Storage Wars Canada

Among my guilty pleasures is watching reality shows about people buying crap and reselling it. Storage Wars is an A&E show that works on the premise that it’s fun to watch a bunch of people fight over abandoned junk left in storage units. The show has proved so successful that it now has several clones-Storage Wars Texas, Storage Wars New York, and I recently found Storage Wars Canada. They all have a small group of people-usually four or five-who hate each other for no clear reason and always try to run up the price on the storage units. I find this shockinlyg fun stuff.

My brother’s an Antiques Dealer and he hates these kinds of shows. Here’s why. People get in bidding wars over a storage unit filled with mostly unidentified and unidentifiable items. They spend upward of twenty thousand dollars on a unit. Now in the real world in which you and I live, that would be twenty grand down the drain. In Storage Wars, the locker will have a cache of priceless paintings, stacks of gold bars, bags of loose diamonds, or some obscure bit of antiquity that no one on the show should be able to identify, let alone determine it’s a great find worth a small fortune. My brother thinks all of these things are plants.

Storage Wars Canada has a slightly more realistic feel to it. Storage units have sold for as little as ten dollars and a big price for a unit has been about two grand. This sounds a lot more real to me. There is also the fact that our heroes are not finding the Hope Diamond every episode, they do find the occasional ‘good’ thing, but even these turn out to less than priceless. I like that. Most of the people make money, but they make hundreds of dollars, not thousands or tens of thousands.

Every series has to have a jerk to hate, the Jerk in Storage Wars Canada is Roy, who just goes to run the price up and keep the occasional good find for his personal trophy room. The Old Pros are Rick and Cindy, who also like to run up the prices and don’t often make good choices. Ursula is the noob who has to put up with a lot of crap from everyone else. And the comic relief are a father and son, Paul and Bogart, who are opening a new shop. Then there’s the Auctioneer, Don, who has the least personality of anyone I’ve ever seen on TV.

Like all the Storage Wars it takes a few episodes to warm up to the Storage Wars Canada. For me the most fun is guessing how much the items they find will be worth and wondering if I would have found something good in a storage locker. It’s the kind of thing I like to think about when I’m out of work and have no money anyway.

Storage Wars Canada is a pretty good show, though I still tend to think the original is the best, even if they do overpay for everything. It’s easy to think that the cast doesn’t really matter in Storage Wars, but Storage Wars Texas has suffered from a random group of regulars and the original Storage Wars isn’t really the same without Dave.

So far I’m having mixed feelings about the cast of Storage Wars Canada, none of them are very likable. But maybe that’s just because their Canadians.

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