Posted by Heidi Schwartz
People say we aren’t a nation of hoarders, but did you know that the number of self storage facilities in the U.S. has recently passed the 52,000 mark? That means there are now more storage options than there are Subway’s, McDonald’s, and Starbucks—combined!
In April 2015, Dan Rafter of rejournals.com wrote, “McDonald’s boasted 14,350 restaurants in the United States in 2014. That’s a big number. But it pales in comparison to the number of self storage facilities dotting the country: more than 48,500 at last count.”
Since 2014, the number of self storage options has continued to creep upward.
“There is about seven square feet of self-storage space nationally for each person in the United States,” said Maurice Pogoda, principal and president of Farmington Hills, MI-based Pogoda Companies. “That’s an awful lot of self storage space.”
And sometimes, you find the strangest things inside those storage units. For instance, check out this list from the Inside Self-Storage blog, which includes the top eight “amazing and unexpected items found in self storage units” (with a nod to David Letterman, who is retiring and probably taking his top 10 list with him):
#8: Tenants
#7: Pirate treasure
#6: A NASA rocket and a countdown clock
#5: Unreleased Michael Jackson tracks
#4: Nicolas Cage’s million dollar comic book
#3: The canoe from the movie Deliverance
#2: The car from Knight Rider
And the number one strangest item: A severed leg in a bbq smoker!!!!
To put our nation’s storage obsession in perspective, SpareFoot (not to be confused with severed leg) has created a visual image that compares the number of storage facilities to popular fast food, retail, and convenience store locations.
