The astonishing growth in so-called self-storage facilities reflected an indecisiveness about moving house and throwing stuff out. Those huge rentable hangars with their rows of garage doors hadn’t even existed before 1964, when two friends in Odessa, Texas, opened A-1 U-Store-It U-Lock-It U-Carry-the-Key. By 2015, there were almost 50,000 of them, four times as many as there were Starbucks, adding up to 21 square feet of storage space for every American household.
