Hasta La Ideas

Had I lived in the 1920s, when personal possessions were sparse, I’d never have foreseen that in the future we’d own so much stuff that we’d pay other people to keep it for us. Or that there would be a big company called The Container Store that essentially sold boxes to hold all of our stuff. And then there’s what I saw last week:

Two guys pulled up in a truck outside the building next door. It said BOX BUTLER on both the side of the truck and the thing they pulled out of the back, which looked like a big ABS safe on wheels. I thought it might be some kind of cool robot with a voice module like Carson from Downton Abbey or at the least Mr. Belvedere, but was disappointed, after asking the truck guys, to find out it was just an empty box. Apparently you pay the Box Butler guys to show up, load their boxes up with your crap and lock ’em up, then they drive them back to their storage facility. The misnamed company essentially provides self-storage without the self, not a British dude who measures the distance between your salad fork and soup spoon.

Back to this 1920s thing. I would not have been able to imagine having a collection of objects so vast I’d require storage back then, largely because I have the imagination of an indigent blogger. But I just read in the Times that the Box Butler concept was in full effect as early as 1928, patronized by the wealthy. A storage facility company called Day & Meyer, Murray & Young launched their proprietary Portovault system, a sort of six-sided dumpster on wheels, that year.

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