Tuesday, November 30, 2010
AP
Photo
Clinton "Ton" Jones, left, and Allen Haff are shown in a scene from "Auction Hunters," about prospectors who bid on abandoned storage units that are put up for public auction. The series airs on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. EST on Spike TV.
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES
Allen Haff has found himself in a precarious position. Armed with a pocket knife and a rechargeable flashlight resembling a space-age ray gun, the lanky 41-year-old is dangerously perched inside a storage unit on the side of a mattress that is teetering against a rickety tower of boxes.
Each time Haff shifts his weight while slashing open the sealed boxes, the dingy mattress bends as if it will suddenly give way and toss Haff down on top of the mounds of junk beneath him.
He doesn’t care. At this moment, he doesn’t want to be anywhere else. Haff makes money by uncovering goodies inside storage units auctioned off because of unpaid rent.
“I’m falling in love,” he says after finding some pottery inside one of three units that he and his business partner bought at a recent auction.
“Every time I open one of these boxes, I feel like there’s an arrow pointing me to the next one. I can hear them saying, ‘Keep looking. Keep looking.’ I want to see it, and I want to be the first one to see it.”
The addictive exploits of Haff and his burly 32-year-old partner, Clinton “Ton” Jones, are the focus of Spike’s “Auction Hunters,” the latest entry in the popular trash-or-treasure reality-TV subgenre.
Much like such predecessors as PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow” and History Channel’s “American Pickers,” “Auction Hunters” fixates on finding gems among garbage.
With only a few minutes to peek inside units at their potential purchases — no touching allowed — Haff and Jones must use clues to decide how much to bid or whether to bid at all. If they win, they must take everything. They picked this unit because it has a vintage case, and the boxes are still intact, which might mean something valuable is inside them.
A&E is debuting its own storage-unit auction series Wednesday. But instead of examining one team of auction hunters, “Storage Wars” focuses on four buyers.
A&E’s entry follows several competitive players. Among them are fast- talking married auctioneers Dan and Laura Dotson, renowned relic raider Barry Weiss and newbie plunderer Jarrod Schulz and his nagging wife, Brandi, who chastises her untested husband in the first episode for buying a car that turns out to be a lemon.