December 18, 2002

A DOZEN HALF -empty cans of Diet Pepsi, abandoned mid-drink, litter the dining table. The cast-off cans have morphed into so many makeshift ashtrays.

Set down your own beverage and you run the risk of gulping ashy, flat, warm soda swill on your next sip. –Tip: touch the can to test if it's still cold before you hazard a swallow.

Or just give up and leave your can on the table to turn into another smelly, watery grave for cigarette butts.

The master of this decaying tin-can kingdom is the Messiest Man in San Francisco, and you can imagine what the rest of his one-bedroom apartment looks like if this carbonated-soda ash heap doubles as his desk and his kitchen table.

There are some conveniences to abject slovenliness. When he wants something to read, he simply reaches down on the floor, where there's always a newspaper or a periodical within reach. And he has no problem keeping his dishes clean. That's because he doesn't own any plates or silverware. One time, after a dinner party, he left the unwashed detritus of the evening's meal in the sink for so long all his flatware and plates rotted. He finally declared defeat and just threw them out. Now he eats takeout from Styrofoam containers every night with plastic knives and forks.

When it opened a branch on Fourth Street near Market in October, the Container Store might have had this Pig Pen in mind. For the Messiest Man, San Francisco's newest big-box retail store is the commercial equivalent of going to confession – when a bout of self-disgust at the layers of filth hits, he's been known to do momentary penance with his credit card in a buying spree of good intentions.

There the hopeless slob is like the wanna-be diary keeper who habitually buys leather-bound journals with artfully rippled parchment paper, filling up the first few pages of each one with introspective musings and then abandoning the effort.

The illusion: order is achievable – if you have the right equipment. Our Messiest Man wouldn't have had to throw out his moldering bowls and plates if he'd owned the Container Store's fine Stainless Steel Dish Drainer ($29.99). He would have washed them the night of the dinner party!

See, neat people already own a kitchen trash can. They don't need to go to a store with an aisle devoted to home waste-management to ogle 20 models in an array of fashion colors. But if the Messiest Man could just pick the right one – perhaps the Touch-Top Chrome Waste Can for a very reasonable $199? – maybe his Diet Pepsi cans would no longer degrade on the dining table ad infinitum. Uh, right.

The Container Store sells "organization." It's a Home Depot for apartment dwellers, people who can't really do anything drastic to their quarters, like rip out a wall, and compromise by figuring out ways to stuff more things into them. It's the limit point of consumerism, a vast store entirely devoted to options for better containing all those things you already own. It's about buying more stuff to keep your stuff in.

The store is proof that anything can be branded and marketed, even an empty box. For instance, two Bold Boxes, made of recycled fiberboard, can be yours for $39.99. Every different size of empty plastic box gets its own name and loving marketing description: Our Jumbo Storage Box, Our Big Underbed Box, etc.

When you enter, you're offered a grocery store-size shopping cart to fill up with boxes of nothing. There's a perverse joy in wheeling it around and packing it with empty containers to a soundtrack of early-season Christmas music, including that treacly, dated jingle "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in which Band Aid croons about the plight of "the other ones." In the kitchen section, near the paper-towel holders: "And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time / The greatest gift they'll get this year is life." Best lyric for Container Store empty box browsing: "Well, tonight thank God it's them instead of you." Doesn't that 82-ounce clear, rectangular plastic jar suddenly look attractive?

There are even containers for things that come in their own boxes, like toothpicks ($12.99) and coffee filters ($8.49). There's a whole aisle devoted to hangers in different materials, styles, and colors, because your wardrobe wouldn't be in a squalid pile in the corner of your bedroom if you just had color-coded hangers – purple for shirts, green for pants....

Far in the back, on the second floor, is the Container Store's pièce de résistance: dairy crates for sale at $7.99 a pop, in black, white, yellow, and blue. And here you thought the whole point of the dairy-crate college-student aesthetic was that they were free, lifted from storefronts late at night. Plus, by the time you have enough money to shop in places like the Container Store, aren't you trying to move away from that design approach? Apparently, though, even dairy crates can be packaged, marketed, and sold back to us as organization.

Over the years, I have watched the Messiest Man in San Francisco acquire a stylish assortment of organizational "solutions" during his brief bouts of self-improvement. He has owned no less than three of those superchic Bisley filing cabinets, sold at the Container Store for $169 each, the ones with those attractive ultraslim drawers that accommodate practically nothing but look great in austere, industrial gray.