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Why Good Antique Stores Go Bad

Why Good Antique Stores Go Bad

In the mid 1990s a small town I lived near was experiencing a full-fledged economic revival.  As part of this renaissance, the former Murphy’s Five and Dime building downtown had been leased to an antique cooperative.  And what an antique store it was!  It had everything from Victorian to mid-century American pieces and all at very reasonable, if not ridiculously low, prices.

I would buy little plastic zip-lock sandwich bags stuffed full of junk jewelry for a quarter.  Yes, you read that right – only 25 cents.  Only the “junk” jewelry wasn’t always junk.  These grab bags were peppered with sterling silver items – rings, necklaces and bracelets among others.  There was even the occasional solid karat gold piece.

So I did what any good antique truffle pig would do.  I kept going back for more.  Over the next several years I probably visited that antique store dozens of times.  Each time I put down a $10, $20, or very rarely a $50 bill in front of the cashier and in return walked away with a small (or sometimes large) pile of treasures.  But then, very gradually, the deals stopped being quite as good.  I had to dig progressively deeper into the dusty corners and dark niches to find my next treasure.

And then, one sad day, the deals were gone.  A couple years later the antique store closed.  I had thought that we had a good thing going.  What happened?  Why do good antique stores go bad?

The short answer is that I, and people like me, mined the store out.  Like a horde of locusts descending on a lush field of ripe grain, we stripped it clean.  I purchased every 25 cent junk jewelry bag the antique store had.  First I chose the ones with the best looking contents, gradually working my way down the stack until there were none left.  And the antique dealers simply couldn’t replace their inventory at anywhere near the same prices.

I suspect that most of those unbelievably cheap antiques came from local estate sales.  There was a large elderly population in town at the time and I think a lot of the executors administering these estates just didn’t want to be bothered.  They let the antique dealers clean out the estates’ houses for a pittance, just so they could move on quickly with their lives.  This allowed the dealers to turn around and sell junk jewelry bags for a quarter.

But it could only last as long as the cheap estate sales kept coming.  Once those tapered off, there was no more 25 cent inventory to be found.  There is a powerful lesson to be drawn from this experience.  The antique and art market is a living, breathing thing.  Those items that only cost a few dollars today may become completely unavailable tomorrow, except at exorbitant prices.  And yes, sometimes good antique stores go bad.

The Dangers of Buying an Imported Burglary Safe

The Dangers of Buying an Imported Burglary Safe

In the world of burglary safes, Underwriters Laboratories (UL) TL-15 rated safes are the first rung of the commercial safe ladder.  They have been certified by UL to resist entry via the door for at least 15 minutes using hand-held power tools, drills, and pressure applying devices.  TL-15 burglary safes are serious pieces of equipment, with even the smallest unit rarely weighing less than 500 pounds.  Incorporating the latest anti-burglary technology, they are constructed of reinforced, high strength concrete mixed with ultra-hard carbide or ceramic nodules sandwiched between two layers of steel.

And yet all is not as it seems in safe-land, as exemplified by a rather disconcerting story.  A man purchased a used TL-15 rated jewelry safe cheaply, but found that the combination dial was binding.  After calling around to various locksmiths for repair quotes he decided fixing the safe wasn’t worthwhile.  So he conducted an experiment using commonly available hand tools – two pry bars and a sledgehammer – to break into his own TL-15 safe.  These are the sort of tools that you can find in garages all over the country.  No power tools were involved.

After a mere 20 to 25 minutes of prying, the novice safecracker had delaminated the boltwork from the composite door, allowing the safe door to pop open.  He then used a sledgehammer to test the body of the safe.  The allegedly high strength concrete fill disintegrated surprisingly quickly under this attack, fully yielding in about 10 minutes.  This safe performed terribly given its ostensible TL-15 rating.

UL employs the best safe crackers in the safe industry.  They work under ideal conditions and thoroughly review every safe’s schematics for weak points to exploit before testing.  Their testing time only includes the time that their tools are actually on the safe.  If they take a break, the testing clock stops.  If they get a glass of water, the testing clock stops.  If they go to the bathroom, the testing clock stops.  The idea that a first time safecracker could pick up some hand tools and pry open a TL-rated safe in a modest amount of time indicates that something was very, very wrong with that safe.

Successful pry or sledgehammer attacks against a TL-rated burglary safe should be almost impossible.  A TL-rated safe should be immune to almost any attack involving hand tools.  Even power tools will generally take much longer than the time rating on the safe.  It is not unusual for a seasoned safe-technician using carbide cutting discs to labor for one or two grueling hours to penetrate the side of a legitimate TL-15 rated safe.

So why did this particular TL-15 safe perform so poorly?  The answer, unfortunately, is because the safe was an import made in South Korea.  Most imported burglary safes are produced in three countries: China, South Korea or Mexico.  Lower labor costs in these countries allow imported burglary safes to sell at significantly lower price points than comparable U.S. made safes.  But factories in many emerging market countries rarely meet the stringent manufacturing tolerances commonly demanded in developed countries.

Chinese factories have been known to forge UL certifications and then export the resulting fraudulent products around the world.  Overseas factories also frequently cut corners by subtly changing key aspects of safe construction and design to save money.  For example, a design that stipulates continuous welds might instead be made using cheaper and weaker spot or skip welds.  In one egregious case, a foreign made TL-30 safe door was cut open for testing by a competitor only to have loose gravel and wood chips spill out!

Materials sourced in emerging markets are also often inferior.  A36 is the standard grade of steel used in burglary safe construction.  This type of steel has a minimum yield strength of 36,000 psi.  But that is only a lower bound; the actual quality of different batches of A36 steel can vary widely depending on where they are sourced.  A36 steel originating from emerging markets – and China in particular – will often be sub-par compared to domestically sourced material.  It’s highly probable that a safe made from Chinese steel will yield to a burglar’s attacks more readily than a similar safe made from American or European steel.

I would like to note one exception to the rule that imported burglary safes should be avoided.  AMSEC is a highly reputable safe manufacturer that has been in business since the late 1940s.  They source some of their lower priced models from China, but have the operational scale and integrity to demand that these foreign factories meet their strict quality control standards.  However, AMSEC’s high-end models with the tightest tolerances and highest security are still made in the U.S.

Safes manufactured in the U.S. are more expensive than imported burglary safes – sometimes significantly so.  This is because domestic safes are produced to tighter tolerances using higher quality materials.  This costs more, but results in a superior product that performs superbly when it counts.  When you buy an imported burglary safe you are rolling the dice.  A substantial number are outright counterfeits, or suffer from latent defects in design, materials or workmanship that are invisible to normal inspection.  An inferior safe only reveals its weaknesses in the wake of a burglary or fire, when it is far too late.

Don’t Fear the Beryllium Diffused Sapphire Reaper

Don't Fear the Beryllium Diffused Sapphire Reaper

As 21st century consumers, we want everything we buy to be organic, free range and all natural.  But the bitter truth is that the necessary volume of organic, free range, all natural things simply doesn’t exist in today’s world to satisfying the overwhelming market demand.

Colored gemstones, particularly sapphires, are an excellent case in point.  Everyone wants them, but there aren’t nearly enough good quality stones mined to support this massive demand.  Luckily, through trial and error, the gem industry has discovered how to improve poorly colored or heavily flawed gemstones.  The latest of these industry innovations is known as beryllium diffusion.

A beryllium diffused sapphire is a natural, non-synthetic stone that has been dug out of the earth, but is then subjected to high heat in an oven in the presence of a beryllium-rich material.  This causes beryllium atoms to penetrate or diffuse into the sapphire, altering its color.  Thai gem cookers perform this operation because it can substantially improve the color of an existing sapphire.

Sometimes, it turns unsalable material salable.  In other instances, it merely turns a stone with good color into one with great color.  Beryllium diffused sapphires can come in many different colors, but are most often found in incredibly vivid, eye-catching shades of orange, yellow and pink-peach.

However, there are some people who adamantly refuse to touch beryllium diffused goods.  They believe that beryllium diffusion is a step too far for the gem industry.  They think these stones have been excessively treated and are therefore not comparable to more traditional, heat-treated sapphires.

This attitude is partially the fault of the Thai gem cookers who accidentally discovered the beryllium process around the year 2000.  Instead of giving full disclosure of this new treatment to their clients, they instead sold them – at great profit – as conventionally heat-treated stones.  It was only 12 to 18 months later that Western gem certification labs discovered the deception.  As you can imagine, buyers of these stones were outraged by the Thais’ unethical behavior.

However, beryllium diffused sapphires don’t deserve their poor reputation, assuming their treatment is properly disclosed.  Beryllium diffusion is entirely stable.  It doesn’t fade over time or from exposure to sunlight.  The new, vivid colors are also usually consistently distributed throughout the entire gem.  Due to beryllium’s very low atomic weight, it diffuses very quickly into a sapphire, penetrating right into the middle of the gem.  This means that if you must re-polish or even re-cut a damaged beryllium diffused sapphire, it will still retain its new, improved color.

Beryllium diffused specimens aren’t all-natural, untreated stones and they will never sell for comparable prices to completely untreated sapphires.  It is clear that sapphires that come out of the ground already looking beautiful will always sell for a healthy premium over any treated stone.  However, I find it equally unlikely that the price differentials between traditionally heat-treated sapphires and beryllium diffused sapphires will end up being significant.  Instead, it is clear that the prices for traditionally heat-treated sapphires and beryllium diffused sapphires will converge over time.

Interestingly, the sapphire industry went through a very similar scandal several decades ago.  In the late 1970s, some enterprising Thai gem cookers discovered that heating colorless (or geuda) sapphire at extremely high heat (greater than 1,500 degrees centigrade) resulted in some stones acquiring a fine blue color.  In addition to this, the heated geuda also showed markedly improved clarity as the high heat – near the melting point for sapphire – healed many internal fractures within the crystals.

This resulted in a flood of good quality blue sapphire hitting the market in the early 1980s as every gem dealer in Southeast Asia rushed to treat his previously useless stockpile of colorless sapphire.  Predictably, prices for blue sapphires collapsed.  These depressed prices for good quality blue sapphire persisted for over 25 years.

But then a funny thing happened around the year 2010.  The price of blue sapphire skyrocketed, increasing by anywhere from 40% to 100% almost overnight.  This permanent, stair-step price increase occurred because the temporary abundance of blue sapphire in the international gem market was just that – temporary.  The massive stockpiles of colorless geuda accumulated over decades of painstaking, artisanal hand-mining had been completely exhausted.  Now colorless sapphire that responds well to heat treatment is almost as rare as blue sapphire straight out of the mine.

I suspect there will be a very similar outcome for beryllium diffused sapphires today.  At first they are poorly understood and hated.  Prices soon collapse due to a glut of supply.  Then, very slowly over time, the overhang of treatable material is consumed.  Eventually, everyone will realize that beryllium diffused material is durable, stable and stunningly gorgeous.  It is also mined from the earth by hand, just like every other natural sapphire.  Once the markets fully digest these concepts, beryllium treated sapphires will trade at similar price points to other, traditionally heat-treated sapphires.

Time is running short.  It has been over 15 years since the beryllium diffusion process was introduced.  If the current situation unfolds anything like when the heat treatment of geuda was developed in the late 1970s, there won’t be many more years until the price of beryllium diffused material increases permanently.  Organic, free-range and all natural may always be our first choice, but raw, breathtaking beauty – even when helped a little by science – also has its own visceral allure.

Will the Real (Post) Modern Art Please Stand Up?

Will the Real (Post) Modern Art Please Stand Up

Modern art is an obtuse, highly academic field, dominated by intellectuals, critics and other insufferable experts.  However, calling modern art “art” is something of a misnomer, because it really isn’t art.  After all, art must be beautiful.

I suppose you could call modern “art” conceptual social commentary in physical form or perhaps conceptual aesthetics.  Of course this line of reasoning leads to an interesting question.  If modern art really isn’t art, then what, if anything, qualifies as real modern art?

You won’t find the answer in any art history book.  Art academics, high in their ivory towers, will never admit that they’ve spent their careers pursuing a philosophical unicorn.  So that leaves the rest of us to figure it out on our own.

In my opinion, real contemporary art is the style or styles exemplified in the prevailing pop culture.  It pervades society, and just as a fish does not understand that it swims in the sea, neither do we recognize the contemporary art that surrounds us every day.

Real art isn’t the domain of the stereotypical Bohemian “artist”, but is instead created by craftsmen, designers, crafters and thousands of other normal people all over the world.  Real contemporary art is eminently approachable.

Everyday items that no academic would consider art are the real masterpieces.  This includes everything from the iconic simplicity of a Louis Vitton handbag, to the minimalist, industrial design of an iPhone, to the distinctive, rectilinear form of an early 1980s gull-wing DeLorean car.

Let’s examine a specific example: steampunk design.  Steampunk originated as a genre of novels that fused science fiction and fantasy elements together against a 19th century, industrial Victorian backdrop.  But this subculture did not stay limited to novels for long.

It soon branched out to fashion, art and even movies and music.  Within only a couple decades steampunk became a ubiquitous, widely-recognized international art style.  You may have never read a steampunk novel, but you can instantly recognize steampunk design – with its unmistakable labyrinth of brass, gears and pistons – if you see it.

And steampunk has proven itself to be widely influential in popular culture, too.  Hit movies such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Wild Wild West are outstanding examples of steampunk films.  But steampunk has hardly been limited to just movies.  The wildly successful video game series Bioshock also has strong steampunk elements.  The Victorian-derived style is also alive and well in the decorative arts, with everything from steampunk jewelry to steampunk furniture to steampunk accessories readily available.

Steampunk may not be recognized as “art” by academics, art critics and other intelligentsia, but it has had dramatically more impact on popular culture than conceptual art, telematic art or any other formally-recognized modern or postmodern art movement.

Want another example?  How about the 1986 graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns?  Before the release of this seminal work, Batman was symbolized in the public mind by Adam West’s corny rendition of the character in the late 1960s live-action Batman television series.

This Batman series was a campy, low-budget affair with a plot that focused on simplistic moral lessons.  Even today, many people are familiar with the ridiculous graphical onomatopoeia splashed across the screen during every (poorly choreographed) fight scene.  This version of Batman was a low point of the franchise, fatally branding the caped crusader as a zany children’s character.

In 1986, Frank Miller’s graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was published by DC Comics.  This work instantly and forever changed the world’s perception of Batman and, ultimately, every other superhero too.  Frank Miller placed his anti-hero Batman in a dark, ugly and hopelessly corrupt Gotham City.  It was a city full of societal rot, overrun with vicious criminals and hamstrung by an incompetent local government.

But the Batman of this Gotham wasn’t a nice guy.  No, he was a bastard – a vigilante in the truest sense of the word.  In addition to his unsettling mental issues – or perhaps because of them – Batman used brutal methods when dealing with Gotham’s criminal element.  This was a Batman of the gritty real world, not some silly “everything’s better after 30 minutes” sitcom.

So why do I bring up Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns?  I do it because the impact on popular culture from this singular work of art has been nothing short of massive.

This lone graphic novel not only single-handedly revitalized the entire Batman franchise, but also gave us the template for how all superheroes are viewed today.  Every live-action Batman movie released since the early 1990s has been based – to some degree or another – on that Frank Miller graphic novel.

Not only that, but most successful superhero movies and television shows today incorporate important elements from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.  Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Man and The Avengers, just to name a few, all owe their overwhelming cultural influence and commercial success to Frank Miller’s bleak and anguished 1986 reimagining of Batman.  The 1986 graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is, quite simply, modern art – real modern art.

Art historians and art critics have built up an ivory tower around the concept of contemporary art.  Only those movements that they approve of – like Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism or Performance art – are admitted to the inner sanctum of (post) modern art.  All else is unfairly relegated to the disposable bin of “pop culture”.

But the experts have it wrong.  Art – real art – doesn’t hang on museum walls or in avant-garde art gallery exhibitions.  Instead, it is embodied in everyday objects that average people touch, use and enjoy – objects that ultimately reflect the zeitgeist of the larger society.