With every volley of the Container Store catalog, and each new store opening—20 to date—it becomes more and more apparent that there are scads of organizational devices one “simply must have.” Owning these things is rationalized because they are obviously essential to life. Never mind that being organized is a personality trait—buying the tools with which to be organized is a shopping trait. Procuring Elfa shelves, the marvelous wire shelving from Sweden, . . . does not necessarily mean that organization will happen. All it means is Boone and Tindell get a little richer.2
I contacted Ms. Robinson in 2015 and asked what left her with this impression.
“I wrote that? I’m often surprised when old stories come back to haunt me,” she said. “The first Container Store was in Dallas, just a few miles from where I lived at the time. I thought it was the most brilliant store I had ever come across and stimulated their cash flow with my enthusiasm.” As for her take on the company’s success across the United States all these years later? “I don’t think Americans have the need of additional storage as much as other parts of the world, we just have too much stuff and we’d like to hide it, store it, or disguise it in a decorative way. I’m an offender. I’d rather buy more clear plastic shoe storage boxes and stack them to the ceiling of the closet than truthfully address whether I really need two dozen pairs of black shoes.”
Three other storage solution retail stores started around the same time, Hold Everything (1985–2006), Organized Living (1985–2005, now a manufacturer), and Storables (1981). An entire retail genre emerged because people needed a place to put all the stuff they accumulated and wanted to feel good about it, or at least like they were being proactive about it. You see it at junk removal runs. Remember that job in Chicago that filled two thirty-cubic-yard Dumpsters? There were sixty-two blue Rubbermaid storage tubs full of things pulled out of that basement. At almost every house where a junk removal company makes a call you will find plastic bins. Storage supplies are to junk what Spanx are to middle-age spread. It is all still there, just squished in. In the wrong hands, containing culture just prolongs a problem, but in the right hands, in the hands of a professional, it can be a revelation.
“The Container Store supports a whole industry,” one professional organizer told me. And vice versa. Professional organizers are like the Justice League of Clutter, swooping in and making things right and orderly once again. Or maybe for the first time. They create systems and teach their overwhelmed clients coping skills. They have different areas of expertise. Organizers can specialize in aging clients or small business organization.
What organizers really do was unclear to a writer named Alan Henry. He decided to crowdsource his research by posting a question to his Twitter followers on October 3, 2014.
Alan Henry @halophoenix
Has anyone actually had experience with a “professional organizer,” or is that just BS on design/real estate shows?
Here are a few of the tweets back:
Whitson Gordon @WhitsonGordon
What the shit is this a real thing
Jack @NinthBatter
Well if we have food stylists does professional organizer really seem that strange?
Jim Zakany @Jim_Zakany
Yes. My wife is a borderline hoarder and they’ve really helped her.
Alan Henry @halopheonix
@Jim_Zakany Ah, good to hear it. Did they actually come and do work or make suggestions for you guys to do later?
Jim Zacany @Jim_Zakany
@halophoenix They work w/her, hands on. I stay out of it. Both decultter & organize.
Alan Henry @halophoenix
@Jim_Zakany Interesting! Thanks—I may be flippant about the idea, but I have an idea and they sound really helpful!
Jim Zakany @Jim_Zakany
@halophoenix I can’t help her (she won’t let me). She needs a third party. Well worth it for some people.
Jeff Angcanan @Jeff_Angcanan
@halophoenix 3 boxes: Store, delegate, purge. There. You owe me money.
Ultimately the author went on to write a thorough piece about professional organizing for the website Lifehacker. It included a very nice rebuttal to the naysayers from an organizer named Julie Bestry. Her retort was, “Some people might think what we do is helping people who are too ‘lazy’ to do things for themselves. I’m sure such people cut their own hair, make their own clothes, and tutor their own children in calculus without any difficulty. But I’m afraid the rest of the world is a little more interdependent.”
Bestry is one of the four thousand members of the National Association of Professional Organizers, known by the acronym NAPO. It began with a small group of organizers who occasionally met in a California living room to share stories and strategies. By 1986 they formally organized and the sixteen members became the first iteration of NAPO. In 1987 they were able to have their services listed in the California yellow pages consumer directory, and a year later NAPO held its first conference.
Fast forward twenty-five years to 2013 and NAPO’s silver anniversary celebration, which was held in New Orleans. They were a festive—and orderly—bunch. There was a funny dichotomy between the “Let the good times roll” essence of New Orleans and a ballroom full of people who keep things in line professionally.
The exhibition hall was full of products an organizer might use. Rubbermaid has a booth. Some are new vendors trying to make a go of it. The lady with the adorable and expensive paint can stickers to identify leftover paint might have those on her hands for a few years. The woman with the folders that say things like CRAP and NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS got a lot more traction. Fujitsu and Neat scanners are trying to encourage organizers to digitize clients’ paper clutter. To make the point, there was a man dressed up as a giant paper monster covered with Post-Its running down the aisle as part of a presentation. Some organizers seem leery and worry that scanners will put them out of a job. One of the sales people made the argument that people who are disorganized in their terrestrial life will be disorganized in their digital life too. But what is striking is how many organizers there are from around the world. Twenty-two countries were represented, including almost half of the G20, a group of nations that control 85 percent of the world’s gross product and 75 percent of global trade.3 There were attendees from Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Guatemala, Israel, and Japan.
A doctor studying hoarding in Japan says people are often surprised by its existence. He has observed that “rampant consumption exists just as much as in Japan as in Western countries.”4 There is a very specific subculture of collector/hoarder in Japan devoted specifically to designer clothing. In a book called Happy Victims, photojournalist Kyoichi Tsuzuki published a series of pictures of Tokyo residents in tiny, tiny apartments packed with the clothes of one particular designer—Gucci, Nike, Agnes B. In the photos every inch—walls, floor space, furniture—is covered with these items.
The Japanese version of NAPO is called JALO, an acronym for Japan Association of Life Organizers. It was founded in 2008. Its goal is interesting and suggests a slightly different approach. JALO’s motto is “For easier, more comfortable lives.” Japan is home to probably the most popular professional organizer in the world. She has been the subject of a television drama in Japan and a comedy pilot for NBC in the United States. There is a three-month-long waiting list for her services. Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up sold more than two million copies and hit number 1 on the New York Times Best Sellers list in 2015. She does not believe in tips or suggestions about where to put things. She believes “Storage is a myth. . . . A booby trap lies within the term ‘storage.’ . . . Putting things away creates the illusion that the problem has been solved.” She believes the problem is that people keep things because of an attachment to the past or a fear of the future. She asks her clients to take the control back by telling them to take each item they own, every single one, hold it and consider this: “‘Does this spark joy?’ It if does, keep it. If not, disp
ose of it. This is not only the simplest, but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge.”
In the United States, in an effort to further legitimize professional organizing, a nonprofit group was created to promote a national ethical standard in the field. The Board of Certification for Professional Organizers was founded in 2007. An organizer can earn the designation of certified professional organizer by passing a two-hour, 125-question test that is given three times a year. But before an organizer can even take the test he or she must have a minimum of a high school diploma or GED and have fifteen hundred hours of documented paid work experience in the last three years. Recertification is mandatory every three years.
Organizers often belong to or are affiliated with NAPO, BCPO, and ICD, or all three. ICD president Linda Samuels remembers that when she started her company, Oh So Organized, she needed to explain what she did for a living. “In the 1990s, it was ‘Organizers? What’s that?’ In the next ten years, ‘I could really use your help. I know someone who could use your help.’”
“Hmmmmm,” was the first thing Samuels said when I asked her professional position on storage units. She chose her words carefully. “There’s a place for them.” Pause. “For someone in transition, it can be handy. As a long-term solution, it is incredibly expensive.” Pause. “The pain of thinking about it and stress. It is also expensive on an emotional level. It is often things waiting for a life you are trying to live.”
It was an opinion shared by other organizers. Storage facilities provide an opportunity to outsource the responsibility for your stuff. Sixty-five percent of all self-storage renters have a garage, 47 percent have an attic, and 33 percent have a basement, according to the Self Storage Association, a nonprofit trade group. Self-storage has its own association and lobbying group because it is big business, generating more than $24 billion in revenue in 2014. The United States is home to reportedly 48,500 to 52,000 self-storage units. That’s about 2.3 billion square feet of storage. It is a business that has been called recession resistant by the Wall Street Journal. When the economy is bad and people are in transition because of eviction or downsizing, storage units provide a place to park their stuff until stability returns. The New York Times reported that in June 2009 Public Storage, the largest chain, had facilities that were 91 percent full, on average. At the time Public Storage had twenty-one hundred facilities. Conversely, when the economy is good, people buy more and need a place to put it. In 2015 Public Storage had twenty-two hundred facilities in thirty-eight states.
While locally owned and even national chains have a very basic, utilitarian look and feel, niche storage has arrived. Driving up to Westy’s facility there are no chain-link fences, no garage-style units. There’s a wrought iron gate and you must enter a code to get in. The building’s white stone facade looks more like a fancy department store. Walking into the lobby you might think you’ve mistakenly popped into a four-star hotel. There are blazer-wearing concierges who greet you. The chrome is shiny and the floor is spotless. There are no garbage cans or Dumpsters. The interior of its Chatham, New Jersey, facility looks like the interior of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Guggenheim Museum in New York City. There are three levels, each with curved white balconies. On the walls hang framed posters of classic works by Roy Lichtenstein and Picasso. The units have shiny white metal doors. You can only access the facility during business hours and limited weekend hours. There will be no late-night shenanigans here.
In Westchester, New York, Katonah Self-Storage offers a place to put not only your skis, but also specific storage units for your wine. And your classic cars. In spring 2015 there were waiting lists for both.
For the door-to-door storage service there is PODS, Portable Storage On Demand. A giant contraption, a detachable lift system known as a “podzilla,” will bring a storage unit–sized box to your home and deposit it in your driveway or on your lawn. You fill it, and then “podzilla” will return and make it go away until you are ready. Founded in Clearwater, Florida, in 1998, it was acquired almost a decade later by a Bahranian private equity firm for somewhere in the neighborhood of $430 to $450 million. In February 2015, PODS was sold to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan for more than $1 billion.
All the businesses that have grown out of American’s relationship with junk have two things in common. The first is that the industries revolving around the axis of stuff caught on the in the 1980s. Second, they all became the subjects of television shows.
1980s
The iconic speech Gordon Gekko gave in Wall Street was not unlike an actual commencement address given on May 18, 1986, at the University of California, Berkeley. A year before he was sentenced to jail and after paying a $100 million fine for insider trading, Ivan Boesky captured the spirit of the free-range capitalism of the 1980s when speaking to a crowd of business school graduates. He told them, “Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
One synonym for the word greed is acquisitiveness, which means the seeking of possessions. For a portion of the American population, 1980 to 1990 was a go-go decade of big hair, bigger houses, and the biggest appetites. Conspicuous consumption, a nearly century-old concept, was emerging as an ’80s cultural norm. As historian Doug Rossinow wrote about this shift in his book The Reagan Era, “Capitalism, subjected to moral and cultural criticism in the 1960s and 1970s by a generation longing for a simpler and more ethical life, received a fresh blessing from the highest levels of American leadership in the 1980s.”5 The Reagan era in Washington, one of “furs, jewels, and limousines,”6 was broadcast into the nation’s homes. The country watched as First Lady Nancy Reagan, who had elegant taste, spent more then $800,000 in donated funds redecorating the White House in the first nine months of her husband being in office.7
Despite economic downturns at the beginning and the tail end of the decade, during the mid-’80s it was a full-on spend-a-thon for those who could afford to, and even those who couldn’t. This included the government; the federal debt doubled during the decade. This was a period when baby boomers, many of them yuppies, were coming into their financial own, having learned at the hands of their parents that it was important to spend. Their parents were told to conserve while World War II raged, and then were encouraged to pump money into the economy as part of the new postwar America. Historian Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, describes it this way: “The new postwar order deemed, then, that the good customer devoted to ‘more, newer, and better’ was in fact the good citizen, responsible for making the United States a more desirable place for all its people.”8 The boomers, the largest swath of population, learned to consume from an aging population who were emotionally wired to save. That is a stuff tsunami.
In addition to this great audience of potential spenders and keepers, the 1980s introduced new levels and ways to consume. In the 1970s the United States normalized relations with China after decades of being cut off. A large, poorly paid (by US standards) workforce led to inexpensive goods from China flooding the retail landscape. In the 1980s Walmart was a dominant retailer in the United States. Sam Walton, founder of the superstore, claimed that Chinese imports accounted for only 6 percent of his sales in 1984. The investigative news program Frontline found another source that put it “at around 40 percent from day one.”9
Walmart is now the largest retailer in the United States, followed by Costco, which was founded in 1983. Although it has a radically different philosophy, Costco too played a part in the consumption culture of the 1980s. Fashioned after the French hypermarkets, these big locations with big inventory allowed people to buy at big discounts. Costco merged with Price Club, whose first location was actually in a converted airplane hanger. Think about that—a store the size of an airplane hanger. It was enormous, and it provided the average person the opportunity to buy in bulk. Of course, people have free will. These two re
tailers do not force people to come in and buy things—forty-eight rolls of toilet paper for example—but they do provide the opportunity to do so.
But what if you never even had to leave your house to buy something? The convenience and ease of QVC and HSN began in the 1980s as well. It started with cable television. Cable had been around since the early 1950s as a way to help geographically remote areas get some kind of reception. After a gradual loosening of the restrictions in 1984, there was seismic shift in the industry. The Cable Communications Act of 1984 sought to both regulate the industry with a national standard and give it enough freedom to grow. From 1984 through 1992, America was wired for cable. The industry spent a reported $15 billion doing so. It was considered one of the largest construction projects since World War II.10
A whole new kind of programming became available, things people had never seen before: rock stars lip-syncing their songs on music television, an entire network devoted to sports. Shopping would not be far behind. Home Shopping Club, renamed Home Shopping Network, was founded in 1982 and QVC (Quality, Value, Convenience) was founded in 1986. They feature comely hosts (and now celebrities) who chat like friends fawning over clothing, appliances, cosmetics, you name it, and they encourage the viewer to buy by simply calling in with their Amex or Visa at the ready. The channels play the scarcity card, broadcasing the dwindling number of items left.
Dr. Barbara Jo Dennison, who deals with patients who have hoarding issues, says, “QVC should be outlawed. It is like an alcoholic at a bar.” Other professionals who deal with shopping addictions expressed the same sentiments about the relentless nature of television shopping. Unlike bartenders or casinos that can cut off those who overindulge, television shopping networks are not inclined to nor required to decline a credit card. Some people buy as entertainment and watch for companionship. The programming is there all the time. Hosts often greet callers by saying, “Hello, friend.” One morning HSN was selling StoreSmart bags and compression totes, the kind you hook up to a vacuum cleaner to suck the air out of so your clothes or linens take up less room. The boyish, v-neck-sweater wearing, neat-as-a-pin host made a joke that you should get these bags so that you can make room for more things you buy on the Home Shopping Network.
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