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Shelving units are possibly the most useful piece of furniture that has ever been invented. Really, think about it, what better furniture can you think of. Don't try to compare beds or sofas to shelving units, because that's just cheating. Think about storage furniture.

You like drawers, you say. Oh but drawers fall down in many aspects. First is that they need to be opened, which is all fine and well for the first few thousand times you open them. After that, they begin to go wrong. The drawers can stick as you pull them for many reasons. Wood can warp, metal can rust, runners can fall off, drawers can fall off their runners. Drawers handles can fall off, leaving you with a struggle to get inside. Finally, you cannot see the contents of a drawer fully, even if you have fought with it until it is open. You need to rummage around, which is why drawers are usually in a mess.

Ah, now you think the wardrobe or cupboard is a worthy contender for shelving units. Well, that is not so, because for one, wardrobes and other cupboards have doors to bang and hinges to come loose so that the door might even fall off. Then there is the dimensions of inside the cupboard or wardrobe and its functions.

Hanging space is useful only for hanging clothes. What if you don't have enough clothes to fill the wardrobe? You have a waste of space, literally. Then there is the depth of the cupboard, perhaps it is too shallow for you to get the door closed when you are running out of space, or perhaps it is too deep, so that whatever finds its way to the back will not see the light of day for months or years. And then there is the height. Many cupboards are too high or too low to be useful for everyday storage. And the last problem with cupboards and wardrobes is that their dimensions are usually fixed so you can only store what fits, you cannot make it fit what you want to store.

Such problems simply do not happen with shelving units, they are usually made with the intention that they can be adjusted so that the height or length of the shelving unit suits what you need to store. Although they can be adjusted, shelving units do not have any regularly moving parts, so they do not incur the same wear and tear as drawers and cupboards. The most important feature of shelving units is that they can be used to store anything well. You wouldn't put your TV or stereo in a drawer or cupboard, but on shelving units, perfect. You can store kitchen equipment or clothes as easily and neatly on shelving units as you can in cupboards, and you have the added advantage of seeing exactly where everything is so you are less likely to spend time hunting for a specific t-shirt or pot.

Possibly the only things that are best kept in furniture other than delving units is underwear, on the one hand, you probably don't want everyone to see your smalls, and on the other, it tends to fall off shelves because it is too small to be piled neatly. So, in all contests apart from underwear storage, shelving units beat other types of furniture hands down.