Darell resells stuff at booth in a flea market. So he’s looking for large amounts of resellable stuff. He talks about reselling things, e.g., the $30 mirror in the locker he paid $3? for.
Low end stuff like clothes, knick-knacks and cheapo furniture are not his thing. Not really worth transporting, cleaning up, sorting thru, etc. Hence the $400 locker he gave to Dave once he realized it was going to be a pain to clean out.
He is clearly living closer to the edge than the others. And two of the others are apparently pretty close to going under anyway.
J&B’s store is reportedly in trouble (within the “reality show” universe) and Hester’s supposedly overextended with his new auction business. J&B are newcomers to the business and are still getting a feel for things. Hester is old hat and has a bigger business but he also seems to be taking bigger risks. He needs a lot of big ticket items to maintain his operations.
Barry is apparently wealthy enough that he doesn’t care about losing hundreds of dollars here and there.
I have a friend who owns some storage units. She said often, after she pays for the certified letters and things she has to do before she can open the unit, she doesn’t make enough money off the contents of the unit to cover the unpaid rent. Once in a great while, however, she will find some really nice furniture or something. The units are in the backwoods of Alabama so it’s not like there are lots of rich folks around.
I don’t believe they seed the lockers. That’s pretty unethical and would lead to quite a black eye for the show. Also, in the earlier example, who says to themselves, “We need to add a valuable item to this locker. I know, Olive Oyl’s shoes!” Who’s that randomly creative? If they were seeding, I would expect more conventional finds like antique chairs or paintings.
I think it’s just that they buy 20 lockers for every one that gets on the show. They only hit jackpots once every couple of shows, so that’s a pretty low ratio if they’re buying (say) 80 lockers per show.
I’m not surprised to see somebody like Mark try to step in and get some coverage on the show. It’s a free world and somebody who REALLY wants to get on TV could just follow the Dotsons around and buy most of the lockers.
What I wonder about, on American Pickers/Storage Wars/Auction Hunters/Pawn Stars, is who’s paying for all those professional appraisals? Either the show stars go to the expert’s place (usually so on AP/SW/AH) or the expert comes in (usually so on PS), the item is looked over, assessed for authenticity, condition, etc., and a value in most cases is put on it. Occasionally the expert is invited to buy the item; often his/her role ends with the appraisal.
Now, people who perform that kind of appraisal generally don’t do it for free; it’s part of their livelihood to provide such services. I have to believe that a reasonable fee for their time would often consume more of the item’s value than the show star could afford as a cost of acquisition and still turn a profit. So who pays?
I just posted this in the American Pickers thread, by the way.
On Auction Hunters it seems that almost always they are trying to sell it to the person doing the appraisal. They certainly have some standard connection (they seem to go to the same guy for guns). My guess is the appraisal is free and the person then gets the opportunity at first dibs on the item. You frequently hear them saying how they need to make something off it. That is my guess for at least some of it, also, they are not getting official certified appraisals most of the time, just some person who agrees to take a look at it.
Yes, for Auction Hunters that is how they roll, and it seems reasonably real to me. In Storage Wars, though, they never seem to try to sell the item to the person doing the appraisal. Oh, once in a great while that friend of Barry’s with the funky shop will buy something, in fact he bought the metal horse head from Brandi and Jarrod. American Pickers will sometimes sell to the person they show the item to, more often that SW but less often than AH.
I believe it’s Pawn Stars that seems to have a plethora of “buddies” just dying to assess collectibles for no apparent fee. Monthly or annual retainer, maybe?
Publicity is what a number of these appraisers get out of this, I’m sure.
In SW appraisers are only necessary for the “WTF is this?” items… otherwise, the buyers price their own storage units. It’s a win-win - SW doesn’t have to pay for appraisers, and the buyers can always show that they made a profit/didn’t lose much money. Hestert is really good at this.
I’m guessing they have a whole array of arrangements. Like the guy from the Clark County Museum who won’t even give a dollar appraisal, I have a feeling he just does it because he likes the chance to see some rare stuff. Kind of the same thing with the gun guy, I could be wrong, but he gets pretty excited seeing this stuff. But I would also guess there is some sort of arrangement whereby the appraisers are often the first to know when something good comes in, so they like to maintain that relationship. Probably a lot of “I scratch your back you scratch mine” relationships.
There was a new episode of Storage Wars last night in which Dave Hestert bought a unit filled with boxes of books. He had the boxes laid out and was going through them to assess the value. From what he was saying, it sounded like he was looking at the sticker prices of the books and using that for the valuation. For example, he said out loud that one book was worth $32.95. But that can’t be what he was doing. Surely he doesn’t think that used books from a storage unit will sell at list prices? But in the end-of-show wrap-up, we were told that he made something like $14,000 on the unit.
I thought so too, although it wasn’t clear to me they were used books. It almost seemed like some failed small bookstore’s inventory. Still the way he valued that seemed pretty sketchy.
I’d need to rewatch it to be sure, but I think Hestert wound up valuing the books by arbitrarily assigning a sale worth of a couple-or-so bucks per book and then estimating how many books there were. Estimating as in saying “There are X books per one of my strides here”, pacing the length of the boxes laid out in his yard, counting as he went, then multiplying number of paces times assumed number of books per pace times X-bucks per book.
ETA: Why, yes – yes, I do spend way too much time watching this stuff. Why do you ask?
Well, except for that time he found a dainty elegant ceramic box that looked really old; was taking it to be appraised; and dropped it on the pavement as he was getting out of his truck.
He started off by mentioning he was using his smartphone to scan the UPC codes, presumably using ShopSavvy or some similar app that says what the online pricing is for new or used copies of the book. I believe that by the end, though, he just said something like “I’ve for 15K books here, even at $1/book I’ve made a massive profit,” which I can’t really argue too much with.
