Both Storage Wars on A&E and Auction Hunters on Spike are fun shows IMHO.
Yes, I’m sure there are folks who do not like them. Head over to the “Stargate” threads, OK?
Anyway, I’d love to see a special that puts the storage wars folks against the team from auction hunters. I’d put my money on the Auction hunters guys.
Plus - I strongly suspect the producers of “seeding” the units that the people buy for both of these shows.
the auction hunters show is not real. they have a disclaimer at the beginning that says, these are some of their best scores or something like that. so i think the entire thing is staged.
storage wars for life!!
I don’t think it’s staged, they just don’t show all the other storage units that they buy and get junk out of. Then again I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all staged being TV and all.
These kinds of shows do make some of my friends think they can get into this and make a lot of money.
I did a short service call at a local storage chain a few weeks ago. I asked the manager about how this has been going and she told me they were very happy with the TV shows. The storage auctions before these shows would draw half a dozen people and the prices would rarely be above a couple of hundred dollars. Now, the auctions are crowded and the prices per unit are sometimes a thousand dollars or more.
Storage Wars certainly shows the hard work involved: dragging out the stuff, sorting, hauling, driving around for appraisals. Then they still have to find a buyer for these finds. I often wonder if they are able to sell some of these items for even a fraction of the worth they are proclaiming.
Storage Wars ran an end-of-season review show where they sat down with the producer to talk about it. They did mention that they also buy dozens of units with nothing valuable in them. So it’s not staged, but edited to remove the boring bits.
Have them watch the episode of Hoarders with the guy who filled his house with crap that he couldn’t unload from buying storage lockers. That should cure them.
Jerrod and Brandi almost went the same way. They opened thier store because Jerrod’s locker buying was overrunning thier house.
Don’t think it will, he and his wife just bought a bigger house to store all their stuff.
I just wonder where all these storage units come from and why anyone would leave anything valuable in them. I know if I was going to lose one I would get all the good stuff out and not worry about the rest. Then again my mother had one that I should have just let them auction off, not a thing in there.
Oh, without a doubt. The players are a bit more subtle about this now, but when they first started seeding the units it was funny watching one of the purchasers ignore 20 boxes and tubs to open a drawer that contained the Big Find.
Don’t watch Auction Hunters.
And then the one where a woman with way too many storage lockers defaulted on her payments and had to clean them out or risk all of her stuff being seized and auctioned off. IIRC, the appraiser who came out to see if she could sell anything wasn’t impressed.
I don’t know, but I do notice the following:
The guys are allowed to price their own stuff. So if Jarrod says that a washer is $75, then the counter goes up by $75. Makes it a bit easier to come out ahead if you can make up your own numbers, right? 
When the purchasers give a price range (“This is a $300-500 piece of furniture”), the counter almost always increases by the higher of the two numbers. I’ve only seen it once where the counter did not go up at the highest number, and that’s when Dave said that something is worth “3, 4, 5-thousand dollars” and the counter went up only $4k.
Sometimes I wonder why Darrell is on the show… half the time he doesn’t buy anything. There was an episode this season where he’s lamenting his life and he says “I’ve got a lot of crap going on in the past few months… another divorce, a child-custody fight, and a home invasion.” It was funny, the casual, “oh, yeah” attitude he mentioned the home invasion with, using the same tone of voice I would use when remembering a flat tire from 4 months ago that inconvenienced my trip to the corner store.
It did confirm our thoughts about Jarrod and Brandy’s relationship:
My wife was sure about #1, I was positive about #2. Glad we were both correct.
Dave Hestert is my favorite buyer, by far. The show would be rather boring without him, imho.
My niece had control over a lot of family heirlooms (I don’t know if any of it was very valuable) and had them in a storage locker. She had a rather nasty slip into Methamphetamine use and before anyone knew what was up, the locker was gone for lack of payment.
Sometimes it’s not obvious that there is something valuable there and the owners may not have realized. But sometimes it is obvious. On one episode of Storage Wars, there was a unit that contained brand-new vending machines. Dave won the auction with a bid of $2-3,000 and sold them for about $30,000. How much was owed on that unit that the owner let it go?
What I don’t like is that he’s unnecessarily antagonistic. Even in the post-season wrap-up show, he was challenging the others as to how much revenue they made over the year, or even how much cash they had in their wallets.
Family heirlooms are always valuable, at least to the family. I’m pretty sure I lost a few things when my mom died. How long do they give people? The few times I’ve gotten storage lockers they were always on credit cards.
Well, yeah. Dave’s not intimidated by any buyers.
I’m sure both shows only highlights their “best scores”, because I don’t think people would watch if they only found old underwear and used toasters. This does not necessarily mean that the entire show is staged though. I still think the producers may “seed” a few units though, probably after they buy them.
I totally agree with JohnT’s comments about the folks on Storage Wars pricing their own items “Oh I can get $200 for that, $300 for this, and that’s a $400 table”… Cha ching, the counter goes to $800. Ya right. When they sell the stuff they probably get $150 for the lot. Dave H. is probably the worst for this.
At least on Auction Hunters, we usually get to see them sell the stuff for cash.
I want to see the Storage Wars folks go head to head against the Auction Hunters dudes. My money would be on the Auction Hunters guys, because they set a top limit for bidding and never go over it. They look more business like.
And Dave Hestert is evil. A show needs an evil character for the folks at home to boo and hiss at. It’s just like the Straight Dope, where we all love to hate the posters like (insert name here)
Yuuup. I begin admiring his work ethic, and then become repelled by the constant insecure one-ups-manship.
JohnT, I must have missed the part talking about Jerrod and Brandi’s strip club work.
Once you’re slightly behind on your payments, they put a lock on the unit until you pay up, so you can’t just go in and grab the good stuff. This happened to a friend of mine. She was able to pay before it was auctioned off, though (and, having been the one who helped her move into the unit, I know for a fact anyone who had purchased it would have been sorely disappointed).
See, I know that, I know they (and he) think he’s the “character you love to hate!”, but I just hate him. I don’t find him enjoyable to watch, even in a ‘bad guy’ way. He’s just annoying and unlikable. I’m less inclined to watch the show because of him, and he’s one of the main reasons I actually enjoy the other show more.
On the Hoarders snark page we’ve called Storage Wars “Pre-Hoarders.” Intervention is “Drug Hoarders” and Heavy was “Calorie Hoarders.”