While some teenagers hang out after school, playing Fortnite or shooting hoops, Michael has taken up a more enterprising hobby. He buys abandoned storage lockers at bargain prices from public lien auctions with the aim of selling their contents for profit. It began two years ago, when he watched a rerun of “Storage Wars.” He has been on an urban treasure hunt since.
His adventures have brought him to CubeSmart, Extra Space Storage and Manhattan Mini Storage facilities in and around New York. He sells his scavenged goods through his eBay store, “Mike’s Unique Treasures,” to earn over $7,000 a month, a figure backed by the financial records he showed me.
He runs his operation out of the suburban New Jersey home where he lives with his mother. The garage is lined with meticulously indexed old magazines, vinyl records, World War II artifacts, rare stamps, VHS tapes and vintage fishing rods.
After finishing his homework, Michael spends his nights at a work table, packaging inventory to ship to his customers around the country. “My friends tell me they’re amazed I’m making money at this,” he said. “None have asked to come along with me yet, though. I’m not sure why.”
Be amazed as capitalism teaches a child that retail arbitrage is more fun than childhood play!
Watch in wonder as a society so crazed for money successful brain washes a kid to share its bloodthirsty obsession!
Gasp in horror as television programming and the media apparatus at large trick an innocent teenager into throwing away their youth in lieu of work and then celebrate it!
If you enjoy long-form content, Elijah Lemard has a very good video discussing storage auctions that shines them in a somewhat less glamorous light than this article does.
It’s always felt dystopian to me. You’re likely buying the stuff of someone that was unable to pay for the unit. Turning someone else’s misfortune into capitalism
If you didn’t watch the above-linked video, that’s basically the conclusion he comes to. He went into it planning to do an experiment and see if he could turn a profit off of 3 storage unit auctions, but by the end he just ended up feeling icky about the whole thing, once he realized what you pointed out. He ended up tracking down the prior owners of one of the units and returning their stuff after finding a lot of deeply personal items there, and he got their story, too, of how the unit fell into arrears. He came out of it with a much different view of it than he went in with.
Have not had a chance to watch it, but yeah, hoped that was conclusion
