MINNEAPOLIS — Ask Marianne Kelly about the glory years in the antique business, and she'll tell about the day that Mary Travers of the legendary 1960s folk group Peter, Paul and Mary came all the way to Mill Antiques in Stillwater, Minn., in search of a blue metal butter churn.
Or when Liberace, the flamboyant piano-playing celebrity known for his white suits and capes, showed up in a limo on a mission to find just the right table.
But those days are gone, gone with the hordes of eager customers who once swept through the 1800s-era lumber mill at the lip of the St. Croix River, gone with an antique trade as Grandma knew it.
Upheaval is evident in Minnesota and elsewhere as prices fall, longtime dealers drop out, and a storm of cheaper imitations hits the retail market. Much of the antique trade has moved to eBay.com and other Internet sites where each consumer can be an expert. In many places, people don't browse shops like they used to, either.
"The dealer sales were going down because there just wasn't the same interest in antiquing," said Kelly, 71, who last month closed Mill Antiques, considered one of the top antiquing destinations in the Twin Cities.
These days, fewer younger people care about antiques, preferring to buy new. And baby boomers seem more inclined to collect novelties from their childhood years, such as theme lunchboxes, than to invest in pricey Victorian furniture built 100 years or more ago.
Such changes have "devastated the industry," said Philip Davies, whose national online newsletter, Tias.com, buzzed this summer with bloggers' firsthand examples of the difficulty of selling antiques. "It's amazing to me that an entire brick and mortar industry is actually dying on the vine," he said.
Kevin Holmgren has bought and auctioned antiques in the Twin Cities for 32 years. He said the decline began about six years ago and gained speed to the point where he's trying to figure out how to make money.
"You need five or six pieces of pie to survive nowadays," said Holmgren, who said he even sells antiques off the back of a truck to compete in a market where imitations of popular antiques are imported from China. "The antique dealer used to be the dealer. Now everybody has a digital camera, everybody has a computer. They don't need themiddleman anymore."
That's what Linda Allen, a Forest Lake, Minn., shop owner, thinks, too. She's closing Lakes Area Antiques because she said it's more profitable to sell at shows than to keep a shop open for an average of 10 customers a day.
"You have to go find them, and that's the way to do it these days," she said.
Charley Bathke, president of the Minnesota Antiques Dealers Association, which publishes an annual directory of member stores, said his group's membership has actually increased in recent years. But that doesn't mean he thinks all is well in the antique business.
"There are fewer shops around when you look through the Yellow Pages," he said. "And for many stores that have been around for a while, sales are going down."
The surviving stores, he hypothesized, are more likely to join a trade group or associationin search of public exposure or business tips when times are tough.
GOOD FOR BUYERS
But what's bad for dealers might be good for consumers looking for deals. Davies said the average price of antiques sold on eBay.com fell from $50 to $27 in recent years. People are more comfortable than ever with buying antiques online, he said, even dealing and shipping large items like dining room tables.
And Paul Post, who publishes The Old Times, an online newsletter as well as a free monthly newspaper available at many Minnesota shops, said lower prices might result from a simple principle of supply and demand because the Internet often reveals a supply that's larger than people realized.
Longtime collector Darlene Nordstrom of Lakeville said that even reduced prices might not save the traditional antique market because of changing trends in how people furnish their homes. For example, younger people tend to prefer uncluttered rooms, she said.
"They don't want Great Grandma's big oval-framed picture on the wall," said Nordstrom, who said that more people of all ages today also tend to think of antiques as novelties rather than furnishings - such as the man who bought an iron bed frame because his wife wanted to decorate their garden.
Hot items on the antique market today include Hot Wheels cars from the 1970s, vintage fishing lures and lunchboxes depicting old television shows, which can fetch up to $400, Holmgren said. But collectibles like wagon wheels and milk cans rarely sell anymore, and nobody wants antique dinner glassware.
David Schultz, a professor of management at Hamline University, said he thinks that pop culture and the Internet are driving the shift in the antique trade.
"What people wind up collecting is a reflection oftentimes of things they remember [from] when they were younger," he said. To somebody who grew up in the 1980s, "they might be more likely to collect something about rock groups or television shows."
But Schultz said that other market shifts come into play, too.Because of the Internet's reach, antiquing no longer is a regional business where products are bought and sold within 100 miles of a neighborhood store. The convenience of the Internet, coupled with TV shows that teach people how to appraise the value of antiques, drives down prices because consumers tend to shop around more, he said.
Kelly, who owned and managed Mill Antiques for 19 years, will return as a contract dealer to a newer but smaller version of the Stillwater shop when a cooperative of dealers reopens later this month as Staples Mill Antiques. She hopes that the antiquing market will revive much like it did in the heyday of the 1990s when 85 dealers rented space in her shop.
"It has its peaks and valleys," she said. "I think that there's always an interest in the touch and feel of buying."
But Davies said he's concerned that while baby boomers have been the antique market's best customers in recent years, they'll soon want to unload their possessions as they grow older and move to smaller homes.
"We're about to see a flood of new merchandise coming to the market," he said. "And where are the new collectors coming from who are going to buy this stuff ?"
High Profile, Pages 53 on 10/07/2007