Stuff

According to George Carlin, your house (not mine) is a pile of stuff with a cover on it.  On second thought, THC thinks this may apply to him.  When living in Massachusetts and Connecticut he and Mrs THC managed to completely fill two story homes along with full basements and attics with their stuff.  When they moved to Florida to a house without basement and attic a storage unit was rented to hold their excess stuff.

More recently, when moving to Arizona and yet another house without attic or basement, the THCs required the rental of two storage units to hold their excess stuff, despite sorting through our stuff for two months before moving and seemingly getting rid of half of it, including most of our furniture.

Thankfully, over our first few months we managed to get rid of some more of our stuff, so we now are renting only one storage unit. Maybe someday we can move to a smaller storage unit, but I know we will always need something for storing our stuff.

We are not alone in renting space to store our stuff.  One out of every eleven American households does so.  The self-storage business has proved to be recession proof and nationally there are approximately 50,000 self-storage locations (2.3 billion square feet, a volume equivalent to 26 Hoover Dams according to this article) and the sector has annual revenue of approximately $38 billion, more than 3X Hollywood's annual gross.

Americans aren't the only ones accumulating stuff.  With its growing prosperity, China and Southeast Asia have emerged as the new hot markets for self-storage because the folks there now have more stuff.