American Picker 2- Daryle Lambert's Antiques and Collectibles Blog – Different from our thinking. American Pickers is becoming one of th3e most watched shows on TV. The Daryle Lambert's Antiques and Collectibles has another way. Both are right but they take a completely different course to success
News-Antique.com - Mar 23,2010 - American Picker 2- Daryle Lambert's Antiques and Collectibles Blog – Different from our thinking.
American Pickers - Thanks to Flicker.com
I was at the health club last night and decided to watch American Pickers to see what great treasures they might find. It is a great show and should be around for several years. If you read my opinions on Dianne Zwieg's blog on I Antique Online, there is no doubt how I feel about the show. They do find treasures and they let people know the profit they think will be made on their purchase.
The show interests me because the two gentlemen aren't afraid of getting dirty or searching through what most would consider trash to find that one item that is a treasure. The old scooter was really neat last night but the memory jug is what caught my eye. If you don't know what a memory jug is, I will try to describe it. Often middle aged people will accumulate items that show events in their lives. Then they take a whiskey jug or large glass jug and put clay or other types of material around the outside and press their keepsakes into the soft clay. These could include small toys, scouting pins, jewelry and most anything else that they chose. We would call this folk art and to a true collector it could be priceless.
However, what I want to share with you isn't our similarity but how different we are from the pickers. The American Picker is all about finding something that is rusty, badly damaged or in rough shape. Their reasoning is that someone else will want to buy their items to restore them and thereby increase their value substantially. To do this, you must have a tremendous knowledge base of what an item would be worth once it is restored. These gentlemen are true professionals so don't let their lowbrow demeanor fool you. I don't believe for a minute that they make many mistakes.
You must be asking how that differs from our philosophy. First of all, we don't recommend buying damaged goods unless the damage is appropriate to the item. Being able to judge what it would take to restore an old rusty bicycle takes years and year of experience. This isn't something for the amateur because he or she would only get burned. I believe that to duplicate what the pickers do, you would have to have many, many years of experience.
Now for the system that we use for success. Ours does include knowledge but it can be obtained very quickly using the Daryle Lambert's Antiques and Collectibles Club guidelines. We don't have to know what the cost would be to restore an item because generally we leave those items for others to buy. So that only leaves us to know the true value of the treasures we find and then it just becomes a matter of being able to buy them at a correct price. It seems that
