http://www.businessweek.com/small-business It’s the time of year when American households are filling up with stuff. Your living room is piled with boxes from your Black Friday haul, or your porch is creaking under the weight of UPS deliveries. While retail analysts are obsessively tracking buyer behavior to gauge the impact of Cyber Monday on store earnings, one industry that will surely benefit from the binge—eventually—is the storage business.
The country’s accumulation of things is outpacing our capacity to keep them in our homes, as the growth of mini-warehouses attests. The number of self-storage establishments more than doubled, to 15,000, from 1998 to 2012, according to Census data, dotting the landscape with faceless buildings full of objects we don’t want to see but can’t bear to toss.
The Census data may actually underestimate the industry. According to the Self-Storage Association, the U.S. had 48,500 mini-warehouse facilities last year. Combined, they amount to 2.3 billion square feet of space for lease—enough, in the trade group’s unnerving formulation, to warehouse every man, woman, and child in the country.
Posted By: Matthew Goldberg
Wednesday, December 10th 2014 at 12:47PM
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