As a matter-of-fact, Estates sales are EXACTLY how I come to be standing next to a dumpster waving weird gadgets around at my co-workers. Anything that can be sold at the house sale, we sell it. BUT, there are a few things that are worth more in other parts of the world than locally, and those go on Ebay. But there’s always a dumpster’s worth of crap that people won’t even look at, and that aren’t worth the return of listing them on Ebay. Just like the DeBuyer mandoline - it costs $140 new, but we’d be lucky to get $10 for it online (you know - used). Mostly it’s those crap particle board Brobdingnagian computer desks form the 80’s.
The one time I saw a knitting machine, it was thoroughly trashed, and being sold by the pound at a Goodwill Outlet. Don’t worry, that’s something that wouldn’t wind up in the dumpster.
Coincidentally, I just gave the Little Pink-wearing Princess next door a hula hoop I saved from the dumpster.
That’s the piece I don’t get. (Maybe it’s the genetic Quaker in me. Or Midwestern thrift instilled by great grandparents who did a Depression, two recessions and the horrors inflicted by Earl Butz.)
It’s a kitchen tool. It’s designed to be washed. It’s designed to have the blade replaced. Why NOT buy it used and replace the damn blade? Throw it in the dishwasher. Hell, buy a bottle of bleach and soak it in a 5 gallon bucket for a week. It’s still cheaper than buying it new.
Then again, I spent my college years shopping at the Free Store and repairing both cars and small appliances at the co-op, before anything like a Maker Culture was established, when eBay wasn’t even a sparkle in someone’s eye and selling shit on BBS was complicated beyond reason. So I really don’t get it.
Ah, nice to meet you, long-lost cousin! Don’t worry - like I said, I keep dragging the ‘good stuff’ back to my little hood and redistributing the wealth.
One of my other sporadic jobs is loading/unloading furniture for antique dealers. I can’t explain to them that they’re buying the wrong stuff, because then they wouldn’t need to hire me. The Baby Boomers and the generation just ahead of them (I’ve heard them called the Matures) were so populous, and lived through such economic boom times, that they bought huge houses and filled them with ever-escalating snotty crap. That Sunbeam mixer your mom got for a wedding gift? That’s an insult now. Jelly roll pans by BakeKing? Now, that’s ‘ghetto’. So, those generations had money they needed to spend like it was going to rot.
Present Day: Young people (a mere fraction of the population) who are setting up their households do it by squeezing into tiny hovels. They don’t have room (or the money) for their parents’ furniture styles - there is no dining room for a dining table and giant china hutch. There is no bedroom big enough for a king-size bed. If the couch doesn’t fold out, then it’s a waste of space. And the home office is a corner of the living room, if that - it’s not some giant room with a giant desk and giant bookshelves. Even if EVERY millennial bought the entire contents of at least one estate sale, it wouldn’t even make a dent.The antique dealers keep buying those HUGE china cabinets and painting them with fake paint that looks like old, flaking lead paint. …and they wait for the customers that don’t exist anymore. …the tragedy is, I wind up demolishing them about a year later, so that the pieces will fit in the store’s trash. I’m always running around the estate sales like an evil hybrid between a used-car salesman and a carnival barker: “C’mon folks - put the china cabinet in the bedroom and use it to display your fancy purses! Put it in the living room and keep all the DVD’s and Lego projects in it!”
