartment
above a facility in Buffalo, N.Y. And they're not unusual.

As the self-storage industry continues to grow, the demand for on-
site managers has too, according to Pamela Alton. Because job
vacancies are plentiful, many managers wind up moving in search of
better pay or more desirable situations. What happens when you uproot
yourself often?

"One of the things we've learned is that there are a lot of things
that you really don't need in this world," says David Fleming. "Every
time we move it gets easier."

He understands the essential truth in the proliferation of
professional life organizers, books on how to de-clutter and
magazines that celebrate the joys of leading a simpler life. While
occasionally leading to postpartum remorse, paring down also can be
cathartic. According to Belk, it's a chance for an individual to
reassert power over things — things that may remind us of who we are,
but which we sometimes let define who we are. He likens the choice of
what to keep and what to throw away to assembling a family photo
album. "It isn't a representative picture of a family at all," Belk
says. "We take photos when everyone looks nice and the house looks
nice. We throw out the shots where people's eyes are closed." Letting
go of stuff is similar. When we winnow, we have the power to change,
sometimes for the better.

Tina, once a pack-rat who couldn't part with her daughter's outgrown
baby clothes, credits her customers with showing her the way to a
lighter load.

"I watch people haul things in here all day. It's really made me sit
back and look at my life and what possessions mean," Tina says. "It
was a security issue for me that I held on to things from the past."
She was afraid to let go of possessions because she thought—as Fromm
suggested—that without her things she wouldn't have herself. Watching
people carry in couches and blenders not worth the cost of storage,
she realized how desperate and misplaced many of us are, looking for
identity in furniture and kitchen appliances. There's no real
security, she says, and if there's anything that comes close, it
comes from within.

"When you're focused on material possessions, it either distracts you
from real needs or it undermines them," says Kassar, the Knox College
psychology professor. For example, if we invest time and energy into
working long hours to acquire stuff, we have less of it to focus on
building meaningful relationships. (We're also more likely to be
competitive and objectify others as a way to get ahead and enhance
status, according to researchers.) Kassar has found that children
from divorce and lower socioeconomic backgrounds are generally more
materialistic, and he believes that, as a society, we have learned to
distract ourselves from feelings of insecurity with those Disney
knickknacks, Wheaties boxes, clothes and cars.

"We live in a culture that says the main way to [feel secure] is to
have more possessions," he says. "We're told over and over and over
by the media and governments . . . that [more stuff] will make us
satisfied, but, indeed, it fails to do that."

Tina Fleming learned the same lesson on the front lines of the self-
storage boom, not through academic research.

"Now I have to bite my tongue with customers because I feel like
saying, 'You know, you don't really need to carry your goods along
with you.' " But it takes many people a lifetime to learn this. Or at
least a few thousand dollars in storage fees.






  • [Livingontheland] Interesting reading: Psychology by the Square Foot, Tradingpost, 08/10/2003

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