Image created using ChatGPT 
Have you ever tried to do a real audit of how much stuff you own? I mean, going through your home, methodically, listing everything that actually belongs to you.
That lamp that you never really liked but bought in a rush when you first moved in. The Star Wars curtains that were cute when your son was six but look a little odd now that your 18-year-old daughter is sleeping there.
In the shed there is the bike with one wheel, the wheelbarrow with one leg, and underneath the no-name-brand-thankfully-never-used surfboard, the braai that was used once and then spent the rest of its career shedding soot on everything else.
But that is nothing compared with the close encounter of the scary kind that is the twilight zone of the garage, where some of the goods may not really belong to you because that puddle of car oil, bike lube and an old tyre may have achieved sentience. That smell is not decaying rubber but an attempt at communication.
It must be that almost global middle-class phenomenon – that we own more than we use – that has led to the fascinating storage industry.
Earlier today the group Stor-Age released its half-year results. It has operations here and in the UK and seems to be growing quite quickly. In fact, right now, just in South Africa it is developing eight more sites. And these are not pieces of land in faraway places, but areas like Sandton, Rosebank and Bramley in Joburg, and Blackheath in Cape Town.
One of the most interesting graphs in their documents is their rate of churn vs their length of stay. In other words, how long people are renting their units for. For this six-month period they’re looking at an average rental of just more than 27 months.
That doesn’t mean the same goods are staying in the same unit for 27 months. I presume that’s just the average time one person rents one unit for.
In some ways, this must be quite a simple business. You buy some land, put up the units and rent them out. Your major costs are presumably security, and I imagine you’d need quite a bit of electricity.
Some storage facilities I know offer 24-hour access (sideboard emergencies have been known to strike at 2.36am precisely) while others offer only working-hours access.
There is obviously a big cost difference. It must be more expensive to have enough security staff to allow people in and out at all times, rather than have times when you can just lock it up.
And yet these services do not come cheap. People pay a fair bit of money every month just for a place to keep their stuff.
It does make sense, though – much of it might have huge sentimental value and you’d sleep better knowing it is safe.
I do have a question which I suspect will never be answered: what do they do when someone just stops paying and can’t be contacted?
The space in the unit has value, you have no idea what is in it and no way of knowing whether you will ever get your money back.
You know those abandoned cars at the Sandton Gautrain station? The ones covered in layers of dust, where the tyres have collapsed? Where, clearly, their owners left them in their rush to OR Tambo and, presumably, freedom?
I’d bet many of those people left storage units behind as well.
We know that drug gangs and all sorts of syndicates use security complexes to store things. I bet they use these units too.
And from time to time a group of police officers must arrive at one of these places with a warrant and a ping from a GPS tracker.
There must be a person at Stor-Age and at their competitors who is in charge of dealing with that kind of thing.
Their stories might put the Madlanga Commission to shame.
If I were asked to write a critique of capitalism (just to be clear, you would have to pay me a fortune in non-cryptocurrency to do it) I’d probably start with storage garages. There is such a waste of value that you can see so clearly in them.
Just stuff, lots of it, that costs money. That is not being used.
But it is the way of things. We all have times in our lives when we need things and when we don’t, and when we return to items of value… and hope they have not developed ambulation and walked off on their own in search of new frontiers and new civilisations. DM