The rise of self-storage is a symptom of rampant consumerism

How many pairs of shoes does it seem a person should need? Five? Ten? 15, tops? Apparently not. Today it seems to be considered perfectly normal to have so many pairs that you can’t keep them in your house. Instead, you rent a self-storage unit and keep them there.

Take Leila Bokaie, recently featured in The Times. She regularly pops down to Shurgard self-storage to “check on her collection of shoes”. Then there’s Judith Gardner Jones, mentioned in The Mail on Sunday. She has 50 pairs of shoes all neatly tucked away at Big Yellow Self Storage. And Barnaby and Phoebe Bugden make the short trip from their flat in Vauxhall to Big Yellow at the weekend to look at the things they own but can’t fit into their current house. And all at what cost? The average unit is about 80sq ft and costs £180.

So what on earth is going on? Self-storage turns out to be an American import. In the US there are 40,000 facilities. Here we have just 450, but that number is expected to grow to hit 3,000. So it is not just a great business (renting people small, empty, windowless rooms with no services in marginal areas for hundreds of pounds…) but a growth business too.

The bad news is that it is surely based on the wrong kind of growth - the rise and rise of our rampant consumerism and total lack of fear of debt. Why on earth do we buy things we need so little that we don’t even keep them in our houses and, worse, pay to keep somewhere else? And what are we buying all this muck with anyway, given that, thanks to Gordon Brown, our real disposable incomes are falling?

The answer to the first question is beyond me, but the second is easier: credit-card debt. And that’s what makes self-storage seem less a vital new growth sector and more a symptom of something wrong. We all know personal debt levels in the UK are out of control: remember Sir Andrew Large’s comment last week that even a modest rise in rates would mean that households’ debt service would rise from about 10% of their income today “towards the peak last seen in 1990” (around 15.5%)? Post-1990, house prices, consumption and the economy fell into a five-year slump.

With debt rising at 14% a year and rates on the up it isn’t impossible to think that a repeat of that peak isn’t far off. Filling storage units with shoes bought on the never never won’t look so clever then.