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Let me fill you in.

When you rent a storage unit from a storage company, if you start missing payments, the storage facility will make an effort to track you down to try to get you to pay what you owe. Failing that, the storage company then puts up the contents of your storage unit up for auction.

This show is about a group of people who bid on these auctions. For the most part they’re owners of their own thrift stores and they rely on winning these storage unit auctions to help fill their store inventory with second hand goods (furniture, toys, tools, clothes, etc). The one exception is Barry Weiss who is a multi-millionaire. He doesn’t own a thrift store. Rather, he attends and bids on these auctions simply because he is on the hunt for the rare, collectible treasures that can sometimes be found in these storage units. When he finds such a treasure that he likes, he doesn’t resell it. Rather he keeps it for himself at his home.

The fakery of the show comes from the scripted banter between the auction bidders, portraying them as constantly sniping at each other and turning these rather mundane auctions into some sort of macho pissing contest.

Another part of the fakery is the planting (called salting) of rare, collectible, and valuable items within the units for the winning bidders to find amongst all the junk inside the unit. People who have been taking part in storage unit auctions for many years say that 90 percent of the storage units up for auction are filled with worthless junk. Only about 10 percent of the units contain that rare treasure. But in the show the bidders are ALWAYS finding these rare, collectible, and valuable items (antique furniture, hundreds or thousands of dollars in cash, safes filled with valuable coin collections, antique jewelry, rare collectible toys, valuable paintings, etc).

One of the regulars on the show, Dave Hester, after a couple seasons became concerned that the planting of items and staging of these auctions could possibly be illegal and took his concerns to the producers who fired him. Dave has turned around and sued for wrongful dismissal and in his lawsuit has revealed the act of the shows producers salting storage units with rare, valuable items.