If you’ve watched the show Storage Wars then you’ve probably started to wonder if it’s a bit fake and why some of the cast members seem to have such good luck while others almost never seem to get anything to go their way. Well, rest easy because in some ways the show is fake, but in others it’s actually a lot of skill and experience that allows these people to make a pretty good living by buying and reselling the things they find in storage units. The legality of these auctions is not in question since in most states a person that hasn’t paid on their storage unit has around 30 to 90 days to pay up and/or get their stuff out or it will become the property of the storage site and therefore available to be auctioned off. It might even be less time depending on the laws in different states, but chances are you’ll have at least a month or more to pay up unless you simply want to forget about your storage unit or can’t raise the money needed.
But let’s get back to the show.
The cast are not the only big winners on the show.
Since the show features only a handful of regular cast members this is all it tends to focus on since they’re the ones that people want to watch and are the biggest personalities in attendance. From Dave Hester’s “Yuuup!” to Darrell Sheets’ often cringe-worthy statements that make no sense, the cast members are the biggest part of the show that bring people back. However, those people you see in the background that are constantly bidding against the cast members and not being recognized save for the numbers that are being tallied on the bottom of the screen do tend to win the units at times. You won’t ever see this because a lot of people are going to wonder just who won the unit and what was in there since the cast members deliberate before the auction begins. But from time to time when the camera isn’t rolling there are winners that aren’t a part of the cast.
You might not want to hear it, but the lockers are seeded now and again.
The thrill of buying up storage lockers isn’t always as grand as it seems since they don’t always yield up the kind of treasures that people are thinking about. Some lockers do contain genuine finds that make a person wonder why anyone would leave something so valuable behind, but a lot of them are crap shoots that force the bidders to gamble on what could be in there. For the sake of the show and the ratings however there are times when certain lockers are ‘seeded’, meaning that the production crew will actually place valuable items for the cast to ‘find’ inside. This seems a lot like cheating and the kind of thing that reality shows are known for, and it is to be honest, but it keeps things just interesting enough to maintain the ratings and to bring people back again and again. If this spoiled your idea that treasures abound in these storage units I do apologize, but you’d have a better time searching for lost pirates’ gold in the Caribbean than finding lockers that would pay big money on a regular basis.
The show is real enough, but the glamour is all for ratings.
It’s hard to tell sometimes if the cast members really can’t get along with one another or if they’re just playacting, and it’s even difficult to tell which lockers are genuine and which were seeded, but overall the show is very real. The idea of auctioning off storage units isn’t a fantasy and does occur in real life, and it’s usually an exciting day for those that attend. It’s also wise to bring cash since most people don’t want to deal with debit or credit cards and the idea is that you buy what you see as it is, and if there’s anything inside that turns out to be valuable then so much the better. A lot of people will insist that any personal items belonging to the former owner be returned to the front office as a common courtesy, such as photo albums and other such items, but otherwise the individual buys the lot and takes ownership the same day. Plus, the buyer has that day and that day only to clear out the unit, they can’t take their time over a period of days to clear it out. So when you see the cast members walking away from their locker you can be assured that they’ll have someone coming back to unload it for them or that they’ll be back to clear it out.
The show is a lot of fun to watch, but take it with a big grain of salt.
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