Paradise Vintage Market in North Fort Myers. -SCOTT SIMMONS / COURTESY PHOTO
The world of antiques is a curious place.
For a long time, many of us assumed that what our grandparents and parents saved for us as something that would rise in value would do just that.
For many years, glassware, furniture, silver, dolls, toys, and other treasures steadily gained value, ensuring a tidy nest egg for the next generation when the time came to sell.
But the next generation suddenly found itself overwhelmed by parents and grandparents who lived longer than previous generations, leaving vast stockpiles of goodies that came to be viewed as clutter.
I remember my friend Jimmy, a Jacksonville antiques dealer and appraiser, lamenting that there was no telling what would happen to our “stuff” – the crystal, the china, the silver that represented a formal lifestyle many no longer embraced.
The business world has reflected that, too.
Traditionally, most collectibles retailers have been mom-and-pop operations.
But they’re no longer able to sustain a business model in which insurance and rent costs have soared.
I have dealer friends who pay upward of $7,000-$8,000 a month in rent for 600-square-foot retail spaces along Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach.
That means sales need to equal the rent – meaning vendors of traditional collectibles get priced out of the market, and the stores turn to higher-end merchandise geared more to designers and purchasers of decorative items than to collectors.
The age of the collector is over, so it seems.
But I think we were hasty in coming to that conclusion.
During a recent trip to the Fort Myers area, where I grew up, my mother and I visited the Paradise Vintage Market in North Fort Myers, where I saw what the next generation of collectors was buying.
I saw young people looking to fill in their mothers’ sets of Pyrex from the 1960s and ’70s. Others were shopping for funky barware or vintage clothing – something you’d never have seen in an antiques mall even 20 years ago.
But there they were, active, engaged and interested in collecting things that evoked a time in their lives, just like my mother and others have done with other, fancier fare.
We ventured down Cleveland Avenue to Eyeing the Past, a multileader shop near the Edison Mall, where we saw a larger profusion of the traditional collectibles we shopped for half a century ago – Fenton and Fostoria glass, print tablecloths (a great vintage Florida souvenir cloth was priced at $125).
Like the merchandise, the shoppers here skewed a little more vintage – my mother sometimes jokes she’s the oldest thing in the shop – but they were enthusiastic, with one man energetically negotiating a lower price for a card.
It was all friendly banter, and it reminded me of why we collect: it’s not just about acquiring treasures; it’s about the relationships we form along the way.
That part of collecting never grows old.
If you go
Paradise Vintage Market, 13821 N. Cleveland Ave., North Fort Myers; 239-362-3811 or com
Eyeing the Past, 1936 Commercial Drive, Fort Myers; 239-275-8885 or www.eyeingthepast.com
Scott Simmons has spent a lifetime collecting antiques. For more than 25 years, he has written about antiques and collectibles in The Palm Beach Post, Florida Weekly and elsewhere. Write to Scott at scottsfla@gmail.com.