At my previous gym we had 2 TVs. The volumes on both were able to be turned up. This caused issues.
Issues of competing broadcasts were one thing, but it was somehow more infuriating on the days when, inexplicably, the volume buttons didn’t work at all.
On days when the volume on both TVs did work, I got to experience what is probably a steadily shrinking phenomenon. The shared, public watching of television.
Off the top of my head I can’t imagine another public place where TV is currently watched with the sound on besides sports bars (which, unless they’re designated for your team, you’re lucky to get the sound on) and prisons. The latter of which I have not experienced but rather, have only seen depictions of on television, but from whose depictions I have noticed, caused a great deal of…tension, to say the least.
For some reason I feel like maybe TVs were watched in public a lot more in the past. Like back in the 70s when entire bars would watch Saturday Night Live together.
From my brief experience with this (I think) shrinking shared experience, I found that a public television invites different types of people to change the volume or channel of it.
There’s the self-aware, unpretentious person who choses the lowest common denominator like sports or a daytime talk show.
That one guy who turns on the local news, turns the volume up, and then forgets about it 5 minutes later to go use the ellipticals across the gym.
Possibly worst of all these people is me. I’m the MSNBC guy. Or at least I was.
I would complain, mentally, all day about how Trump is dominating the internet headlines (headlines I largely chose to read), and then at the first television I could find, I would turn on MSNBC which of course was…more Trump.
Fun.
So much fun that one day I couldn’t take it anymore.
I changed the channel. Specifically, one channel down.
And it was there I found an oasis. It was there I found American Pickers on the History Channel.
Ancient Aliens
The problems with the programming on the History Channel are well documented and could certainly fill an article of their own.
What I want to talk about is how great it was to have American Pickers playing in the early evening as I lifted heavy things and put them back down again, vainly attempting to stave off the inevitable expansion of a waist line that comes with old age sure, but mostly comes with not wanting to not eat noodles.
Things were going good. The heavy things were lifted and set back down again inside the air conditioned gym while American Pickers‘ Mike and Frank (of course those are their names) went around America, diving into everything from garages filled with rusty trucks to attics filled with creepy dolls. Things were going good.
And then the History Channel, in all its unmitigated wisdom, changed their schedule.
Now, they played Pawn Stars 2 days a week at the time when MY SHOW WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ON.
Sorry for yelling. That’s what Pawn Stars does to you.
Let’s just say I found Pawn Stars to NOT be the calm, placid oasis of curiosity and antiqular passion of Mike and Frank’s American Pickers world.
Pawn Stars didn’t so much as remind me of the good things America had to offer (from its often traumatic past), and instead reminded me why capitalism and individualism left unchecked are, to say the least, very annoying.
So why?
Why did I find American Pickers to be so much more pleasurable than Pawn Stars?
The 7 Ways American Pickers is More Pleasurable to Watch Than Pawn Stars
#1. Passion
Mike and Frank love what they do
American Pickers are clearly 2 guys who love “picking” and they say it almost every episode.
Because they love it, they love explaining it, so you start to learn the challenges of picking: big buildings with seemingly nothing to find until you get to that one cardboard box, kids who want their fathers to sell their belongings and fathers who feel ambushed by the whole idea, sellers whose price points are unrealistically high, etc.
Each episode is spending time with two guys who know what they love and love the fact that they get to do it everyday.
The gang at Pawn Stars just aren’t that enthusiastic about it.
Their dad did something that made money so they do that thing now.
Their workplace culture seems to revolve around how much of a curmudgeon the “old man” is, how much the younger guy buys risky items that he pays too much for, and how annoying some of them are currently finding others of them to be.
The point of a pawn shop is to make money, and if you show passion for an item you potentially make it harder on yourself to lower the price at which you buy that item.
The crew at Pawn Stars are (painfully, for the rest of us but beneficially for themselves), not that passionate about buying the things they buy.
There is some history woven in for sure. Dispassionate, flash card history.
2. Not All About The Money
Example 1: Respect for the Seller
Sure it’s all about the money.
But there are times like this non-purchase of a 1936 Ford that are just as engaging, if not more engaging, then the scenes where Mike and Frank make a purchase.
In this scene Mike and Frank help a son and his father dig up a car owned by their father/grandfather that has been sitting in storage for 40+ years. A task it was clear the father and son wanted to do but didn’t really make a priority.
At the end of the day, Mike and Frank know they can’t pay the guys what their target price would be.
But in the process we learn about the parents/grandparents of the guys they’re buying it from.
They see how much the car means to the son and grandson who were bequeathed it.
“I never thought this [car] would see the light of day again”
They then go onto advise them that with some handy work they could sell it for much more than Mike and Frank could pay them for it.
It’s not all out of the goodness out of their heart, the car isn’t worth as much as the owners hoped it would be, but it still feels honest and real. The emotion is there.
Example 2: Haggling
The most cynical aspect of Pawn Stars is, of course, that it takes place in a pawn shop. Pawn shops often function as a type of loan/collateral system for poor people, or the otherwise desperate, to get cash outside of the banking system. Like any other shady part of a capitalistic economy who makes a niche out of cornering at-risk or marginalized segments of the population, pawn shops can take advantage of their “customers”.
While this is all legal, and at times can be truly helpful to a person in a desperate situation, pawn shops exist to make as much money as possible as unscrupulously as possible. You can see it in the haggling that takes place.
On Pawn Stars, they will start hundreds of dollars a part from the seller, sometimes thousands. They will often insultingly low-ball them. The rounds of negotiation can exceed 4, even 5. This is not how normal, human negotiations work.
Normal human haggling is a lot more like American Pickers. By and large Mike and Frank will say a number, or the seller will say a number, the other person will come back with something a bit higher or lower, and they will settle somewhere in the middle after only a round or two of back and forth.
Human haggling looks like this:
Buyer: “I’m thinking 400”
Seller: “I was thinking 500”
Buyer: “How about 450?”
Seller: “Deal”
That is how you bargain with someone while still respecting them.
If after the first round you realize your numbers are too far apart, you don’t keep trying to low ball them or talk them out of their money.
Often Mike or Frank will agree to the sellers first price, especially if they’ve been buying all day (and to be fair, because it’s probably a good deal for them). They don’t immediately undercut a seller at every turn.
Lastly, there are even times on American Pickers where Mike and Frank will teach the seller that the value of the item they want to buy is much higher than the seller initially asked for.
They aren’t saints but they show genuine respect for the people they do business with and the antiques that they buy.
3. Learning Obsucre American History
The appeal of Pawn Stars is the high ticket, famous items.
They are the Hard Rock Cafe of antiques.
Sure, it’s a place to look at a few fun, exciting things from history but it feels manufactured. On Pawn Stars they are usually buying one piece of an already famous history – like antique pistols from famous battles or Super Bowl rings.
On American Pickers you learn the industrial history of Racine Wisconsin (Season 16, Episode 17), or how a certain kind of oil sign is more valuable than another (almost every episode).
I remember an episode of Pickers where the guys visit a young father who has just purchased an old, clay, brick-making farm. The whole estate had been used to forge clay into bricks and the Pickers ended up buying some old, handmade folk pottery.
The new owner was a young man who had plans to revamp the site into a meeting place for the community. They talked about the man who originally owned the farm, how their clay was used in town, how he lived in a shed in the back. They even look at his old, torn up jean jacket that had been patched over so many times it appeared to have none of the original denim.
This is a piece of local American history that would likely never make a history book and certainly never make a TV show if it weren’t for American Pickers.
I also can’t find the episode online but I promise it’s real.
In a lot of ways these guys are documenting America before it passes away into dust, before an old man dies and his kids don’t know the history of the land the way he does, before America forces another farmer off their land to sell everything they own for scraps.
4. Calm and Peaceful in a World of Loud and Obnoxious
The last few points are rather succinct.
American Pickers is chill. America right now is not.
5. Pawn Stars is a play on the phrase “porn stars”.
That is all.
6. American Pickers take place in the pastoral, rural communities of America.
Pawn Stars takes place in a Las Vegas warehouse.
That is all.
That’s Not, Completely, All
We need more examples of America where people aren’t undercutting each other’s pride and humanity to make a dollar.
We need more examples of people pursuing their passion that isn’t sports or a singing competition.
We need more examples of down to earth, hard working Americans getting along with each other.
We need more examples of trust and good faith, and we need less examples of passionless cynicism in the name of profit.
America needs more American Pickers and less Pawn Stars, and we need more if it on TV, reflected back to us, because I think it’s more of who we are than what we’re currently portraying.