The timeline below is my personal account.
The Start
My experience started out ordinary. A rainy day exposed a leak that
left my belongings sitting in water. No
apology. The office offered me another unit away from the
leak.
My Shock
They then turned around and rented the leaking unit,
still unrepaired, to the next person. In the weeks that followed, I
watched that renter's belongings and the belongings in the units
around it get ruined the same way. I saw a woman standing in that
hallway crying over what she had lost. It was terrible to witness, and all of it traced back
to a leak the company knew about and did not care enough to fix.
When I told the front desk I would leave a review about what happened, I was told that if I left a review
I would have 48 hours to clear out every unit on my account, at every location. Knowing I could not comply with such a request at the time, I stayed quiet. Until now.
The Convenient Whisper
A short time later, a small postcard arrived in the mail, the kind that looks like
spam, easy to miss. It was a rent increase notice, stating that my rate was nearly tripling. A POSTCARD from a company that runs an APP, keeps my EMAIL address on file, and has no
trouble reaching me ELECTRONICALLY when a payment is due.
Patterns Emerging
I had two units, each in a different state, and I noticed that the
increases arrived on exactly the same schedules after
move-in, even though both properties had empty units to spare.
One rent hike is a landlord being a landlord. Similar
hikes, on the same timeline, at unrelated facilities with
vacancies all around, look like something running on a
program.
The Realization
That's when I started digging. First the news stories,
then the court dockets, then the academic paper written
from inside the company describing its pricing model to investors, then the Better
Business Bureau file, where more than a thousand strangers
described the same sequence of events almost word for word. Talking
with employees along the way, they seemed trained
to steer every conversation away from the one honest answer, which
is that the advertised rate was never going to be the price.
Why I Built This
Not to get my money back and not to settle a score. This site
exists to bring the pattern out into the open, revealing that the "friendly
neighborhood storage company" posing as a small business is actually
Wall Street's latest heist to extract as much
as possible from unsuspecting, hard-working, average everyday Americans. The people most injured by the scheme are often those who can least afford it, stripping money and/or property from the most vulnerable citizens. Forcing them through arbitration often leaves them with no recourse. On my journey of making this site, I learned
what's happening is by design, and it's occurring coast to coast, affecting tens of thousands of
customers who each think it is only happening to them.
The reason these stories rarely make headlines is by design too. Forced
arbitration keeps disputes out of public courtrooms, and class-action
bans keep customers from pooling their cases. So the evidence stays
scattered and quiet.
This page puts it back in one place. If you're already stuck,
maybe something here helps. If you're about to sign, take it as a
warning. And if they already got you, you're not alone. Got a
story of your own? It belongs here too.