MSM: U-Haul CEO Joe Shoen Calls to End Deceptive Pricing Practices
The U-Haul 1-Year Price Lock is disrupting the self-storage industry, drawing a clear distinction among the big operators and their strategies for courting and retaining storage customers.
Modern Storage Media interviewed U-Haul CEO Joe Shoen on the topic.
From MSM:
Joe Shoen is taking a stand. In our exclusive interview, Shoen sat down with MSM to explain why he’s going against the grain when it comes to pricing. He says he’s “fed up” with what he describes as a strategy among major players: offering low introductory rates and then increasing them multiple times a year — sometimes before customers even move in. So he’s taking a different approach: offering customers a one-year rate lock guarantee.
Shoen had been circling the idea for a while, and then he got hold of a year-old article in Slate titled "Sneaky Self-Storage Unit Rate Increases." He reads a piece of it aloud. “These kinds of massive rate increases (ECRIs) are more common among larger companies… Familiar names like Public Storage, Extra Space Storage, U-Haul, National Storage Affiliates, CubeSmart, Prime, and StorageMart,” quotes Shoen, and he shakes his head.
“The thing is, we don’t do that. We’ve never done that. I didn’t even know what ECRI meant until I read this. And now we’re being lumped in with those who are doing this because we’re all the biggest names in the industry. That sealed it. I thought, ‘I need to distance myself from these other guys.’”
Shoen says that he’s had many people including industry colleagues tell him that he could make a lot more money if U-Haul did adopt aggressive ECRI practices. “I’ve heard it all. They say, ‘But all the REITs are doing it,’” says Shoen. “And the REITs, by doing this, they’re communicating to me that they are smarter than me. Okay, maybe you are. But I’m not being sued by the city of New York.”
Read the rest of the article: https://www.modernstoragemedia.com/msm-exclusives/joe-shoen-deceptive-pricing-practices.
About U-HAUL
Founded in 1945, U-Haul is the No. 1 choice of do-it-yourself movers with more than 24,000 rental locations across all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces. The U-Haul app makes it easy for customers to use U-Haul Truck Share 24/7 to access trucks anytime through the self-dispatch and -return options on their smartphones with our patented Live Verify technology. Our customers' patronage has enabled the U-Haul fleet to grow to approximately 203,000 trucks, 137,400 trailers and 41,700 towing devices. U-Haul, which offers rate transparency to self-storage customers through its 1-Year Price Lock, is the third largest storage operator in North America with 1,126,800 rentable storage units and 98 million square feet of self-storage space at owned and managed facilities. U-Haul is the top retailer of propane in the U.S. and the largest installer of permanent trailer hitches in the automotive aftermarket industry. Get the U-Haul app from the App Store or Google Play.
Contact:
Jeff Lockridge
E-mail: publicrelations@uhaul.com
Phone: 602-760-4941
Website: uhaul.com