Yuck, ew, Public Storage
Exploring important themes through a shitty experience with Public Storage.
Welcome back to BASKETBALLWEATHER. Before we jump in,
I appreciate it! Now, have you ever had to put your shit into storage?
Public Storage should burn in hell. Of course I mean literally. If I was a more courageous person, I might smear its gates with profanity; I might strike a protest Pussy Riot style, I might throw bags of shit at it. Why you ask?
Let’s go back in time before we get too excited.
Before moving to New Orleans in 2022, we put our shit into boxes at Public Storage. They do what all storage places do and offer the first month free, and then you can go month to month from there, a hack as old as time.
Great, I’ll take it.
I was prepared for the fees to rise, and surely, after a few months they did.
What’s annoying about this process though is that they don’t tell you when.
Words have been pored over by lawyers and thousands of pages of homework have been typed and redacted to what ultimately becomes your contract. The gist of it is “fuck off we control you and can raise our prices on you as often as we want to.”
If you ask someone at the PS Office, they’ll look at you like you’re four and tell you that they do this like it’s the most obvious answer on the planet — “it’s seasonal.”
But beyond that they tell you nothing. You ask them for the meaning of life and they don’t even offer you a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich.
By the time we left New Orleans, we were paying almost $200 more per month for our facility in Los Angeles than what had been in the original contract.
No big deal?
It’s worth noting that the people who work at the offices are disconnected from the corporate side of the conflict. They’re low wage workers who have little to no information, and as long as you understand that they’re surprisingly easy to get along with, given that they too are being molested by the corporate crime lord known as Public Storage. The problem, as you will soon see, is that if you have an actual problem, they’re as helpless as an Ivy League university president being asked about antisemitism.
Very random side note re: contract negotiations.1
After ten months in New Orleans, it was time to come back to Los Angeles for the summer. My family and I had not yet decided if we were going to move back to Los Angeles for good, or perhaps maybe possibly stay in New Orleans forever — like many a smart person had done before us, hence we had accumulated enough new shit to warrant another storage facility in New Orleans.
Cut to the Fall, it’s early September and we’ve just made the exciting decision to sign a lease on a house in Los Angeles. We are thrilled that we can finally get our stuff out of storage. Now I admit, this next one is not Public Storage’s fault…
Space cadet that I am I had to spend some extra money because I lost the key to my original storage facility in Los Angeles. To my defense the key is rice-sized and hard to keep track of. Anyway, to fix you hire someone unaffiliated with PS to come by and open the thing for you. It costs like a hundred bucks, and at least you’re putting bread into the pocket of someone who doesn’t work for PS. You also get to watch a locksmith use a blowtorch.
I have no doubt that PS would take advantage of this business opportunity if they could, but I am willing to bet my mother’s life that there is some stipulation in that Mt. Everest of paperwork that prevents them from doing so.
Anyway, after getting our stuff out of Storage Unit One, it’s time to go to New Orleans to get things out of Storage Unit Two. I realize that I have lost the key to my storage facility there as well, and once more have to hire a locksmith to pop it open for me.
Luckily it’s still only $150 bucks or something, and this time it’s some rapper who just moved to NOLA, from the valley (in Los Angeles) of all places, because it’s cheaper to live in NOLA than in the valley, and quite a few people go to Tulane and what have you for college, so the storage facility game is tight every summer. When I ask why it’s cheaper to pop the lock in L.A. he has no good answer.
I pay my money and meet Duel (short for Abdul) and the rest of the movers who have come from Houston to lug our shit across the country. They have just pulled an all-nighter after the original crew got rerouted, but super nice despite the fact that I have to pay them $250 more than what we initially discussed with the moving company. Also nothing to do with Public Storage, but something about cubic space in the truck, and what am I supposed to do tell them to go home? (They basically have all of my belongings sitting outside of the truck now.) I tell them to take everything but the bean bag and a toy kitchen that my son got sick of using.
A few days later I get the message in my inbox.
Public Storage is charging me a $300 cleaning fee for the bean bag and kiddy kitchen that was left behind.
What?! I say, Please no 🙏🏻 as I call the office in New Orleans and talk to someone who is as helpless as fucking Nemo was when he was about to be attacked in open water by a shark. There’s no number to call, there’s no human alive who can help me, just some nebulous email to “a manager” who works wherever the hell PS is based, Ohio probably, <I just checked it’s not Ohio!!!>, and fuck if I know what I’m going to do if I get charged this fee, and yet I know I will so I’m already vomiting like the time my son vomited on that helpless violin performer on the airplane (to Cleveland)!
I have 10 days to pay the fee or I’m being held in contempt of court or sent to Darfur or something even more terrible that will quadruple my penalty if I don’t pay up asap.
$300 is a lot of money for a “cleaning fee,” I plead with the lady who works the office in New Orleans nine days later, but NOPE she doesn’t get paid enough to care. And I wouldn’t care if I were her either.
If anything, I feel for HER. She has to work at this place. I can only imagine how they treat their employees if this is how they treat their customers.
Miss, don’t we deserve a better system?
Shouldn’t we be treated well by our storage companies?
I paid.
Thanks for reading and for being a part of the BASKETBALLWEATHER community. If what you read here spurred something in you, you can buy me a coffee.
Did you know Ellen De G(enerous) is loaded because of the way she negotiated her contract for the Ellen show? I didn’t realize that she was as financially built as a slice of Sicilian pizza, but one day while on some doom-scroll I saw this thing come up at the bottom of some random web page about her “net worth.” It was one of those ugly web pages that you hate to stumble on when you’re scrolling the internet for dirt about your ex — the equivalent of waking up alone in the Red Light District in the middle of the day, with a warm beer and an empty pack of cigarettes.