HJL,
In my 26 years as an auctioneer I have conducted over five of these type auctions. Three were defaulted storage auctions. Normally, we don’t know what we have until the door is opened. The first one that I remember was around 1993. It was a 10 X 20 unit. In it were three crossbows, boxes of climbing gear for mountain climbing (crampons, pitons, ropes, and harnesses), first aid kits with blood expander, packs and pack frames, firearms, various brands of dehydrated food, small cook stoves, and so forth. The next one I remember was a 5 X 10 heated unit full of new guns, ammo, packs, food, portable gasoline-operated winch (it worked off of a chainsaw engine and was new from factory), and many other items. The third was a 10 X 15 unit where the person had passed and the relatives said, “Sell it.” It was full of over 100 boxes of books on every subject imaginable, with many on the same subject by different authors. Another was an estate where there were over 75 firearms, many new unfired but in odd calibers, and literally a ton of ammo; some was from the factory and some re-loads. There was reloading gear, powder, NVG, several binoculars and monoculars for range finding, books, brass, lead, lead casting items. It took four auctions of about three hours each to sell it all. In today’s era, the younger relatives don’t want to deal with the eccentricities of Mom or Dad and will dispose of years of accumulation of what is to them “useless junk”. Having read Patriots and several other books about four years ago, I have come to appreciate these type of auctions. If you have the time, farm estate auctions as well as storage auctions can be a place to find many items for prepping. For me and my wife, even though we are auctioneers, we cannot pass up an on-site farm estate auction. – Prepper in ANC