For Iron it's worth it if you have a place to keep it until you have enough for the trip.  I wait until I can pretty much fill the bed of my truck and get about $200 for a ton.  Taking small loads would not be worth it.

For copper it's very worth it.

Then of course there's silver and gold...

Auction I went to today charged a buck a bidder, gave you a little number card like at other kinds of auctions.  Didn't bother me any, nor would five bucks, especially if it lowered the attendance.

When my wife and I go we take our two kids.  Not sure I would like the idea of having to pay $20, especially at a caravan of six or seven facilities.  Maybe if you just paid once for the whole caravan or something.

That was just a made up example.  I usually ask the same price on eBay/craigslist and swap meets.  For the bigger power tools shipping gets so expensive on eBay that it eats in to what you get for the item so I don;t often eBay bigger items.

We were selling every other weekend at a swap meet that was just getting started, indoors and heated in a hanger at a municipal airport.  It's in a fairly industrial area.  I sold power tools like crazy there, at a decent profit.  Sometimes 10 of them in a day, plus assorted small tools and other stuff. 

Anyway, that one went under, not enough vendors to pay the rent on the place unfortunately.  IT was really a bummer because it was a good group of people selling and run by good people.

We moved to another swap meet, farther away, indoors in a huge barn at the fairgrounds.  More traffic, more sellers, and I can;t move tools at all.  There are more vendors with tools of course, but they aren't selling all that many either.  Other stuff moves there better than at the first place of course, like I got a good price for an airsoft gun that no one had even looked at at the other place.

Also the people that buy at this one are much cheaper.  If I have something that retails at $200 marked at $25 people will try to get me to sell it for $5 then act all insulted when I won't sell for that.  That never happened at the other place.

It's not really a storage auction though.  We also go to bankruptcy auctions. in this case it was a big electrical contractor that had gone under.  This auction overall was our best one ever.  The first, and fasted, good hit from it was the contents of a bunch of shelves in a conex container, bought for $75 (not the container though).  We are using the shelves in our warehouse, sold about $200 in scrap metal, another couple hundred in tools, and a tractor part that went for $100 minutes after buying the lot.  $75 into a little over $500 seemed great, but that wasn;t the best thing.

I also bought a cabinet full of stuff, normal aluminum cabinet you might find in an office, for $100 - mostly because I wanted the cabinet and figured I'd make a little on the contents..  It had a computer we kept, and a bunch of small items that went for about $200.  It also had these three gas detector things that I didn't know anything about at the time.  I little research and the right contact (and a little luck) and these NETTED us $1500 after being refurbished. 

$100 into about $1700.  Made up for the time I turned a $400 locker into two dump runs at $20 a piece and maybe $30 in sales.

I've seen bidding go crazy on units with empty TV boxes a few times.  There was one at one of those pods places, opened it up and a huge flat screen box was right in front.  A few of us shined our lights through the little handle hole on the side and the box was clearly empty.  The rest was boxes, conveniently marked "clothes", "bathroom", "kids" and such.

I forget what it went for, but I think is was close to $2K, the TV new wouldn't have cost that.  Didn;t get to see the look on the buyers face when they found the box empty.  Would have been nice to see.

I just shave the 10% off my max bid.  If I figure it's a hundred dollar unit I only go to 90.  Generally I avoid professional auctioneers, but sometimes I have to deal with them.

I to wish people would boycott auction, for this reason or any.  The fewer the merrier.

Safe was just person papers of course, but it was fun to find. 

We have a ton of this La Creusette and Fiestaware stuff.  Seems absurd what people are willing to pay for the stuff, but I'll certainly be happy to take their money.

There is a set of outdoor furniture made of teak. Table, chairs and a glider type rocking chair thing.  Looks like retail new would be a couple grand so we Right get the price of the unit just from these if we find a buyer.

Tomorrow I'll try to add some pictures.