The people at Chattel Changers, 2520 E. Capitol Dr., are professional appraisers and liquidators. They stock the three upper and three lower rooms of the store with items that customers either bring in on consignment or that they bring from a "clean out," which has become Chattel Changer's standard for settling an estate, removing all household items to get a home ready for who's next.
"We found that over the course of time with increases in advertising and labor costs it was more beneficial to do clean-outs instead of estate sales. In order to make a sale worthwhile you have to sell the big ticket items. Otherwise the sale just wasn't profitable, which was a disservice to our clients," says Dave Kascht, co-owner of Chattel Changers.
Chattel Changers was opened in 1972 by Kascht's mother, Mary Lou, and her two partners Joan Hargarten and Carole Carter. Kascht says the three women started the business later in life, after their kids had grown or were at least in high school. They started with estate sales for their own parents, realized others had the same problem -- getting rid of parents' things -- and they set off to become professional liquidators.
Kascht says that after the estate sales were done, there was usually a fair amount of stuff that remained, and typically someone would come by and offer a nominal sum for all the leftovers. These people had second-hand stores where the items would be taken and sold for more money.
So the three women decided to open up their own store, that way not giving away really nice things for less than they might otherwise receive. With five months for folks to come by and look at household items instead of the day and half of an estate sale, they found the store to be ideal.
"They opened the store in '78 or '79 and it really took off," says Kascht. Starting with one room, Chattel Changers expanded three times, first taking over a photographer's studio to the west and later the insurance agency to the east. They also have a storage building in the back which Kascht says is filled to the rafters.
Hargarten and Carter are now retired but Mary Lou comes in a few times a week to help the "second generation," her son and his business partner Laura Davis.
Davis started working for Mary Lou in 1982. She grew up in Stevens Point and moved to Milwaukee after getting married. Davis handles the clean-outs and Kascht staffs the store.
Kascht, who is married and has one stepson, was hired in 1985, right out of school. He grew up in Whitefish Bay and earned a degree in accounting and finance at UW-Osh Kosh. Thinking he was just helping out in the office for a while, Kascht has been at Chattel Changers ever since.
Although they haven't put on an estate sale in a few years, Kascht says households with expensive lawn and garden equipment, which would be difficult and costly to move, would still make a good estate sale.
Kascht says they currently have some really nice art work in the store, selling from just a few dollars to 300, and they tend to get it fairly often. A recent clean-out Davis did resulted in Chattel Changers stocking hundreds of DVDs and model planes. They're selling the DVDs for just $3-5 apiece.
Chattel Changers has nearly every kind of furniture possible, from end tables, poster beds, dressers and dining room sets to grandfather clocks. They have quilts, padded and wooden chairs and sofas, an assortment of desks, lamps, posters, prints and serving ware. The basement rooms are filled with more chairs, table and wall clocks, glassware and many small household items only describable as "knick-knacks."
The price of every item in Chattel Changers is reduced 15 percent every 30 days. Consignees can remove items after 60 days. If something doesn't sell after five months, it's donated to a charity, a Milwaukee church and day care.
"Danish, modern and contemporary is hot, Victorian is not," says Kascht. "Kids today don't want grandma's furniture, they don't want anything really extravagant or heavily carved. Kids today are very mobile and don't want to be tied down with a lot of stuff, it's as if they would almost rather have everything be disposable."
In addition to unwanted furniture, Kascht says items like collector plates, which were sought after in the 1970s, sell for next to nothing now. Trends in antiquing aren't only matters of changing tastes, but also changing technologies. Kascht says entertainment cabinets were really hot 10 years ago, but with the advent of HD flat screen TVs that can hang on a wall or be put on something really small as a stand, people don't need large entertainment cabinets and no one wants them anymore.
"I was at an auction in Chicago recently where the Hilton hotel dumped 200 of these cabinets. They were going for $25 each," says Kascht.
Chattel Changers still sells Victorian pieces, and everything else that might not currently be in fashion, because regardless of an item's current status the trends change often enough -- and then there's the concept of "price control."
"Everything's price controlled, in the sense that if it's priced low enough, someone will buy it," says Kascht.
Kascht says liquidation and consignments is a "big time hands-on business." Davis does at least one clean-out every week. Kascht spends most mornings traveling to examine furniture that people want to have at the store on consignment. They have five employees to help with all the new items brought in daily, including store manager Marie Ulsberger who has been doing appraisals in the back of the store for 20 years.
"If people bring in one or two boxes, we're usually more than happy to go through it while they wait and give them prices. We're too busy for anything more and ask people to leave those items with us for a while," says Kascht.
Royal has taught courses in critical pedagogy, writing, rhetoric and cultural studies at several schools in Wisconsin and Minnesota. He is currently Adjunct Associate Professor of Humanities at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
Royal lives in Walker’s Point with his family and uses the light of the Polish Moon to illuminate his way home.
