News & Events

Mid-America News
Show Calendar
State Event Calendars

Regular Features

The Antique Detective
Antique Detective Q&A
Common Sense Antiques
Editor's Notebook
Refurnished Thoughts
Traveling with Ken
Good Eye
Discover Mid-America
  Marketplace
Books for Collectors

Directories & Classifieds

The Finder: Unique Shops
Lodgings Directory
Museum Directory
  Aviation Museums
Wineries in the Heartland

Classifieds

Archived Features

Heirloom Recipes
Helpful Hints
   for Collectors
Is This An Antique?
Reflecting History

Web Links

2005 Best Of Winners

Discover Mid-America — January 2007

It’s January, again
by Bruce Rodgers, Editor/Publisher

Every January, I wrestle with what I’m going to write about for this column as we head into the new year. (Yes, I know, it’s only my third “January” column — it’s not like I’ve been writing in this space since the invention of movable type.)

I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the weather, the craziness of warm, cool, cold, warm, cold, cool, dry, wet ad infinitum. Gee, why can’t winter be winter in the Midwest anymore? You know, snow, wet, brown, cold for weeks on end.

Weather forecasters must love the constant weather variations. The public’s desire for some level of weather predictability continues to drive up the wage scale of meteorologists while increasing their on-air animation as they announce dramatic shifts in temperature or a potential “fast-moving” storm.

I wonder if the storm is over in the antique business. For the last three or four years there’s been disturbances in the Discover Mid-America parts of the trade. There’s been a shakedown, blowout and blow-over in some places. Long-time shop owners have quit or retired, the number of antique shops in the Midwest has dropped and eBay has made it both easy and tough to be an antique dealer. Predicting how business is going to be sometimes is just a flimsy cover for praying that it will get better. The only constant in the antique business is people’s love for antiques and the history and imagination antiques invoke.

In my ongoing drive to research the antique business (insert laugh here) through my extensive travels throughout the Midwest (let loose a guffaw), I make the prediction that 2007 will be a good year for the antique business. How do I know this? I don’t, but here are some thoughts why the antique/collectible business will continue to endure and get better:

• The level of disgust for “everything is the same” in architecture, home furnishings and shopping options will drive creative consumers to antique shops
• Younger people are getting over their aversion to “old” things because many “new” things are familiar to the point of being boring and don’t carry the same import
• Increasingly, the people left in the antique business know what they’re doing, thereby helping establish a permanence to how the business is conducted and in the way customers are treated
• eBay is losing its luster for the serious collector; people-to-people networking, in which the digital world is not a barrier, makes for better and repeat business
• Collectible trends are taking on a flavor of endurance rather than quick and maddening flashes of got-to-have-it buying
• Retiring baby boomers, leaving other careers or seeking new careers, like the independence and creativity they see in the antique business, increasing both the customer and ownership base.

So how do I know all this? Because it’s January and I needed to fill this space.

Have a Happy New Year and thank you for your business and readership this past year.

Bruce Rodgers can be contacted at publisher@discoverypub.com.

> Editor’s Notebook Archive — past columns