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.
