Call me cynical, but it enables the vendor to quote charges in terms of cubic feet for both storage and services and get a markup without some buyers ever understanding what happened. For the inexperienced buyer, they don't often see that the "standard box" has an equivalence of 1.2 or 1.25 (or more) cubic feet for both storage *and* services. In addition, many uninitiated buyers don't ask what volumes larger boxes are calculated at. Since many vendors are now charging both storage and services based upon cubic feet (rather than charging services on a unit basis as some do), the cubic foot equivalence is a significant cost factor that many purchasers don't calculate into their analysis. In some markets, where vendors have varying ways of calculating storage and services charges, it can be very difficult for an inexperienced buyer to compare pricing and I have seen Purchasing departments look solely at the line item for storage when making the decision.
 This is a significantly dumb decision when one vendor charges services per cubic foot and another charges a unit cost (not pro-rated to the size of a box). For the customer with a huge number of large boxes, their "cheap storage" deal (when basing the buying decision on storage cost) suddenly gets ugly when they see the bill for services.

Yes, the basis for the box size calculation is the space occupied by the box, but I find it very strange that you have to ask many vendors for a chart to understand how each type of box size is calculated. Arguably, basing things per cubic foot enables the vendor to accommodate a larger variety of boxes and not have to adjust the contract when some oddball box comes in -- and certainly incents the customer to use standard records boxes (take a look at how many cubic feet are assigned to a typical "mover's tote"). However, since the industry does not have standard definitions of cubic feet by box size, it is up to the customer to fully understand what the equivalences are and calculate the impact so that a true apples to apples analysis can be performed.

 Patrick Cunningham, CRM
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