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American Pickers represents a strong niche of society, the buyers, sellers, and collectors of treasures that most people wouldn't regard as treasures. Having worked in a similar type of store growing up, I can relate to their plight.
'Pickers' can take different forms. Some are pure pickers who will go place to place, yard sale to yard sale, buying select items like Mike and Frank do. Others will buy entire estates for a flat fee: trashing the trash and selling the good stuff at different rates. There are multiple variations in the middle.
What makes Mike special is that within picker ranks there are invariably people who are looking for the buck, more than the adventure. There are very few people like Mike who will say something like "its worth more than that" and offer someone a better price on an item when the owner of the item gives him a low price offer. Commenters who think Mike and Frank are "rip-off" artists are incredibly misinformed.
1) Selling items requires knowing the market to sell in. If you place an item for auction you pay a fee on top of placing the item up, and it may not go for what you want. 2) Even selling on Ebay you may not get the price you want. When the show gives the "price" of items, that doesn't mean thats what Mike and Frank will get for the item. But people sell items to them because Mike and Frank have developed a customer base who the individual seller may never be able to find.
American Pickers is a show that does what it advertises to do: tell the history of America piece by piece. The little "historical quips" are NOT what tells the history, as the idiotic review before me noted. Rather the history of America is told through the items, their materials, and the people who hold on to them. American Pickers is a highly recommended show for anyone who wants to deviate from the path of the history books and see American history as it exists today.
score 9/10
jforem1-1 22 January 2011
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2373508/ |
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23-12-2020 23:19:07