Searching for the Good Old Days in the Antique Trade - so I'm Going to Re-live the Chaos of the 1990's

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

 Before Suzanne and I got married, I made what I thought was a deal-breaking admission. Oh sure, I drank too much, stayed out with the lads too late, played hockey, football and golfed at least twice a week in a foursome that enjoyed life a little too much. No, that wasn't the confessional. I had to tell Suzanne that by marrying a fellow who was a member of the press gang, a writer by any other name, and secondly, an antique dealer, would be taking a pretty hefty risk. Writers, especially in the news media were known to be hard living and wickedly determined to compromise good health with excesses. But at least I didn't smoke. Being an antique dealer was even worse because I was prone to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole, and take a relatively normal adventure, and turn it into the kind of chaos that fills a residence with way too much stuff. More than a few antique dealers I've known over the past forty-five years have been poster characters for obsessive behavior and role model hoarders, who occasionally sell some stuff to afford yet another opportunity to buy more. This is of course a bold overstatement and disrespectful to those dealers who suffer from none of the above. I just haven't known you to this point.

     My point to Suzanne was a simple one. I was ready to gear down the other bad habits, and tell my golf buddies that I'd have to pare down my outings to no more than once a week, and maybe only twice a month. As far as the other team sports, well, it was pretty difficult to dump what I had been involved in for most of my life to that point, it was a necessary reduction seeing as we wanted to start a family soon after getting hitched. As for the writing and antique dealer thing, it was the way I earned a living to that point, so I couldn't really make much in the way of concessions on either, except tone down the outrageous aspects. Meaning I had to pull back from the press club that used to meet three nights a week, and a few afternoons, down at the former watering hole known as the Bracebridge Albion on Main Street. I could do that, and it would save me quite a bit of money. As far as not being able to attend auctions and go on antique buying trips, Suzanne was far more compassionate, as far as making me cut back that kind of professional fun. But I would have to stick to a budget, and be responsive to her needs. Mostly then, keeping my acquired goods out of her way. It didn't work out so good, but I was successful in cutting the other craziness to the bone. It was 1983 and I felt naked without my vices. So I probably compensated by overdoing both writing and antiques, and long before we hit a sort of social / cultural / economic impasse in the reconstruction of the 1990's, I had, as they say, leapt far, far over the guard rails of our ability to cope with all that was bouncing around in our lives, including two wee lads, and a uptown Bracebridge Antique Shop that we were left with, to finance solo, when a partner departed at a most inopportune time. We were broke. Our new house was worth forty thousand dollars less than we had paid for it a year earlier, and I had lost income when three positions dried up within months of each other, and our car was in and out of the service centre at least once a week for three of those economy shattering months of 1990.

     Suzanne had been able to go back to work as a secondary school teacher in Bracebridge, thank goodness, and our antique business got a new partner and business did slowly increase to at the very least cover the bills. We even began selling sports trading cards which became a minor obsession for the boys and I, and it was the occasion to morph the small business to whatever happened to be in vogue that we could financially support. For the brief time that hockey and baseball cards sky-rocketed in value, we benefitted substantially, and we were already winding down our exposure by the time the market internationally collapsed, leaving a lot of dealers holding the proverbial bag. We had a colleague who was forced to close his high rent shop and auction off his remaining inventory to save his house from mortgage default. It was happening to these pop-up sports card shops that had bet the farm on new product instead of relying as we had, on the older sports memorabilia and vintage books on hockey and baseball.

     What the 1990's in its entirety meant to us, was knowing how close we had come to experiencing a total financial collapse as well. If not for the fact, that instead of making even more mistakes, and spending money we didn't have on items that may not have hit the mark in retail income, Suzanne and I decided to simply watch and learn for pretty much an entire decade of recession recovery. We made a point of educating ourselves about the new dangers of retail gambling, and watched many unfortunate situations develop for colleagues in business, who weren't as fortunate as we were to escape the collateral damage of an unstable economy. We pretty much stopped spending on ourselves, with the exception of the basics, and monthly bills that needed to be paid, and covering what our young family could not do without. As far as the business? Gosh, we had to experiment constantly, but the saving grace for us, was when we began taking consignments for a measly twenty percent commission. Here's why this happened.

     From the very early days of 1990, we were being inundated with requests by customers to buy their collections, estate items, and, yes, stuffed into their car trunks; and sometimes these vehicles were also their places of temporary residence. As the nineties progressed, and the housing crisis continued to create casualties, as power of sale listings were popping up all over the place, the volume of sellers vastly outnumbered customers who actually wished to purchase items from our small basement shop. It became a real source of aggravation, but Suzanne and I felt pretty rotten as well, having to turn so many folks away, who obviously needed the money in order to survive. I can remember several poignant cases when I would have to go and view items for sale, in cars in our parking lot, and finding nothing of any value to justify even one small purchase, and being horrified to find children in the car and a large amount of bedding materials. I can recall at least a dozen of these situations, and felt so bad for them, and carried this feeling home with me at night. I wanted to help them but we didn't have the money to help even a fraction of those who were trying to raise emergency funds, probably to feed their kids living in those sedans. I had run out of excuses why I couldn't help them out, although I did direct a lot of folks to the local Salvation Army and social services. I would give them out numbers we had pre-printed on pieces of paper, as it was this bad, no fooling.

     We decided that we could help some of these folks, who had a little bit more time to generate some needed income. We could try to sell some of the better items, at a better price that we would have been able to purchase them over the counter. If we had a couple of weeks, we could probably raise fifty percent more and still get our twenty percent. It worked pretty well, although for some folks we would eventually buy the items after the consignment period, if they were still facing dire circumstances. Consignment selling became our mainstay during those turbulent years of the 1990's, and it enabled us to hang onto our small business, and adjust for most eventualities that rise in market fluctuations, and for us a business re-location in 1996. We gave up our Bracebridge shop, so that I could take a new position as a curator of sports memorabilia with the Crozier Foundation, at the Bracebridge Arena, and media manager for the newly established Children's Foundation established by former National Hockey League goaltender, Roger Crozier, who grew up in Bracebridge. Instead, we spent a great deal of time travelling to all kinds of sale venues around Muskoka including our regular participation in the Antique Boat Show here in Gravenhurst. It was much harder work than running a shop, because of the heavy lifting and vulnerabilities with weather conditions, because most of the sales were held outdoors. We still handled a variety of consignments and it is a business option we continue today in the music component of our family business in Gravenhurst, as co-ordinated by our sons, Andrew and Robert. We don't have many consignors these days because as retirees who are winding down their careers, we just don't wish to take on the complication of paper work which can be of nightmarish proportion if business is particularly brisk, and the accountant is already overwhelmed.

     The nineties was the era of reconstruction of a business plan, and the period of reckoning with the  realities of a notoriously difficult profession in the retail sense. A lot of antique shops don't survive to hit their tenth anniversary celebration. Quite a few antique malls have run into problems in the past couple of years as well. Having survived that decade in particular, where everything seemed to be in flux, and the marketplace wobbling all over the place, we had the idea that if we studied it close enough, and truly investigated the dangers that had surfaced in what had been relatively calm waters in the late 1980's, we would never have similar problems in the future with the ups and downs of an economy of which we couldn't control, but could basically understand as battle-weary re-investors in retail. We closed ranks as a family, and made every attempt to watch and learn, and sample conditions when we could in a safe and economical way. Which brought us to this new century, and all of its ups and downs like a carnival merry-go-round. But if it hadn't been for the on-the-job learning we received through that entire decade, there's no way we would have had the courage and resources to take another stab at main street retail in this exciting but perilous new era in retailing.

     We are grateful for all those who taught us how to survive and diversify our retail portfolio. It was for us, the taming of pomposity, because we found out rather abruptly that being an antique dealer was not really a high status, protected profession. We found out how vulnerable we really were, and how the market is unforgiving when it comes to the hardcore realities of competition in the midst of recession. It's why we never, ever get cocky in our industry today, as we once touted ourselves untouchable because we bought and sold old and valuable stuff. We learned the hard way but we did learn.....and that's, well, all she wrote.