Misnomers: Space-Savers and Organizers
[Trivia: Which 10 states currently offer bottle deposits?]
Something that mildly confused me, and then bothered me, is the wording that surrounds home goods products called “space-saving” and “organizers.”
These don’t describe what they do. Organization, putting things in order, can be done independent of pretty much any physical structure. The key value in so many of these products is in the recall accessibility: it’s not just how your stuff is organized, it’s how easily you can access any discrete part of it without disrupting other stuff.
This is also why we use bookshelves to collect books horizontally. In principle, just in terms of ordering the books and the space they take up, we could also store our books in vertical stacks. The key weakness of doing that is that you can’t access any book without disrupting all of the books resting on top of it.
And none of that really has to do with “organizing,” per se.
It’s the same thing with pretty much any organizer: having more shelves, or different drawers, allows easier recall of more belongings.
So, too, with the language of “space savers.” It’s not saved, because there’s a certain amount of space1 that you have at your disposal. This isn’t “saving” space; it’s just giving you the infrastructure to use more of it for storage.
If Square One for an indoor space means that you have the flat plane of floor space available for storage, and (possibly) anything that itself is stored by resting directing on the floor, then furniture and such that turns that flat rectangle of possibilities into a larger 3-dimensional solid that takes advantage of more volume and fills the space will be more economical. But it’s not “saving space,” just capitalizing on it.
Maybe that’s obvious to everyone else, but it’s just such a disorienting misnomer.
~
Answer: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Vermont, and (the state to pioneer this practice) Oregon.
(Delaware is the only state that once had such a law, but repealed it.)
Indoors, anyway. I’m dimly reminded of an XKCD about Roman property rights securing ownership to all the volume above a piece of land all the way up to the heavens, but I can’t find it now.