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A British bank is run with precision. A British home requires nothing less! Tradition, discipline and rules must be the tools! Without them: disorder… catastrophe! Anarchy! In short, you have a ghastly mess!

~ George Banks, Mary Poppins

Bankers may have undeservedly dour reputations. (Please note, I don’t mean banks. There’s not a day that goes by that someone isn’t blogging about the excessive fees and impersonal treatment perpetrated by banks on their customers.)

Let’s face it, there is no more quintessentially stuffy banker than George Banks of the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.

It’s no wonder, then, that a document storage container originally designed — and named — for bankers, would have an equally stuffy, stodgy, conservative reputation.

Even if you’ve never used one, you know the Bankers Box. I bet you’re thinking: stiff, heavy-duty cardboard, folded into place, designed for long-term records storage. In other words, your mind’s eye probably painted a picture that looked much like this:

Boring? Maybe. Stuffy? Paper Doll won’t disagree. But one cannot deny the simple, practical benefits of the traditional Bankers Box Stor/File.

–It’s easy to assemble. In fact, I sometimes think the illustrations for assembly of the box are more complicated than the steps themselves.

(At least you don’t end up wishing you’d studied Swedish in school.)

–There’s no glue required. Creepy crawly creatures love nibbling at glue. By using a Bankers Box, put together solely by folding panels inward and then downward, you end up with a sturdy box, dependable and useful for long-term document storage, sans adhesives.

–It’s surprisingly sturdy for a “basic weight” storage box. At 10.5″ x 12.5″ x 16.25″, the Stor/File has a stacking weight of 450 pounds.

–It’s inexpensive. At a suggested retail price of $5.43, you can still often get a package of two for under $6 at Walmart.

I’ve often heard clients complain about the drawbacks of the Bankers Box, but my research turned up some surprising responses to these challenges and obstacles. They say:

1) You can’t use hanging folders!

Of course, what clients mean is that unlike plastic file crates, hanging-file desk-top boxes and plastic boxes designed for file storage, the original Bankers Box didn’t have file rails. The traditional box merely folds into place leaving you with…well, a box…a big empty space. If you’re transferring a filing cabinet drawer or desk drawer full of files all at once, the box will fill and the sheer volume of file folders, pressed against one another, keeps them from falling down.

Because the traditional boxes have nowhere to place the hooks for hanging folders, you generally have to remove your manila file folders from their hanging folder homes in the filing drawers to move them to the boxes. Then, if you’re not filling an entire box, the contents may (OK, will) shift and fall over.

Enter the Bankers Box Hang’N’Store:

The Hang’N’Stor still comes packed flat to allow you to assemble it quickly, but it includes plastic interior channels that act like file rails and allow hanging folders to safely nestle inside and smoothly glide forward or back, as necessary. You can grab entire hanging folders (archived client files, prior years’ invoices, etc.) and move the whole organized system directly from active to archived storage without separating out individual files.

The Hang’N’Store comes in letter size (11″ x 13.75″ x 13.25″) with a stacking weight capacity of 300 pounds or in letter/legal size — just turn it 90 to accommodate letter vs. the legal — (10.75″ x 13.75″ x 17″) with a stacking weight capacity of a whopping 600 pounds! Both styles are made of 65% recycled paper (59% post-consumer recycled content). The suggested retail price is $9.02 for the letter size or $9.27 for the letter/legal, but good deals for packages of four, at about 20-40% off the suggested rate, can be found at Amazon and various office supply retailers.

If your file drawers are overwhelmed by hanging files you must maintain for legal, financial or regulatory reasons, the Hang’N’Store offers a smooth transition.

2) You can’t keep piles of papers or bound materials from falling over!

Sometimes, you want to store papers away, a few chunks at a time, without having to buy extra hanging folders (with one set in archived storage and another set in daily use). Other times, you want to store stacks of paper, directories or other loose or bound material, but anything less than “full occupancy” in a traditional Bankers Box will make your documents flop over.

The solution: the Bankers Box Stor/File Divider Box. The Divider Box comes with five 5″ corrugated cardboard dividers designed to keep files upright, even without hanging folders, when the box is only partially full. (You have to ask yourself, is your Bankers Box half-empty or half-full?)

The Divider Boxes are medium-duty weight and come in letter (10.25″ x 12.875″ x 25.375″) and legal (10.25″ x 15.875″ x 25.375″) size, and if you’ve ever tried to keep stacks of legal-sized files (contracts, mortgages, wills, etc.) from bending, toppling or flopping over, you know what a boon this can be. The stacking weight capacity is an impressive 700 pounds, and the suggested retail price is $13.62.

The Divider Box seems just as easy to assemble as a traditional box — as the Divider Box demo video shows, the slight design change adds just a few brief steps to finalizing this double-end, double-bottomed box. Pop it together as normal, fold and insert the dividers, and slots in the folded-over sides hold the dividers in place. Easy-peasy.

3) They are cosmetically-challenged!

Yes, the traditional boxes are ugly. Your grandparents’, or even parents’, Bankers Box was either white with black, white with blue and black, or the oh-so-classy Systematic Woodgrain box with the flip-top lid, popular with attorneys and accountants (who, like bankers, are not exactly known for bon vivant exuberance.)

Paper Doll doesn’t blame you for being dubious, then, that Bankers Boxes can add some color to your document storage world. However, our stodgy friends have made a decidedly 21st century improvement in the realm of aesthetics with Decorative Stor/File Boxes in Cornflower Blue, Mocha Brown and Persimmon Red.

Although built to the same dimensions as the basic Stor/File boxes, these snazzier decorative versions are medium-duty weight (vs. basic), have deeper lift-off lids with locking designs for secure storage, and come together with the newer Fast-Fold Assembly, the little video for which shows a brisk three second (vs. 14 second) assembly advantage. It’s not exactly Formula One or NASCAR, but in Paper Doll‘s file box world, it’s pretty darn speedy! The Decorative Stor/File boxes have a suggested retail price of $8.36, but you can get package of four from Amazon for $27.

Aesthetics, function and ease of use — a nice (and not so stuffy) surprise!

4) They’re not so great for the environment!

Bankers Boxes actually have a pretty good environmental record, especially compared to similar functioning plastic storage resources. Most of the boxes in the basic-, extra- and maximum-strength lines are made of at least 65% recycled product. However, the Bankers Box Recycled Stor/File line is made of 100% recycled materials.

The box shown above is a standard letter/legal version (10.25″ x 12.5″ x 16.25″) with a lift-off lid, a stacking weight capacity of 550 pounds and a suggested retail price of $6.17. Variations include recycled boxes with flip-top lids as well as those with fold-in lids and string-and-button closures. (Admittedly, the latter is a little stuffy. They’ve never heard of Velcro?) Like their decorative cousins, these recycled Stor/File boxes come together quickly with the Fast-Fold Assembly design.

5) Re-stacking boxes is a pain!

The high stacking capacity of all of the boxes, even those at basic-strength, still fail to solve the inevitable problem: the box you want is on the bottom of the stack!

Certainly you can use a variety of shelving solutions. For example, Paper Doll is a big fan of Rubbermaid resin shelving, and Bankers Box even has a line of Staxonsteel (watch the video!) interlocking steel shelving units. However, these solutions are more expensive, and can be overkill for simple home office or small business filing needs.

The File/Cube Box Shell presents a reasonably priced, modular shelving unit that stacks up to five boxes high.

The 11.375″ x 13.875″ x 16.875″ shells have steel-support frames within the durable corrugated cardboard, and wire-frame clips hold the shells together, both horizontally or vertically, to maintain neat stacks.

Of course, you still want to carefully consider whether your family, organization or business needs to be keeping any individual piece of paper. (An oft-repeated professional organizer maxim says 80% of papers stored are never retrieved or needed again.) And do be sure to label your document storage accurately and with useful details and dates to make retrieval and destruction procedures go more smoothly.

The Bankers Box has come a long way, Baby! Although we tend to think of every cardboard storage box as a Bankers Box, it’s a brand name with a rich history. In 1917, for a mere $50, Harry Fellowes bought a company that made cardboard boxes for bank records. The small investment had huge potential, as the 16th Amendment (allowing taxation of individuals and corporations), had only been passed a few years earlier. The concomitant requirement to keep tax records meant people and businesses would need more permanent document storage.

Eventually, company leaders “thought outside the box” and expanded into various product lines (including shredders, computer accessories, and binding and laminating machines). Although the company name changed in 1982 to the more all-encompassing Fellowes, the product line Bankers Box remains.

While it’s true that nobody is ever going to green-light a Bravo Network reality series about innovations in storage box design, the old Bankers Box has a lot more pizzazz than you might expect from a typical 93-year-old.