Ben Carlson
Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management who writes about investing, markets and risk on the A Wealth of Common Sense blog.
“There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald's, Walmarts, Home Depots, Domino's, Dunkin' Donuts, and Costcos combined ... This is how rich we are collectively as a nation. We can't fit all our stuff into our houses anymore.”
Animal Spirits Podcast · October 2026
Carlson is arguing that the United States is the richest society in history, whatever the mood about the economy. The comparison is one he is passing on from a magazine article about self-storage that a listener sent him. The conclusion about wealth is his own.
Transcript
Okay. I want to give one more data point on how rich we are as a nation because it's weird to say that like we are the richest society in history right now. There's never been a society as richer than the United States of America at this moment right now. Okay. It's going to be painful if we go through a crash or a down cycle or whatever, but right now. So someone sent me this New Yorker about how we are the American religion of self-storage facilities. Have you ever used a self-storage facility before?
Sure.
Where you block stuff in a garage or whatever. I used it for six months or something as like when you're moving or something. Yeah. So there are more self-store. I love these. There are more self-I love data points like this. There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald's, Walmart's, Home Depot, Domino's, Dunkin' Donuts, and Costco's combined. The United States is the world leader in storage units, roughly 90% of global capacity. So this is a United States thing where we have so much junk that we have to put it somewhere else. And they said that this survey in 2022 from Black and Decker found that more than a third of the country's residential garages were so full of overflow possessions that their owners were unable to park their cars in them. You've seen this. Everyone has a house or two on their street where you go by the garage door when it's open and you go, oh my gosh, look at all that stuff. Like they can't fit their cars into the garage because they have so much stuff in there. This is how rich we are collectively as a nation. We can't fit all our stuff into our houses anymore.
And so just getting back to the bigger point I was making about focusing on the negative. Yeah, it is. Obviously, understandably up that there are so many people struggling big time getting crushed by inflation. And there's tens of millions of these people. And there's also tens of millions of people that have more money than they could wipe their ass with it. Right. But we spend, we, content creators in general, over-index on the suffering and spend no time. Forget it. I'm not talking about the billionaires, but there's so many people that are doing incredibly well financially. Right. And it's sort of like, you know, f those people, who cares?
Right. 4,800 dedicated RV and boat storage facilities in the United States. Have you seen like how big RVs are now? Like you drive past a house, like one of these old boomer houses that was built in the 70s, and it's got an RV perked on the side that could barely fit. It's like it's the size of a bus. And you go, we don't have
room for RVs here. Oh,
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