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On and Off the Avenue
The Wild, Wonderful World
of Estate Sales
The estate-sale industry is fragile and persistent in a way that doesn’t
square with the story of the world as we have come to expect it.
By Lizzie Feidelson
January 7, 2022
Photographs by Norm Diamond
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Save this story
n estate sale is only a true estate sale if the homeowner is dead. If the
owner is living, then it’s a tag sale, though many people use the terms
interchangeably. When I went to one of my first “estate sales,” in Hewlett
A
Harbor, Long Island, roughly two years ago, just before the pandemic
temporarily forced much of the industry online, I was surprised to discover that
the owner was not only alive but there, in her soon-to-be-former house. A
recent widow, she wandered through the rooms, dazed, dressed in a fringed
denim vest.
The house was a beige Colonial-style four-bedroom with prim hedges and a
small, sloping lawn. I arrived thirty minutes early, but a long line had already
formed outside; people were peering into the windows, hands cupping their
eyes. When I introduced myself to one of the elderly women up front and
admitted to her that I was a newbie, she promptly pulled me into a hug. “You’ll
find that this is a culture,” she said. “It’s like an addiction!”
At 10 a.m., a slim, brunette woman wearing a long-sleeved shirt that read “Full
of Surprizes Estate & Tag Sales” emerged from the house and walked onto the
lawn. The regulars recognized her—she was Madeline Winn, the owner of the
company that was hosting the sale. The group surged toward her like an
audience at a concert as she removed a sheet of paper from a plastic shopping
bag and cleared her throat. “Ricardo M.?” she asked, reading off the sheet.
“Allen C.?”
The sheet, I later learned, was “the list”—one of the many aspects of estate-sale
culture that is at once quaint and slightly murderous. Hours before a sale
begins, an estate- or tag-sale company will put out a sign-in sheet that
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determines the order in which people will be allowed into the home. The first
few names on the list are always “pickers”—estate-sale obsessives, usually lowlevel furniture, silver, or jewelry dealers—who wait outside the sales for most of
the night in their cars, sometimes in teams, with each person taking a shift.
Next are the fervent hobbyists—one of Winn’s regulars, for example, is a man
who really enjoys carving things out of oak, “so he’ll buy anything oak”—and
the decorators on repeat pilgrimages for a client, such as an interior designer I
met, who was working for a woman who “loves everything parrots.” There are
also the higher-level dealers with brick-and-mortar stores (or storage units),
who show up in vans and take four or five of the most expensive furniture
pieces first thing in the morning. They resell the pieces at secondhand
boutiques in Williamsburg and Chelsea or on eBay, charging at least thirty-five
per cent of the original price.
As Winn called out names from the list, the buyers lunged inside, hands
grasping, necks swivelling. It was as if each person in the line had discovered, in
the night, that they had contracted a unique disease that could only be cured by
obtaining a Lucite napkin ring or an official Barbra Streisand memorabilia
plate. Prices ranged dramatically—a nice umbrella was twenty bucks; a handcarved clock was just over a thousand dollars. The buyers ran through the house
possessed. “Where are the posters?” someone screamed, kneeling in front of a
stack of frames. Nearby, a clothes hanger, recently rid of its contents, swayed.
One man clutched five belts. Another had a shower caddy looped around his
finger.
By 12:30 p.m., everyone on the list had made their choices. The early-bird
buyers looked rumpled, like travellers moving through baggage claim. Winn
began to slash prices—a chandelier went from twelve hundred dollars to seven
hundred and fifty. Around her, people grew contemplative. “My father loved
animals,” one woman said, staring at a framed needlepoint screen, which
featured a dog and cost four hundred and ninety-five dollars.
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At that point, new customers started trickling in—women wearing leggings
and couples looking fresh-faced, people who had stumbled upon the sale during
a jog or a family outing. They marvelled at the offerings, usually with no
intention to buy. “Beautiful. A steal!” a well-dressed man said. “Look at these
old ’45s!” There were also people who had come to buy the basics: food, sheets,
napkins. Winn, whose job is to get the best price for the homeowner, haggled
over everything. When a woman and her daughter wanted to buy an old
lunchbox, Winn drove a hard bargain, using the same line that she’d used
earlier when negotiating the price of a twelve-hundred-dollar beaded chair: “It’s
gorgeous. I can’t part with it for less.”
Now, too, came the streams of the very elderly, who, you couldn’t help but
think, didn’t look too far from holding estate sales of their own. “Someone once
tried to buy my dishes for eight thousand dollars,” one woman told me. “And I
wouldn’t sell. Do you know why? My grandmother’s hands were on those.” She
raised her own hands and shrugged. “My kids couldn’t care less.”
E
state- and tag-sale companies mainly deal with two generations:
homeowners born during the Great Depression, who have either died or
are moving into assisted living (in the United States, one of the bigger
organizers of estate sales is a downsizing franchise called “Caring Transitions”),
and boomers looking to pare down. The groups have different reputations in
the business. Depression-era homeowners are known for their pack-rat
behavior, and the boomers are known for just having a lot of really nice stuff—
the result of having lived through the perfect time in history to consume amply
in early adulthood. On the horizon lie the millennials, a fuzzy, aimless group
often characterized as having little reverence for antiques and collectibles, and
having no money to buy such things even if they want to. “It’s a cliché, but I
really do think millennials like experiences most,” Lark E. Mason, Jr., a
longtime appraiser and expert with Sotheby’s who often appears on the PBS
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television program “Antiques Roadshow,” told me.
As a millennial, I thought that sounded right. My friends and I grew up on a
profusion of cheap goods from Target and entered our first apartments lugging
crackable, plastic under-bed drawers from Marshalls and Amazon. We also
grew up on a steady diet of home-improvement reality TV, where much of the
fun of living anywhere seemed to lie chiefly in remodelling your place to look
like everyone else’s. But, I thought, I would never be able to afford to buy my
own home anyway. The one “antique” dresser that I ever bought myself was off
of Craigslist, in Boston; I left it two apartments later in Rhode Island. Why
keep lugging such a heavy armoire from rental property to rental property?
Unlike the auction world, the estate-sale world is unregulated—there are no official rules for how much
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companies can charge for their services.
I started going to estate sales for the deals, but I rarely bought anything.
(Estate-sale prices are lower than prices at New York’s curated secondhand
shops, on average, but they aren’t yard-sale prices; a two-hundred-and-fiftydollar sweater, with its original tags, might go for forty or fifty bucks at an
estate sale.) Usually, I just watched—the people, but also the homes. It was like
trick-or-treating or spying, but with the rubbernecking undisguised. Part of the
fun was being able to do some light detective work about the owner. You could
often tell, based on their book collection, if they had split with a spouse or
made a career change. The physical placement of the objects themselves also
yielded certain clues: in some houses, only the lower shelves, at the height
accessible by wheelchair, were filled. But the most interesting people to
speculate about were the ones whose possessions seemed to contradict each
other—one house I visited had both a prominently featured memoir of Laura
Bush and, in another room, a commemorative Soviet Union hat. At each sale,
my eyes would trace the piles slowly: all the Christmas decorations, a dusty
juicer sitting like a cat in the sun. The houses tended to be nice, but not so nice
that I wished I lived there. An estate sale brings out the facts of living that are
true for people of any income bracket: paper plates and tennis shoes multiply
like rabbits. White furniture always grows brownish over time.
High-end estate sales, such as when Christie’s auctions off a Rockefeller
collection, are different. The items are highly curated, and they are not sold
within the actual home; auction houses display them in immersive, museumquality exhibitions, which reel in collectors from all over the world. These
events are also relatively infrequent. (In 2021, between July and September,
there were just twenty New York auctions at Christie’s; in the second week of
July, within thirty miles of my Zip Code, there were a hundred and sixteen
estate sales.) The vast majority of New York’s in-person estate and tag sales take
place in the outer boroughs or Long Island, at normal-seeming houses that are
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abnormally full of resellable objects: nearly new recliners, Barbie dolls in their
original packaging, blenders in tip-top shape. It was a fun paradox to behold.
Each sale was also a vocabulary lesson. “See this?” Winn asked me, holding up
a fringed blanket draped over the edge of an H. W. Perlman antique piano.
“This is called a piano shawl.” There were so many vestigial words—“wall
pockets,” Hummels, Lladró—the last, referring to a Spanish figurine company,
used as a shorthand for both finery (“Well, it’s not a Lladró piece”) and kitsch
(“I didn’t come all the way here for Lladró”).
At the estate sale in Hewlett Harbor, the elderly woman who had refused to
sell her dishes was searching for statuettes to display. For less than fifty dollars,
she’d bought a Lladró, which she considered a prize. Winn handed it to her
wrapped in newspaper, saying, “Hold it like a baby.”
A
ntiquing is a relatively recent invention. It came into being after the First
World War—a by-product of the consumer culture of the nineteen-
twenties, enabled by the invention of the automobile and the emergence of the
concept of the hobby. Since its inception, the market has relied on the ability of
one party to exploit privileged market information over the other. This is what
allows resellers to rip off buyers in gentrified Brooklyn, but it’s also what drives
the flow of valuable secondhand goods from private homes into the antiques
market to begin with. In her book “Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in
Twentieth-Century New England,” the social historian Briann Greenfield
describes how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the value of
antiques began to rise, a middle-class cadre of enterprising “junk snuppers”
began departing in cars from urban centers to the countryside, where they
knocked on farmhouse doors and kindly offered to relieve inhabitants of any
mint-condition Americana. She cites a 1907 antiquing guide called “The Quest
of the Colonial,” which advises junk snuppers to identify possible marks by
looking for “the sight of chairs on a porch.”
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In the nineteen-fifties, an explosion of advice manuals positioned estate sales as
a knowledge trade—a way for middle-class housewives to score quality goods
that might elevate their family’s social standing. The contemporary styles of
that era, in turn, have played a major role since: “mid century” has been one of
the most searched-for terms on estatesales.net, the industry’s premier site for
estate-sale listings, for at least a decade. Being less than a hundred years old, of
course, mid-century furniture won’t be strictly antique until around 2050, but as
the concept of antiques gets older, and as new terms begin to emerge (upcycled,
repurposed, salvage, vintage), the definition of “antique” has slackened. “In an
effort to salvage waning interest among younger buyers,” Maxine Carter-Lome,
the publisher of the Journal of Antiques and Collectibles, recently wrote, “the
word has been appropriated to include an eclectic mix of generally old things.”
The average antique collector’s connection to history has also shifted over time.
The market for early American antiques, perhaps the first and most popular
antique genre, waned significantly toward the end of the twentieth century.
Greenfield said she doubted that the market would ever recover; fewer wouldbe collectors have knee-jerk positive associations with the material history of
the early United States. “I think recognizing that the past is much more
complicated has undermined that movement,” Greenfield said.
The market for collectibles and memorabilia related to the Black American
diaspora, on the other hand, is rapidly growing. The Asian art market has also
been roaring for decades, especially as more and more affluent Chinese buyers
compete with Americans in online auctions for Chinese art and artifacts. Gail
Deculus-Johnson, a collector of Black Americana, and the president and cofounder of the African-American Memorabilia Museum and Cultural Arts
Center, first started collecting in the nineteen-eighties. At the time, many
sellers didn’t consider representations of Black Americans to be particularly
valuable, unless they knew that they were selling to someone “looking for Black
stuff,” she said—in which case they’d quickly jack up the price. Deculus-
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Johnson’s collection includes documents and objects related to slavery, such as
shackles and civil-rights memorabilia. “Now,” she said, “our Black population is
really seeking these items.” Both Oprah and Whoopi Goldberg are known to
have had Black Americana collections.
I
n January of 2020, I drove through the streets of Brooklyn with Paul Dunn,
the owner of Lucky Rabbit Estate Sales, to visit two potential clients. At a
stoplight, he flicked through thumbnails of photos of a client’s possessions on
his phone: a grandfather clock, an entryway bench. Distinctive pickers acquire
nicknames once they’ve been on the scene for long enough—Radio Rob, Tom
Chicken Broccoli, Lexus Mike, Victor No Shoes—and before he opened his
own company, Dunn was known as Alcohol Paul. When he got into estate
sales, after the 2008 financial crisis, he developed a specialty in reselling vintage
alcohol. “I could buy a bottle of Cuban Bacardi for five bucks and sell it for five
hundred,” he said, “depending on the label.”
The first place we saw that day was an apartment above a pharmacy, in
Bensonhurst, where two adult daughters pointed out the primo items: their late
mother’s adjustable Craftmatic bed (“She didn’t die in it!”) and a set of prim
undergarments that had been hand-sewn for her wedding in 1958.
Dunn didn’t think that they had enough for a sale. As we left, he told me, “I
didn’t want to tell them, ‘Sorry for your loss.’ They actually seemed kind of
jovial.”
The next house was in Crown Heights. The woman who answered the door
had honeyed hair, a cherry-red manicure, and an Apple Watch. She’d just flown
in from California. “There’s no light switches in here,” she warned us. Inside
the house was mustard wall-to-wall carpeting and a gigantic Maitland-Smith
desk with an ink blotter. Across the room was a phonograph. A set of built-in
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shelves had been covered hastily with cardboard. “We didn’t want the nephews
taking what doesn’t belong to them,” she explained, tearing at the tape with her
red fingernails.
“My father-in-law was the nephew of Chajim Bloch,” she continued. “He was
the author of ‘The Golem.’ He was captured by the Nazis and immigrated to
New York in 1939. That’s his library.” She pointed to where the bookshelves
extended into the next room.
“We have some experience with stuff like this,” Dunn said. “The Jewish art
does very well.” He rapped on the Maitland-Smith desk. “Nice desk.” He
flipped over the edge of a rug to look at its underside, running his fingers along
the stitching.
“Is there a lot in the basement?” he asked, hopeful.
E
veryone who loves estate sales has the same dream tucked inside them
somewhere, like a name written inside a T-shirt collar. It’s the dream of
the special find—the dusty baseball card of great value that just sort of calls to
us, the weird sculpture that turns out to be a priceless masterpiece. It sounds
like fantasy, but the stories appraisers tell about real finds almost always begin
at an estate sale or low-end auction house. People uneducated in antiques often
share the same misguided ideas about how much old things are worth.
“Everyone thinks old shaving mugs are worth something,” one art appraiser
told me. Most are worth less than a hundred dollars, “unless they have a
transportation or occupation theme,” she said. Meanwhile, few people assume
that old artworks are necessarily worth money. In 2016, a low-level reseller
bought a pen-and-black-ink drawing for thirty dollars at an estate sale in
Concord, Massachusetts. Recently, it was revealed to be an Albrecht Dürer that
is estimated to be worth many millions. In the South, unsigned animal figures
by the sculptor William Edmondson—the first Black artist to have a solo
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exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1937—which are worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars, can be found in the back yards of people who bought
them as lawn ornaments.
In one of the most popular clips of Lark E. Mason, Jr., the Sotheby’s appraiser,
on “Antiques Roadshow,” he is brought to tears by a Tang Dynasty statue. “It’s
fantastic,” he tells the statue’s owner, who looks bemused—her grandparents
had bought it on a trip. “And where have you had this since then?” Mason, Jr.,
asks her, pained. “My mother had it in her house and I inherited it,” she says,
adding that someone once told the family it was from the Ming Dynasty.
Mason, Jr., informs her that it’s older than that. “This . . .” he said, his voice
breaking. It’s a fascinating display—years of education culminating not just in
knowledge but in the ability to be suddenly felled by recognition.
Many of the objects Mason, Jr., deals in no longer have much mystery: they
possess chains of ownership and pedigree, and a lack of flaws that makes them
the perfect vehicle to embalm a particular historical period. They are, in the
parlance of appraisers, “collectible” art—something fine enough to matter to a
rich person, or to an institution, and that will “tell the story of society, of life,”
he said, “for all of us.” The kinds of meaning objects acquire at estate sales—the
mysterious sentimentality surrounding an object that has been disgorged from
an unknown person’s life, and the idea that it could improve your residence, or
your day—don’t exist in the world of collectibles. When I asked about estate
sales, Mason, Jr., spoke about them as if trying to find a way to compliment
pocket lint. “I think that they are very interesting,” he said carefully. “I think
that there are many opportunities for people who are interested in making
discoveries.” He paused. “Going to those on a regular basis is, um, not
something that I would want to spend my time doing.”
And yet. How did he get into antiques? “My uncle had a wonderful kind of
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estate-sale type of business in Tallahassee,” he said. “I remember as a child
going in, and he’d have rooms of books. One year, he bought a circus. Who
buys a circus?” He laughed. “It had the funny mirrors and that game where you
have the big mallet that hits the big thing that shoots up?” Mason, Jr., searched,
but he couldn’t find the word for it.
Unlike the auction world, the estate-sale world is unregulated—states have
different rules about whether estate- and tag-sale companies must possess
business licenses or collect tax, and there are no official rules for how much
companies can charge for their services. There is also nothing stopping
companies from charging certain customers more or less. “I got into this many
years ago because I saw the elderly being taken advantage of, especially those
with dementia,” Julie Hall, the director of the American Society of Estate
Liquidators and a thirty-year veteran of the estate-sale business, told me. In
one of her numerous books, which include “Inheriting Clutter: How to Calm
the Chaos Your Parents Leave Behind” and “What Am I Going to Do with All
My STUFF?,” she describes a woman with Alzheimer’s whose friends and
neighbors, hearing that she was going to be institutionalized, showed up at her
house and began looting the place. “What I witnessed,” Hall wrote, “was like
watching a vulture strip a bone.”
Leftover items from a sale are also handled in different ways. Some companies
leave unsold items with the homeowner, but others do trash removal at the end
of the day. There is also a company that purchases the contents of the home
outright, in which case the items can be dispersed over a period of years—to an
auction house in Westchester via the help of a small flock of appraisers, to
interior decorators who submit wish-list items over e-mail. “Eighty per cent of
a home is sellable,” Terry Chase, the co-owner of Brownstone Liquidators, told
me. Over the course of days and months, she gradually reduces her inventory in
price, until, finally, at 5 a.m. on Saturdays, she sends a truck loaded with the
lowest-end merchandise to an empty lot on 189th Street, where she holds a
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weekly flea market. Those sales attract a large crowd of mostly Asian and Latin
American immigrants, Chase said, who buy in large quantities and then send
the items home.
What can’t be sold there is carefully pared into donation categories. Sheets and
towels go to animal-rescue shelters. Books of paint or rug samples? Perhaps a
local preschool can use them for the crafts table. “Everything is recyclable,”
Chase said.
Online sales that were hosted by estate-sale companies proved extraordinarily lucrative during the
pandemic.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, furniture is the least
recycled item in American households, accounting for twelve million tons of
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waste in a year. For estate-sale junkies, spending Sunday at a sale instead of at a
big-box store can feel like the ultimate form of recycling. You can save so much
newish stuff from the landfill simply by buying it next door: quaint and
functioning lamps, Christmas lights with undimmed bulbs, or even just
someone else’s ikea bookshelf that isn’t yet terribly scratched. This realization
inspired Denise LoSquadro and her son, Robert Esposito, to open Sisters in
Charge, a popular estate- and tag-sale company on Long Island, and
Relocators, a cleanup, moving, and storage company. “We basically try to
recycle the world,” LoSquadro told me.
O
ne of the best sales I went to before lockdown was one that LoSquadro
was holding, in Hewlett, on the South Shore of Long Island. The house
had fire-engine-red wall-to-wall carpeting with pieces of beige tile cut directly
into it to create an imitation stone walkway. When I arrived, LoSquadro was
standing on one of the islands, near a motorized wheelchair attachment, gazing
at a large photo of a woman with a teased updo and shiny evening gown. “Look
at her,” she said. “She’s so beautiful.”
The contemplative mood shifted. “Fast Eddie is here,” someone said.
A small, round, compact man in a skull cap whizzed past me and up the stairs.
Bumping and slamming sounds began wafting down to us.
I followed him up into a bedroom and found him in a closet, wedged against
the wall, a slender flashlight in his teeth. He had removed two drawers from a
filing cabinet and was furiously working the third. As I watched, something
gave. A dozen small objects started tumbling into his hands. Thud, thud, thud.
“I found something!” he crowed.
An employee with “Joe” on his nametag appeared. “We couldn’t even get that
open,” he said, of the file cabinet.
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Fast Eddie extricated himself from the closet. “It’s over,” he said, glowing. “It’s
a wrap!”
“Give us a minute,” Joe said to me, closing the door to the room in my face. I
listened from the hall. More banging, more thuds. “Oh, wow,” I heard Joe say.
“Where was all this?”
“They look old, man!” Eddie said. “Old! You fumbled, man! You lose!”
Hubbub rose; employees began to flutter. Eddie and Joe emerged from the
room, and Eddie sat down proudly at what LoSquadro had labelled a “beautiful
gold leaf Asian accent writing desk.” He slammed the desk’s delicate drawers
open and closed. “This is all caca,” he said, examining some jewelry with a
loupe.
Joe began stacking Fast Eddie’s findings behind the register—two dozen glass
bottles with round stopper tops. They looked decorative, or like something that
could hold perfume. Eddie was thumping his chest. “I can’t tell you my secrets,”
he told us. “What’d happen to Daddy?”
This behavior made no sense, I thought. Someone who really believed that he’d
found something underpriced would purchase it quietly. Eventually, as Eddie
went back upstairs and began rummaging through more drawers, I realized that
he hadn’t even made any claim to the bottles. He wasn’t planning on buying
them. It was all an elaborate performance—designed, I guess, to inject some
excitement into the day. No one except the staff seemed to care particularly
what he’d found. As the energy died down, it seemed all they’d really cared
about in the first place was his shouting.
M
ere weeks later, covid arrived in New York. A few companies tried to
continue holding estate sales in person, posting mask advisories and
limits on capacity. But I knew that would stop, and it did; once governors
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started announcing stay-at-home orders, estatesales.net began automatically
pulling listings for non-appointment in-person sales in states with stay-athome orders. That April, I saw a local listing that was advertising what I
thought looked like an in-person sale anyway, but when I called the man on the
other end scrabbled around for a moment and then hung up on me.
For at least a month, there were almost no sales at all. Stuff sat inside, unsold. I
imagined it thickening, straining against the walls of the homes of recently
deceased, Depression-era residents of Long Island, their dishes growing heavy
in cupboards, “digger” basements growing even more filled with dust. But the
pause was brief—the estate-sale business is intimately tied to the real-estate
market, and the latter has boomed in the last year and a half. In late spring,
2020, estate-sale companies increasingly began switching to an online auction
model, photographing items and then putting them up for auction at a one- or
two-dollar starting price with curbside pickup. These online sales proved
extraordinarily lucrative during the pandemic: in 2020, Caring Transitions
earned seventeen million dollars in revenue on its proprietary online auction
platform, compared with about nine million dollars the year before. “In the
twenty-two years in the industry, 2020 and 2021 have been the busiest years
I’ve ever had,” Grant Panarese, who runs the virtual estate-sale platform
AuctionNinja along with his wife, Christie, told me. “I’ve never seen years like
this in my life.” Virtual platforms upend the traditional estate-sale dynamic: to
get the best goods at an online estate sale, there’s no need to get in line at dawn.
A typical customer, Panarese said, “has dinner, a glass of wine, and sits down
for an hour and bids.”
This model favors the retail consumer. Online auctions can feel more sporting.
There’s a sharp, competitive rush to winning an item at an online auction that
you don’t quite get when you go in person to haggle. Theoretically, you or I
have as good a chance as any seasoned picker of claiming the winning bid on a
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Herman Miller when the auction winds toward its close. But when I tried
scoring a formerly ten-thousand-dollar couch on a virtual estate sale during
lockdown, I failed miserably, my heart racing as the maximum bid rose and
rose. In 2020 and 2021, demand has exploded for regular home goods, such as
couches and dining tables, a result of hasty exoduses to the suburbs and supplychain issues or long back orders at furniture companies. “People say they can’t
sell brown wood, but we get crazy numbers for brown wood,” Panarese said. “If
it’s in good condition, we can sell it.”
Priorities have also changed. Before covid, a couch could be a showpiece;
now—or for now—it needs to be a piece of furniture comfortable enough for
someone to work from home on it. Aesthetics-wise, eighties furniture is back.
In the past two years, shoppers have relaxed further into their own personal
styles and embraced a kind of anything-goes eclecticism. It’s not as easy to
predict what will sell. In some cases, everything does. During the pandemic,
Winn said, she has been selling almost all her lots at auction, as opposed to the
typical sixty-five or seventy per cent.
The pandemic has also disproven the claim that millennials don’t care about
physical possessions. “They just collect different things,” Panarese said. As with
joke cryptocurrencies and N.F.T.s, the pandemic era has seen the cementing of
luxury collectibles as an alternative asset class; as of recently, even ordinary
people who can’t afford two-hundred-thousand-dollar Swiss watches or exotic
cars can still diversify by buying shares in high-end whiskey or sneakers. For
estate-sale companies, especially ones that have continued to do online sales,
actual vintage items like mint video games, Magic: The Gathering cards, and
G.I. Joes—anything older millennials played with as children—have also
started drawing large numbers of bidders, and selling high: a sealed, mintcondition copy of the first Super Mario Bros. sold last year for two million.
Panarese spoke with me on the phone with his wife. “Nostalgia!” they said, in
unison.
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I spent each morning of spring, 2020, at home, staring glassily at whatever
auction was being held that day, scrolling past sectionals, table lamps, clustered
picture frames, bookends. I thought often of the people I’d met at sales and
fretted about whether they’d ever be able to return to doing this in person. I
couldn’t tell if this first-name-only world was truly a fragile one—whether the
pickers would reassemble like cockroaches once the sales came offline again, or
if this universe would just disintegrate. There was a man I kept thinking of
named Rengang Wang, from Rego Park, Queens, whom I’d seen at every estate
sale that I went to before lockdown. He showed up early but selected reverently,
without pushing or snatching, and tended to stay for a while, walking around,
as though he and his purchases were on a date. It was always interesting to me
to see what he chose—at one sale, a carved walking stick and a single snifter. At
another, a large number of used paintbrushes and a Trapper Keeper. At a third,
a foldable music stand that he gently clacked open and closed as he strolled. He
wasn’t a dealer—I’d asked. There was no way his home was not completely full
of stuff. I wondered how he was doing now, quarantining in there with all his
things.
When I asked estate-sale company owners about their businesses, they always
talked about the social aspect, and how much people liked to be able to touch
the things they bought. But during 2020’s lockdown, they all also started saying
that virtual sales were much more lucrative. “Right now, I’m going to stick with
online auctions,” Debbie Bertoli, of Treasured Tag Sales, Inc., who had never
done virtual sales before the pandemic, told me last summer; currently, many
sales are being held online again during the Omicron surge. As much of the
country gradually began to reopen in the spring of 2021, AuctionNinja retained
nearly all of the five hundred vendors it ballooned to during the pandemic;
Caring Transitions is still doing brisk business on its online platform. “Inperson sales are a dinosaur!” Panarese said. But, by the middle of last year, the
number of in-person sales on estatesales.net had, according to its C.E.O., gone
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back to pre-pandemic levels. Although Omicron has forced more sales back
online for the time being, the fear—or hope—that estate sales will switch
permanently to an online model doesn’t seem to be panning out. “Never,”
insisted LoSquadro, of Sisters in Charge, when I talked to her this past
summer. She had recently hired Fast Eddie to help with the load. (“People read
him wrong. He’s very honest,” she said.) Her online sales were doing
“phenomenal,” but she was also booked for in-person sales through September.
The reason, she said, was simple. “People like to get out of their house.”
The demise of the in-person estate sale might be like that of the brick-andmortar bookstore—constantly foretold but never decisively coming to pass, an
industry both fragile and persistent in a way that doesn’t square with the story
of the world as we have come to expect it. With good reason, we assume that
everything ephemeral, local, and interesting will eventually be flattened
underneath digital behemoths and delivery services. It doesn’t make sense that
estate sales should thrive. But they do. When the sales opened in person again
for the first time, this past summer, I went to one of Winn’s, expecting to feel
the way that I did getting takeout at neighborhood restaurants closed for
indoor dining—tentative and a little sad. But it felt pretty much the same. We
were at a single-story house with a Brown University magnet on the fridge and
a towering set of slide carousels, labelled “Alaska,” “Beijing,” “Yellowstone.” It
was a little bit of a quiet day, but many of the regulars were there. New people,
too. A few old-timers argued about a sale they’d attended together once that
had a lot of vintage computer equipment. A young white couple shopped for
items for their Etsy store, murmuring about an eighties lamp. For twenty
dollars, a middle-aged woman purchased a Lazy Susan, pronouncing it a
perfect destination for her collection of jams. Another young man spoke
Mandarin into a WhatsApp video chat while he walked through the house,
giving someone on the other end a video tour of each room.
Wang was there. He told me that he’d lost his job during covid. “The best
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thing would be not to spend that much money,” he admitted. But he’d already
found items to buy. He was holding two small decorative boxes, one in each
hand.
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Lizzie Feidelson is a writer and performer living in New York.
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