Self storage
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A public storage facilitie, also known as self storage facility or mini storage, is a business that rents rooms (or units) to people and allows those people to store items in the room, a kind of shared warehouse.
Description
The facilites are usually located on cheaper, less desirable land, such as under a freeway, near an airport, or on the outskirts of town. The facilities will have a catchy name of the U store it variety. Moving trucks and vans may be also be available for rent e.g. the facility may include a U-haul franchise.
The rooms are typically windowless, walled, and lockable by the renter. Chain-link fencing may function as an more secure ceiling than a suspended ceiling. Rooms are different sized, from closets to enough space to store all the contents of multi-room apartment. A controlled access facility may employ security guards and surveillance cameras. Some rooms may have an external garage door allowing loading and unloading to a vehicle.
Customers are generally allowed to store and non-hazardous, non-toxic material in the facility: personal items, furniture, motorcycles, overstocked retail wares, etc. Industry surveys indicate that 44% of clients are moving, 34% don't have enough space currently, and 15% of clients are people with business needs[citation needed]. Customers are prohibited from sleeping, or otherwise living in the room.
If the customer fails to pay the rent, the contract may be written to allow the facility to claim ownership of the customers items. In one case, a clever customer stored a load of old tires and then purposely stopped paying the rent -- to storage facility became the owner of the tires and had to pay for their proper disposal.
Cold storage
Some facilities are climate control. A cold storage facility provides rooms with very low temperature suitable for the storage of perishible items like meat and vegetables. Many of these are leftover from the days when most fright was shipped via railroad: with the advent of refrigerated trucking, door-to-door cold transportation became common.
Less formal public storage
Less formal public storage might be a locker room, cloak room, left luggage, train stations and airports. There may be an attendant or an automated vending machine to collect the fee and control access, or it simply require dropping a few coins into a slot to allow a key to be removed locking a compartment. At a swimming pool or sauna the key will be attached to a wrist or ankle strap.