Storage Wars
Storage Wars is an American reality TV series that follows a group of professional buyers that want to strike it rich by buying repossessed storage units. They win units by auction and they actually “win” if they turn a profit on the merchandise.
We got the chance to sit and talk with the “Young Guns” of Storage Wars, Jarrod Schulz and Brandi Passante. Straight up to the point, we asked them what their most memorable locker.
Jarrod: My favorite, most memorable locker was in Simi Valley, California. I think I paid around $1,700, something like that. It was tools and skateboards then some kind of little motorized vehicle, which is why I was drawn to it. So I didn’t think anything of it and Brandi was kind of upset that I overpaid. Once we got into it, halfway through, there was one giant safe and one smaller safe in it.
Funny story about those safes too. When I took them back into my shop, we bought this unit on a Friday and we did not have time to excavate it there at the time. [So the crew to told us that] you had to leave the safes untouched until next Wednesday when we can come out and film you opening them. So I literally have these safes in my shop for five days and I would go back looking at them, trying to shake them and I had to wait five days before I can actually open the safes. But when we opened those safes, they were full. Old coins, old jewelry, just everything you want to win.
Jarrod and Brandi have this great dynamics on the show so we asked them what were the advantages of having each other at auctions and their strategies to win biddings.
Brandi: We have the advantage of having each other. That way you have two sets of eyes to look at the lockers and look for different things. Sometimes some of us are being reckless (looks at Jarrod) and somebody needs to pull them off the ledge a little bit.
Jarrod: I can tell you that having a partner at the auction is definitely helpful. We’ve tried every strategy that I can come up with, from distraction to misdirection to fake bidding in order for Brandi to win the auction. Anybody can go out there with the most amount of money and buy units but when you have the least amount of money, you got to be a little more creative. That’s what we’ve done. It’s this team that’s giving us the advantage.
We also recalled some episodes with them. One in particular is the episode with the My Little Pony merchandise. We asked them how they won that locker.
Brandi: It’s by pure dumb luck.
Jarrod: That’s not true.
Brandi: No?
Jarrod: It was a calculated guess. That’s it. If you have a hundred of things in there and you can only see three of them but you base the fact that the three are nice or maybe collectible, then there’s so many signs already. You buy them assuming there’s more good stuff inside. It’s not really dumb luck, maybe we got lucky towards the end with that locker but it’s experience. I didn’t know there was My Little Pony in there but obviously, because of the things we saw at the door, we knew there were quality stuff in there.
Brandi: We also didn’t know that there was a society of grown men who love My Little Pony.
Jarrod: What also I didn’t know was how easy it was to sell those things. We sold every single one. I’ve had watches I couldn’t sell that fast. Everybody wanted one. It was crazy. People who saw that episode came to our store asking us if we still had those ponies and I’m like “they’re gone, I sold them all already”.
Seeing the success they had on the show, we had to ask them how they developed how to tell the value of an item.
Jarrod: The thing about collectors, well everybody collects some things in some way. But in our job, we don’t need to know everything about everything. So we’ll take a whole collection and we’ll just pick up a couple of things and we look them up. And if they’re valuable, then we take the time to sort everything out and do it correctly.
Brandi: The key is to know a little bit about everything.
As we close the interview, we recollected an episode where they found a replica of the communicator from the Star Trek franchise.
Jarrod: Oh man! You know the amazing thing is, the amount of money that they’re willing to spend for their craft and hobby. The Star Trek people turned it into a lifestyle.
Brandi: And I do know how to do this (Vulcan Salute)
Catch Storage Wars every Tuesday at 9PM on History.
