I kept waiting to see if a records manager would talk about the underlying engineering that is creating the problems that lead to reboxing records. 

If you walk through the records centers that house your records, you will see that the records storage compartments have changed. 

If you look at photos of records centers in the 1990 - 2005 time period you see racking that accommodates 2 boxes high and 8 wide and the racking was two boxes deep.  The warehouse worker typically worked on a picker, and the worst case scenario was he was moving just a few boxes to grab the requested box.

Since the compartments were stored two high, the box was plenty strong to support one box on top of itself.

But that is not what the warehouses look like after 1,000 independent companies have been rolled into mega-giant companies. Look at the compartment and you will see it is 9 wide and it is now 3 boxes high and they store them 3 deep.

This provides great density; but think how much more labor is involved in stacking and re-stacking to get at your box.   And it is not just the daily wear and tear of your business that is wearing out these boxes, it is the constant influx of newly acquired records collections from smaller companies that cause reorganization of the current boxes.

With the largest companies, they do not even use their own staff, they hire special contractors with lots of muscle to move the boxes around. Instead of 32 boxes in a compartment there are now 81 boxes.  This is a lot more activity to pull a box, and with the boxes 3 high, the boxes take a beating.

The offsite storage company saved on space. But the victim is the box.  No one changed the boxes to be especially strong to deal with all this extra weight and extra movement.  So of course the boxes break down faster.

But the lesson learned by the offsite storage companies who store in such large compartments; is that they can bill for anything and 90% of the market will just pay for these charges.  Note that 13 out of the 14 responses on this day dealt with this so obviously everyone is seeing these charges.

Also, look at the mezzanine systems and see how they work.  Note the curling sliding board that drops from 60’ or 50’ or 40’ high.  They drop your box into the slide and it drops at a high rate of speed to the bottom level and slams into the boxes already sitting at the bottom.  These collisions go on all day.  No box can withstand this abuse for long.

If you go on the web and look at photos of records storage racking and you can even find photos of your own storage company. You can count the boxes in the new style shelving and see there are 81 boxes per compartment not 32.  You can see the mezzanines disappearing into the clouds. You can see the box slides.  And they take a toll on boxes.  The only negative to these high density systems is they just destroy boxes in a very short period of time.

If only the vendor could pass the cost of the box destruction onto the records storage client!  Then they get the efficiency and turn the cost into a new profit center. And if the client catches on, if there was only some way we could prevent them from leaving with some sort of punitive fee. If only we could hold them hostage in our warehouses. 

> If you don’t trust the provider, you’re going to distrust anything that you can’t see and that's not a healthy place to be.

Seriously??  We had discussions of reboxing in previous threads where the reboxing was done not due to worn boxes but just to create exorbitant profit.  6,000 boxes that were reboxed, the entire collection and the boxes were only 1 year old. Stephen mentioned minimal charges… is $9.00 per box fair for a box that costs less than $2.00?  Or as Brett described, charging for reboxing a box that had previously been destroyed.

My spell check doesn’t even recognize reboxing as a word.  It keeps changing it to rebooting.

Ironically, it is the records managers of the Big Data guys that saw the opportunity to take advantage of this unethical treatment.  They realized how unhappy their company was when treated this way.  They did not like it when they were hit with these bogus fees, hostage fees and when they switched vendors, the big storage company just went out and bought the new vendor they selected.  IBM and Dell chastised the offsite tape storage industry last year for failing to alert the clients when the well run independent offsite storage company was in the process of selling out to the mega company.

So the result,  The Cloud!  A place where records aren’t held hostage.  Where the client controls the movement of the information assets. And boxes do not exist.   I only wish I was smart enough to know how to build a Cloud.

Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
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