Anyone been following this show on the Dave Channel (the last new episodes just finnished) although lots of repeats.

Old guy on there been collecting stuff from front yard and garage sales for over 30 years and nobody had been through the stuff untill the Pickers knocked on his door, he had thousand upon thosands of albums and 7" singles all neatly stacked in one part of the many barnes full of collectables which made my eys pop, the pickers took a quick look and said naa don't know anything about records and continued to look round all his out buildings, not sure whether they were in Miami at the time, spoted an Imperial 7 " single on top of one pile of singles, oh just to be there eh?...Rick 

Anyone been following this show on the Dave Channel (the last new episodes just finnished) although lots of repeats.

Old guy on there been collecting stuff from front yard and garage sales for over 30 years and nobody had been through the stuff untill the Pickers knocked on his door, he had thousand upon thosands of albums and 7" singles all neatly stacked in one part of the many barnes full of collectables which made my eys pop, the pickers took a quick look and said naa don't know anything about records and continued to look round all his out buildings, not sure whether they were in Miami at the time, spoted an Imperial 7 " single on top of one pile of singles, oh just to be there eh?...Rick 

 

Yeah, I've been watching the shows 'cos I'm interested in junk lol. What amazes me is the amount of stuff some of these people have in their warehouses and barns. There's probably more chance of getting a hit in one of those places then any record shops these days.

 

I've seen it first-hand a few times, especially if I'd been to a flea market and looked through a box of records. Often the stall-holders would say that they'd got 1000s of records at home or in storage. On the few occasions that I followed up on some of these I had good and great hits. With records being relatively low cost items these people spend more time valuing other more valuable stuff and the records almost inevitably get forgotten about until some Brit hound turns up.

 

This exact situation happened when I hit a flea market in Florida and was just generally looking around furniture stalls looking a for an original bankers light lol. I saw a box of records in the corner and found a couple of dozen decent items @ 50 cents each. The next day I went round to their house and they had 50K records just piled up in a room. Payday!

 

Ian D   

Hi Ian, Hope you are well, i had a feeling you would be a "Pickers" Fan as me like you love looking through "other peoples junk" our treasure, never sadly made it to the States,  Rick

Great Show - my #1 watch on the telly.

I saw that episode of "American Pickers"- the guy said he had over 250,000 records 

and then one of the pickers decided they didn't want to waste their day when there 

were other things to look at.

  Oh..... to have had a chance to look at that collection !!!

From the perspective of doing my record boxes and harbouring a fancy to take up lutherie (guitar making) one day when time, equipment and space allow, I can't help wondering what stocks of old, rare and now-unobtainable timber are stacked up in some of these barns - century-old mahoganies, endangered rosewoods, giant sequoia...

 

Rare stuff that would cost you nothing but a brush to get the cobwebs off, but again, something the pickers would pass by completely to get to the enamel motor oil adverts etc.

 

Agree, great programme, though hard to watch lots in a row on the catch up - bit samey after a while.

 

Nick

Interestingly, there's a UK equivalent where a chap from North Wales goes around the country looking for stuff for his salvage yard (can't remember the title) - this and 'Pickers I think generally have sound-ish valuations, but the programme does kind of give the impression that the value they think up when they load the van is money in the bag, and anyone who's tried to trade in records or anything like that knows it's never a done deal until it's done.  However, what makes me laugh is the valuations on Storage Wars and the like, where the non-experts give absolutely ludicrous made-up values for the random stuff they find as if it's a sale price they'll get tomorrow - $75 for hand tools you can find on a market stall for a quid.  You can always guarantee that if they come up with a box of records it will be pre-war marching band 78s with no buying market and they's say 'old equals money' and value it at $1000, or a million-selling Jimi Hendrix album will be worth $500 because it's an original.  Funny thing is I've never seen them get a really big stash of records, but I'll bet they're out there somewhere. 

 

Nick

There was a good one where they found an old rusted Lambretta and took it along to a dealership to sell.  I think they thought they'd done well selling it for a few hundred dollars profit, but the dealer bit their hand off because fully restored he knew he'd probably sell it for $5,000 and they had no idea.

 

 

I expect they only mostly go for the big stuff they can make a quick profit on.