When your an antiques dealer every days a shopping day
When You’re an Antiques Dealer, Every Day’s a Shopping Day
When You’re an Antiques Dealer, Every Day’s a Shopping Day
Some people go shopping to spend money.
Antiques dealers go shopping to make it.
There is a difference.
To most people, shopping is leisure, therapy, or occasionally marital endurance. To an antiques dealer, it is reconnaissance, treasure hunting, speculation, education, and, on a good day, profit.
When you deal in antiques, “popping out for a look” can become a day’s work.
A boot sale at dawn? Work.
An auction where you buy nothing? Work.
Peering into a dusty cabinet in a provincial saleroom? Definitely work.
Even wandering through a junk shop muttering, “there may be something here,” is research.
The marvellous absurdity is that you can make a living from what others call rummaging.
Where most people see an old box, a chipped figure, or a painting hung upside down, the dealer sees possibility. Perhaps it is Georgian. Perhaps it is rare. Perhaps it is dreadful. But perhaps — and this is what keeps us going — it is a sleeper.
That little word perhaps has built many fortunes.
The public imagine dealers sit grandly behind polished desks waiting for masterpieces to arrive.
Reality is rather different.
We are shoppers with sharper elbows.
We hunt in country sales, markets, attics, auctions, and places respectable people have never heard of. We spend half our lives buying things we were not looking for and the other half regretting the things we did not buy.
It is commerce powered by curiosity.
And what other trade lets you say, quite truthfully, “I bought a 200-year-old teapot this morning and made money before lunch”?
There is, too, a delicious irony in spending your life acquiring things in order to sell them to someone else who wishes to acquire them.
A civilised relay race.
Of course, not every shopping day is triumphant.
Some days you come home with a bargain.
Some days with a lesson.
Occasionally with both.
But even the mistakes educate, and education in this business often arrives disguised as overpayment.
The joy is that one’s work rarely feels like work.
If you love objects, history, stories and the thrill of the chase, earning a living can feel suspiciously like getting away with something.
In our trade, shopping is not recreation.
It is stock acquisition.
And if profit is made while indulging a lifelong passion, so much the better.
Because when you are an antiques dealer, every day really is a shopping day —
and some days, you even get paid for going shopping.
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