Last Saturday, the wifey and I were adventurous and covered a lot of ground in our hunt for the best deals on the rare, obscure, and just plain cool. No content with just going to the thrift shops, or just browsing the antique mall, or fitting in one auction, we did all three.

First stop: Villiard’s auction house. Almost every weekend, Villiard’s holds a consigmnent collectible & antique auction. Despite the consistent calendar, D and I have never gone to one of these auctions — we’ve been to on-location estate auctions, but this one has always slipped by, either because of other commitments or the lack of interest in devoting four or five hours to an auction without any certainty of inventory, and knowing our thin budget is unlikely to get us far bidding against the usual auction crowd.

What we’d failed to remember is auctions are just plain fun. It’s a rummage sale wrapped in the guise of the blackjack tables. The excitement of wondering what to bid on, when to bid, and when — of course — to stop bidding is a blast. The bidding moves fast, keeping the adrenaline coursing through the veins as a constant reminder that decisions need to be made quickly, before we’re out of the game or the price gets too high. Unlike gambling, however, the only time you spend money is when you win a bid. There’s a risk of loss in buying something that’s worth less than you expected, but you can usually be reassured that you’re only paying incrementally more than one other person was willing to pay, so overpaying should be at a minimum.

Auctions, pros & cons:

• Con: Budgeting. We didn’t have a writing utensil, so we had to keep track in our heads of how much we’d spent. Auctions can quickly become unmanageable if you’re not accounting as you go. Nothing’s worse than finding a stack of tags at the cashier’s desk twice the size you expected.
• Pro: ‘too good to pass’ bids. We know that if bidding drops to a couple dollars, we’ll kick ourselves if it — whatever it is — sells for $2 when we could have gotten it for $5. Auctioneers don’t waste their time putting things worth less than $5 or $10 on the block, so you’re assured to come out ahead…and if it really is a dog of a bid, you haven’t lost that much.

We’d arrived at the auction late, so the tables were empty before our budget was spent. Just a half mile down the road from Villiard’s is the Moorhead Antique Mall, probably the nicest antique mall in the area. Of course, half of the customers at the Mall were fellow auction expatriates, but the shop still had far more customers than we’d seen before. The Mall was having a spring sale, so the various dealers had each marked down their booths, ranging from 15% to a surprising 40%. We ran into one dealer, a friend of ours, who was helping out during the sale. She said the Mall was having a banner day, beating their usual sales expectations and the day was barely half over. Deep discounts, and a pocket full of money? This was a dangerous combination, indeed, but we did well to control ourselves. We visit the Moorhead Antique Mall once every few months, long enough to let the booths’ inventory turn over and make it worth our time.

The fun of the antique mall is the climate of a jewelry shop or gift shop. The Mall is clean and brightly lit, and to see the nicest items you need to flag down a store employee carrying an improbably large ring of keys. Things outside of your price range can be picked up, examined closely, then returned to the case with a disapproving knitted brow as though it isn’t good enough for you.

Antique mall, pros and cons:

• Pro: Quality stuff. floorspace in a 10′x10′ booth is a premium, and dealers don’t waste their time with the low-quality stuff.
• Con: Higher prices. Nobody wants to pay retail price, but that’s what most antique store items are marked.
• Pro: Examining the goods. If you’ve gotten in the habit of buying on eBay, you’re gotten too accustomed to the risk of damage in shipping or a misrepresented item. At the retail shop, you can pick it up and turn it around in your hands, and you’re sure of what you’re buying.

Last stop, using the last hour before we had to be home, was the ARC Attic Treasures, a local charity thrift-shop that’s out on the far edge of town, so we don’t make it out there very often. We went with the intention to just ‘look around,’ which, of course, meant that shortly after arriving I had to go get a cart. This is a regular thrift shop, comprised of rummage-sale castoffs, but the prices are reasonable and we usually find a few things.

We don’t usually find the greatest stuff, but what we do find is worth the small price tag to us. Thrift shop finds tend to be fun purchases, as opposed to collection-building. The antique mall rarely carries 1960s scifi novels or mildly-scratched disco albums - and if they do, they’re not priced at less than a buck a piece like the thrift shop.

Thrift shop, pros and cons:

• Pro: Dirt cheap prices. Most thrift shops, including the ARC, are catching on and retaining the help of an appraiser to price their mroe valuable items, but they don’t catch everything.
• Con: poorer quality. The good quality stuff is usually grabbed quickly, so much of their inventory ‘good’ rather than ‘fine.’ They still have the floorspace-premium as antique malls, so they usually don’t put out garbage, but the thrift shop is far less picky than antique dealers.

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Article Tags: , Antique Mall, ARC Attic Treasures, auctions, Moorhead, Villiard's

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