American Pickers, Picking and Grinning
Antique Archeology in Iowa, known for the TV show American Pickers. Photo by Nbastian210, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
In the proliferation of reality television programming, there have been new shows that have attracted large recurring audiences: Life Below Zero, The Curse of Oak Island, and American Pickers among others. American Pickers is of particular interest to my household. I grew up in a working-class family in the Midwest with parents and their contemporaries who lived through the Great Depression. I can relate to a couple who has a garage or barn full of scavenged tools, car parts, bicycles and appliances. If anything around our house broke or was lost, the first stop was always that barn where parts and replacements were scrounged and used long before reaching into dad’s wallet. Waste not, want not was the family motto.
You quickly notice watching this particular show, the focus is on quality and not quantity. Frank and Mike will roll up on a “collector” with barns full of old stuff. They crawl, shuffle and dig through literally tons of rusting junk to emerge with an antique baseball glove or pedal from an early 20th century bicycle. They make offers of cash and cement the final agreement with an old school handshake that affirms each party to the transaction will honor their commitment.
The people the pickers seek out to build their antiques business share many common characteristics. They universally refer to their hobby as collecting and to themselves as collectors. When Mike or Frank pulls out some tattered relic from underneath a random pile of junk, the collector inevitably explains where the piece was acquired, who acquired it, an approximate date, and usually a very specific cost.
“My dad got that hood ornament at a swap meet in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the fall of 1968. He paid five bucks for it. I was six at the time and was sitting in the bed of his pick-up. It was raining. Dad was wearing overalls and a green shirt.”
You know instinctively he isn’t making this up this astounding level of detail. It’s coming directly from a place deep in his memory where he has tied this object to a place and time — and often a feeling.
One of the pickers inevitably asks, “When was the last time you saw this?”
The response? “1968”
The line between a collector and a hoarder may seem a quite fine one. The line is not quantity, obviously, nor even the quality of the collection. It appears to be whether or not there are rotting foodstuffs and/or several dead cats in your “collection”. It’s OK if you had a wild raccoon or some mice that found a warm spot to die; it’s the domestic pets that take it over the line. If not a hoarder, you’re a whimsical collector or aspiring artist with a fun, quirky hobby. Your payday arrives when the guys in the Antique Archaeology truck wheel up with pockets packed with cash.
Even if you have watched only one episode, you know the stars aren’t going to buy an entire collection or barn-full of what they call rusty gold. This is where they lay claim to their label as pickers. They’ll pick through the collection, rout out pieces they know they can sell, and drive off waving from the cab of the truck. It’s fun to watch an episode where an elderly collector or an executor who has inherited a collection announces it’s finally time to clear out the entire hoard. After letting Frank and Mike crawl around all three barns, two tractor trailers, four sheds, the garage, basement, and 4-bedroom house loaded to the rafters with the collection, the pickers wave goodbye with a dozen items tucked in their truck. The collector waves at the departing TV stars holding $320 in cash, three barns, two tractor trailers, four sheds, the garage, basement and 4-bedroom house loaded to the rafters.
The reason these fellows are so eminently successful running a company that resells old crap is neither their practiced pickers’ eye nor their days on the road traveling the country in search of collections. They are successful because of what they don’t show: a carefully cultivated collection of reliable buyers. The pickers have an intimate knowledge of their buyers’ wants and they know exactly what they can charge these customers for these finds. Simple business mathematics defines what they are willing to pay for anything from an old 78 rpm record to a barn-find 1956 gull-wing Mercedes 300SL.
Ultimately, the collector is the one who decides what goes and what stays. You can get inside the head of a collector pretty quickly. The pickers will locate some artifact from beneath a pile of rubble. They’ll offer what I think is top dollar for it. The collector hasn’t even seen it in 30 years.
While standing shoulders-deep in an old building, an aging collector will say, “Geez, I don’t want to part with that rusty oil can. It means a lot to me. It was from my Uncle Shep who ran a gas station on this site in the 1920s.”
“Do you want me to pull it out for you so you can display this wonderful memory of your uncle?”
“No, just put it back under the pile. Uncle Shep would have wanted it that way.”
We recently buried an elderly relative who had started as a collector in her youth, then squeaked across the line to hoarder when food stored in her cellar began rotting during the Carter administration. Unlike the pickers, she didn’t have an eye for future value. In a bin in the cellar, we found the entire Beanie Baby collection. A few are now worth $3-4 each if you can find someone who still cares. The majority may sell for about $.25 for a shovel full. The dozens of Hummel figurines she left behind were all from large factory production runs. None were the beautiful antiques hand-painted by German pensioners in the 1950s. She had several sets of all 50 state quarters issued by the US Mint. Today, these valuable collectibles are worth 25 cents each.
Every closet, cupboard, bookcase, bin, shelf, cubby hole, and even under the beds was a repository for various collections of glassware, dolls, statues, spoons, perfume bottles, plaques, costume jewelry, and coins. As she was facing her final battle with a deadly cancer, she looked around and said she was leaving all this behind as a bequest for her heirs — a cash-less fortune left after a lifetime of collecting. The last I knew, the family was still debating how to disburse the collection. The American Pickers were even floated as an option.
I guess Frank and Mike were busy.
My grandfather was something of the same way with office supplies. As kids it was FANTASTIC because he always had scrap paper and pencils and a plethora of other stuff that we could use when we visited to make whatever we wanted in his office. After a week there his office would be stuffed with drawings, glued up whatevers and laughter and love.
When they moved to assisted living years later my dad and his siblings had dozens of unopened cases of pencils, reams of copier paper and the like to dispose of. The BOys and girls club and several local churches made out like bandits.Report
Both my wife and I come from families with hoarding tendencies; though since she saw it earlier and more extreme than I did, she’s able to fight it in our own home far more effectively than I can.Report
With regards to reality shows, one I found on Netflix is “The Repair Shop”, where a bunch of artisans work together to restore antiques that have meaning to people.
As for hoarding… yeah, my mom. Luckily she just hoarded paper (news clippings, greeting cards, letters, legal docs, notes she took about this or that). When she died, we kept the bonfire going all day with everything she had hoarded.Report
Yeah, I’m a fan of AP because it’s always interesting to hear the stories from people and find out about different products. And I’m always gobsmacked when they buy a rusty bicycle frame or part of a motorcycle for thousands of dollars (I understand the market reason, but it still shocks me).
“The Repair Shop” is a great show. I need to find it outside of Netflix because we’ve watched all the episodes that were available.
My gramps gathered quite a bit of stuff (but wasn’t a hoarder), but that was his depression upbringing–his family lived in a tent when he was 12 or so.Report
That’s a really good point about, e.g., the Hummel figurines.
People don’t want stuff anymore. The idea of “I have this whole series of things that exist mostly to be a whole series of things you can have” doesn’t excite people the way it used to; probably because the idea of there being things in general isn’t that special anymore. It used to be that if you had a lot of something, that was a big deal, because someone had to make all those things. But a weblog pointed out that Micro Machines, those tiny little car toys, were interesting mostly because it meant that production technology had advanced to the point where you could do details that fine, at scale, for children’s toys. It no longer represented a notable achievement to have a lot of items that looked interesting, because “items that looked interesting” were now just a commodity product.
And, y’know. It’s not a bad thing that things worth having can now be had by anyone. But it does mean that there are basically no collectibles since the 1980s anymore. If something was made in a factory and you could buy it in a store (or at least at retail), it’s basically worth dirt. Literally the only person who’d want it was someone trying to jumpstart a collection from nothing, and that person usually already bought someone else’s stuff on eBay. (And even if you find someone who’s looking for just one piece, they usually are only looking for just one piece; they aren’t gonna buy your entire collection, and they certainly aren’t gonna pay higher than original retail.)
Maybe Magic cards, but even those are mostly valuable as historical artifacts now; most anything old has been ruled unusable in officially-sanctioned gameplay, which is where the value of the cards really came from.Report
Counter-example: sneakers. This completely mystifies me, but my age is well above that market.
More generally, what makes something “collectable” has nothing to do with its utility. It is the ineffable consensus of the market. Why is a first edition book worth more than a second edition? Because book collectors say so. And if the initial print run of the first edition had a typo on the fifth line of page 57, which got corrected for later print runs, the errant version is worth more and knowledgeable collectors will immediately turn to page 57 before making an offer. And if it is a book they actually want to read, they will buy a cheap “reading copy.”
The kicker is that collectability requires limited supply. If a factory could just crank up production, it would simply be commonplace junk. It needs to be something that no one can make more of, or is manufactured by an outfit with the self-discipline to keep production runs artificially low. The the whims of the cultural consensus have to kick in, people agreeing that this sort of item is collectable, where another sort is just old junk. No one can predict what direction cultural whim will take. That is why all those baseball cards were thrown away, back in the day.Report