Some of it is genuinely useful: a 50 year old Sunbeam Mixmaster is going to need some maintenance but will last another few decades if taken care of vs the crap built with plastic gears these days.
I think these antique malls spring up as much as anything from people who valuing these items collecting them. At some point you wake up and realize unless you're going to open a museum you don't actually need 10 examples of whatever.
You see this all over New England and I assume elsewhere. All sorts of antique stores and malls. Some of the stuff they sell is genuinely old quality. An awful lot is just random crap of one sort or another. It’s not a well-defined distinction to be sure.
Nobody cares about spare parts in a museum unless they add up to a full replica of something recognizable. Selling to people who care is likely much better in the long term.
If they turn out to be valuable our grandkids can read about how someone donated them from their private collection.
So many of these conversations can be broken down to the things you find valuable might not be the thing others find valuable and there is no right or wrong. You either get it or you don't. I have zero desire to collect model trains, but I understand some people do and there is probably value there in that community.
Seems like straight out of a boys book - abandoned shed, dozens of cars stored in there, nobody knows that they're so valuable. I don't know anything about cars but from looking at the pictures in the OP, I can't help but think that some of them would be worth quite a bit? Certainly more than the scrap metal value?
Particularly anything that people already see as collectible and carefully preserve; leads to a large supply of good-condition items.
Pocket watches are one interesting example. The majority of nice old pieces from the late 19th century are worth only $50-$80. It's something that seemed obviously valuable to people so nobody threw them away, even once they went out of fashion in actual use. So there are literally millions of pocket watches out there still, since everyone has their grandfather's old watch. And they regularly appear on eBay, keeping the market supplied. Even if a large proportion are cannibalized for parts or lost, it's still enough supply that collectors' demand doesn't push prices very high.
I have a silly hobby of collecting battered metal toolboxes. I like the fact that the history of their usefulness is displayed as the dents, scratches, rust, etc.
The nice thing about that hobby is nobody else collects them, so I can often pick one up for a dollar.
They might be pieces collectors have seen before, but on the other hand they're crucial parts of a one off performance piece, and I'd bet that adds value for collectors.
Could this be survivor bias at work? All the nice 1950 stuff you see are only around because they're nice enough to keep around. If they're junk they'd be replaced in a reno or something.
For classic cars and other large pieces of vintage machinery, "barn finds" have been a common source of weirdly well preserved specimens for many years - especially in dry climates. Now that we live in a world where many elderly people have had suburban garages for many decades, that probably will be a major source of interesting finds like this.
All other things being equal, having the space to keep a large object you're not using is gonna be a big predictor for how many specimens end up in a safe storage situation for long enough to become antique.
Antiques are only interesting as long as there are people who remember them when they weren’t antique - my father’s father’s generation had roll-top desks as a normalish office accessory, so he’d be interested in them.
To me they’re only moderately interesting because he had one.
Narp, I mean some will probably end up as collector's items in a hundred years, as a glance into 2021 design trends - 100 year old advertisements and catalogs are great collectibles and time capsules nowadays - but at the moment they're more of a nice to have for the next year or so. I do like leafing through things like that sometimes, but at the same time I don't mind going to the physical store for a browse. More useful.
I think these antique malls spring up as much as anything from people who valuing these items collecting them. At some point you wake up and realize unless you're going to open a museum you don't actually need 10 examples of whatever.
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