More, more, more, store, store, store

Daniel Chisca knew he had witnessed a bargain one day last year when he saw $400 land an Atlanta man a Hewlett-Packard, Pentium 4 computer with flat-screen monitor - along with a desk, two big color televisions, and $2,000 worth of scuba equipment.

Mr. Chisca is neither a law-enforcement official nor a black marketeer.

He runs storageauctions.org, a website on which the managers of self-storage facilities - those sprawling road-side complexes into which Americans can cram possessions for a few months or much longer - can announce sales of the contents of units on which rent has gone unpaid.

If the self-storage phenomenon seems a glaring paradox in what's often called a throwaway society, there can be no denying its growth.

Facilities numbered about 8,000 in the mid-1980s, and experts now put the total at between 40,000 and 50,000, most consisting of hundreds of units averaging 100 square feet each.

Today, in a twist, some forms of self-storage might be considered just one more example of waste. Auctions such as the one Chisca attended in Atlanta now quietly empty as many as 120,000 abandoned and forfeited units a month nationwide, he says - freeing up space that's in voracious demand in a cycle of store and ignore.

Credit the continued interest in self-storage to a confluence of factors, experts say.

More late-life marriages mean more households with redundant furnishings. Many in a mounting wave of new retirees appear content to store, rather than unload, accumulated belongings unwanted by their already goods-laden offspring. Add to that what one social observer calls the prevailing American culture's "treadmill acquisitive behavior."

"Storage units are a symptom of a much deeper malaise," says Peter Whybrow, director of the Neuro- psychiatric Institute at UCLA and author of "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough."

"Where there's no clearly defined social hierarchy other than money, the acquisitive nature gets maximized by the need to create one's own social standing," he says. "[So] you keep what you want to flaunt and you put the rest away - because you can't bear to give it away."

Keeping it can mean paying $100 a month or more for the privilege. Powering right through recession and recovery, self-storage (or ministorage) has become a $15 billion industry with enough current capacity to add $2 billion more, says Mike Scanlon, president and CEO of the National Self-Storage Association in Springfield, Va.

Small businesses stowing extra equipment and inventory account for about one-third of rentals, experts say. But individual middle-class stuff-keepers make up the majority of renters, even though the size of the average new single-family home has more than doubled since 1950, and family size has declined.

"It's a $17 billion-a-year business devoted entirely to finding a place to store our abundance," says Daniel Pink, an author and culture watcher. "It's bigger than the motion picture production industry."

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