indoor storage – Page 29

Love Affair with Cars May Be Ending

Six decades after the launch of America’s interstate highway system, changing habits and attitudes suggest America’s romance with the road is fading. Driving rose almost continuously since World War II, but driving by U.S. households has declined nearly 10 percent since 2004. Since the decline began well before the Great Recession, economics doesn’t appear to be the only cause.

“There’s something more fundamental going on,” says Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

Consider these points:

The average American household now owns fewer than two cars, returning to the levels of the early 1990s. This may signal a change in home-building, too, as there is less need for three-car garages.

More teens and 20-somethings are waiting to get a license. Less than 70 percent of 19-year-olds now have one, down from 87 percent two decades ago.

Thousands of people are commuting by bicycle rather than by car. In Minneapolis, for example, about 3,500 people bike to work daily via the Midtown Greenway. That’s double the number of bicycle commuters in 2000.

Online shopping has reduced the number of car trips for shopping.

A record 10.7 billion mass transit rides were taken by Americans last year, a 37 percent increase since 1995. Light rail continues to expand in many cities and ride-sharing services, such as Lyft and Uber, are further denting the need to own an automobile.

The number of drive-ins – whether featuring car hops serving food or giant outdoor movie screens – have sharply declined as Americans drive less.

The number of teens taking drivers education has declined by 40 percent as state subsidies are eliminated and the need to take drivers ed to earn a high school diploma is dropped.

Heck, you don’t even need to own a vehicle to bring your things to Dino’s Storage – we rent trucks at many of our locations, so just give us a call.

Sharing Rides, Sharing Moves

The idea of sharing rides instead of calling a traditional taxi company has moved across the nation and, in fact, into 36 countries. Now a Santa Barbara, Calif., startup is making a similar move in the moving industry.

NextMover offers an alternative to traditional moving companies and to rent-a-truck do-it-yourself moves. The company helps truck owners and pickup drivers earn extra cash by helping with small-scale, local moves. They have been assisting with local moves in Santa Barbara since January, but the concept has already drawn comparisons to car-sharing services such as Lyft, which is now operating in at least 60 cities and Uber which offers ride-sharing in 36 countries.

With NextMover truck owners set their own prices for movers to consider and NextMover takes 20 percent of that. “On the average we are about 50 percent cheaper than similar services. But it turns out that’s really third on the totem pole,” says president and CEO Alexander Kehaya. “The convenience and the community aspect are the things that people consistently tell us when we show them our website and talk about what we do.”

Truck owners vehicles can range from pickups to larger commercial trucks. To participate they must emerge from a vetting process that includes interviews, a background check and vehicle inspection, before they’re allowed to participate. Consumers can choose among truck owners depending on budget and needs, as well as driver bios and user ratings. NextMover is currently assuming insurance responsibility for these initial moves, but the company does ask truck owners to carry commercial insurance.

Co-founder Max James says. “Part of the thing that our platform provides is security for everyone in the sense that the price is what it is. It’s a rate you set ahead of time and if it’s processed through our system, nobody’s going to come to you and say, ‘Hey, we are holding your house hostage until you pay us for it.'”

NextMover is preparing to secure more funding in order to expand to other cities. Kehaya says they’ve already signed up a few hundred truck owners in other cities, such as Austin, Texas.

“We first started with only pickup trucks, ‘your friend with a truck,’ because we realized that there are a lot of pickup trucks that aren’t being utilized and that perhaps people would be interested in using that to make some money on the side,” says James. “We have made a pivot since then and moved to more of a larger, open marketplace. The people with pickup trucks that want to make some money on the side can still do that, but the marketplace is also for small businesses, or people who have a larger vehicle or a box truck that they use for other things. Our platform is so easy for them to use that they are willing to try it out and use their trucks when it is convenient for them.”

“When we switched to this open marketplace, we got good feedback from the truck owners and also on the consumer’s side: Not everybody needs just a pickup,” says Kehaya. “There are some people that would like it if you had a trailer. They would pay more money for that because they’ve got more stuff to move. Sometimes they want two people to come and help them, not just one guy and a truck. It really opened up the services that we can provide.”

There are, of course, limitations to moving with NextMover. It only works for local moves, and is less ideal for people with large houses who truly need full-size moving trucks and comprehensive service. “And we can’t move pianos,” says Kehaya. “You’re better off with somebody who has all the straps and equipment for that.” But Kehaya believes the demand for the convenience and cost savings that NextMover provides is plenty large for local markets.

While NextMover is only available in Santa Barbara right now, Dino’s Storage can lend a hand with available rental trucks at some of our locations. If you need a truck, just check with any Dino’s facility for a location convenient to you, or send an e-mail to customerservice@dinosstorage.com.

Canadian Anti-Spam Law Takes Effect July 1

Making sure the people who get your marketing emails have explicitly asked to receive them is best practice anyway. But the Canadian Anti-Spam Law going into effect in Canada on July 1 makes it even more of a necessity. And, yes, it could impact small businesses in the U.S. too — if you email regularly to customers in Canada.

The new legislation is technically designed to protect Canadian citizens against particularly nasty spam messages used for phishing, identity theft and spyware.

Unless you use the proper precautions, your business could be found in violation. And you could be open to penalties of up to $10 million (in Canadian Dollar rates) and even private civil suits. The law applies even if you are located outside of Canada, but send to recipients who access the messages from within Canada.

The law applies to all commercial electronic messages including email, text messages, social media, IM and voice messages. The law is much broader than its U.S counterpart, the CAN-SPAM Act, which has been in effect for a number of years.

The chart at left highlights the differences in the U.S. and Canadian anti-spam laws.

In an email interview with Small Business Trends, Connie Sung Moyle, manager of public relations and digital strategy at San Francisco-based email marketing company VerticalResponse, explained:

“Our customer support team has fielded a few inquiries from customers, and we’re telling them to consult with a legal advisor to make sure they’re fully cooperating with the new law.”

The new regulation gives a three-year grace period for email marketers to obtain permission from recipients they already email inside Canada. After that time the Canadian government will be able to file suit for up to $10 million against violators. Even Canadian citizens will be empowered to bring suit against you and your business for a violation, warns Chandler, Ariz.-based email and sales software services provider Infusionsoft.

In a recent post on the official Infusionsoft blog, product marketing specialist Justin Topliff wrote: “Because it may be difficult to determine which contacts in your database are located in Canada, Infusionsoft encourages you to obtain a double opt-in from your entire database. This is a best practice for email marketing and will ensure you are in total compliance with all Canadian and U.S. spam laws on this issue.”

Meanwhile Constant Contact, the Waltham, Mass.-based company whose online marketing toolkit includes email and other services, says it is focusing on educating customers about the law. Lisa Kember, the company’s Regional Director for Eastern Canada explains: “We are proactively reaching out to our customers-both those in Canada and those that market to Canada-to help guide them through the process of being CASL compliant.”

At Dino’s your security is of utmost importance to us – whether it be your goods in storage or your personal information. We never sell our email lists to anyone else and always treat our customer information with appropriate respect.

What Is Self Storage and Who Uses It?

Self storage offers people a secure place to store possessions they don’t have room for where they live or work, or that they don’t need on a daily basis. At Dino’s Storage we offer storage units ranging room 25 to 300 square feet. Dino’s specializes in providing modern self-storage facilities to customers in our service areas. Our various locations provide a variety of storage opportunities, from outdoor storage for boats and automobiles, to indoor storage for general items, to climate controlled storage for your special keepsakes.

While there have always been people or businesses willing to rent space to others for temporary storage, America’s first commercially viable storage operation wasn’t founded until the early 1900s, by Martin Bekins. His company, founded in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1891, served the storage needs of families who were moving west and eventually became the well-known Bekins Moving & Storage Company.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the modern self storage industry as we know it today came into being, according to a New York Times article by Jon Mooallem. For the two decades that followed, Mooallem writes, “storage remained a low-profile industry. For the most part, storage units were meant to temporarily absorb the possessions of those in transition: moving, marrying or divorcing or dealing with a death in the family.”

Not much has changed since then, except we tend to do more moving, marrying, divorcing and dealing inherited stuff than ever before. Consequently, the self storage industry has grown to meet the demand.

So who uses these self storage units? A great many of them are rented by individuals. According to the Self Storage Association, one out of every 10 households in the country rents a self storage unit, while businesses account for 30 percent of self storage customers.

Individuals put everything in self storage from holiday decorations to seasonal clothing, sporting equipment, furniture and vehicles. Businesses use self storage for documents, excess office equipment and furniture, tools, inventory and supplies. Unless it violates the terms of the facility (ammunition, perishable items and live animals are a few of the commonly restricted items), it can and is being stored.

When you rent self storage space, there’s a contract involved, written by lawyers. The SSA defines self-storage as “the term applied to facilities offering rental on a month-to-month basis where the tenant applies his lock and has sole access to his unit.” That protects the self storage facility from creating a condition called bailment, whereby it would assume responsibility for the care, custody or control of a customer’s goods. Unlike a dry cleaner, for instance, who might be liable for burning a hole in that cashmere sweater you dropped off, the self storage facility has no responsibility for the care of your stuff, other than what’s stipulated in the rental contract.

You are responsible for the insurance on and the care of your own stuff. And once you’ve signed the contract, the storage facility owners won’t enter your unit unless they have really good, legally defensible, reason to think you’re violating the terms, which will stipulate materials you can’t store and activities you can’t conduct from the rental unit.