What Antique Dealers Want You to Know

Our team at The Barn on Country Club has been in the antiques business for many years now, so we have had ample time to learn our trade. In our experience, many people have a mistaken idea of what antiques dealers like ourselves do or how this whole business works, so we thought we’d take a little time to clear things up. In this article, we’ll go over a few key things that antique dealers want you to know.

• Antique Stores are Not Thrift Shops- One thing that our antique dealers want you to know is that an antique store is not the same thing as a thrift shop. The items in a thrift shop are donated, while the items in an antique store have all been purchased by the dealers, a fact that affects the quality of our items as well as the average price for them.
• Antique Dealers Have Different Specialties- Just like historians specialize in different time periods, antique dealers can specialize in different eras or in different types of collectibles–a historian of the French Revolution may know little about 20th Century America, and a dealer who focuses on sports memorabilia may know little about fashion, for example. If you’re looking for a particular kind of item and don’t see it here, chances are that a different antique dealer may be able to help you.
• The Past Had Junk, Too- One sentiment that antique dealers hear a lot is that things were built better in the past, and that’s why antique items still exist and are in good condition. While we make sure to offer well-constructed, high-quality items, we also want to clarify that for every piece we have in our collection, hundreds of other items from those time periods wore out, broke, or were simply thrown away. Just because our items were built to last doesn’t mean that everything was.