I've watched the show, saw the first six episodes in December, not sure if there are any more.
Though I find the show somewhat enjoyable, I also cringe. It really does seem that the units are staged.
If you win a car, you still need the title to sell it.
They overinflate the value of everything, and then pretend that they actually receive these full retail values for all the wares, with no overhead. (In that regard, it's nowhere near as bad as American Pickers. Those guys oughtta just come out of the closet already.)
The Elvis newspapers? Hint: if you have thousands of something it does not have a retail value. It has a wholesale value. Thanks to eBay, not much sells for retail anymore. Good flip? Probably but best to bulk out and be done. They're
slow sellers at $30 each.
Then there's the time Darrell briefly mentioned buying a bunch of comics for $2700 and flipping them for $130,000, as they cut to an image of a bunch of comic long boxes. Of course, this was not featured on the show; it's a tale from his past.
While possible, I still tend toward thinking he's exaggerating.
A bunch of long boxes can look pretty bad to anybody without looking inside. Most unopened long boxes are filled with comics from
The Dark Age Of Comic Books, near worthless dreck that is often difficult to sell for 2¢ a book (anybody interested in 68 copies of Magnus Robot Fighter #22?). Thus, I can see why unopened boxes would be underbid.
I also know that people die. People go to jail. Some people don't know the value of what they own. Even with all those things known, I still hold as suspicious the notion that somebody lost $130,000 worth of comics because of a failure to pay their monthly rent on a storage locker,
especially in light of how fast and loose they play with the truth on the rest of the show.
As far as them being worth a million dollars? Well, a million dollars worth of comics (guide) are worth maybe $130,000 wholesale IF they're really good stuff. Guide is meaningless, and doesn't reflect the market (as with many other collectibles, but perhaps more so). Everything's worth what somebody's willing to pay. There isn't a lot of liquidity in collectibles markets, especially now. It's a perpetual buyer's market, in a sense.
What was I talking about? Oh, Storage Wars. Yep, find it entertaining. But I doubt just about every word that comes out of my speakers.
There's a
decent discussion of the show over InsideSelfStorage.com. (Go figure.)