Coopertition | Maine Antique Digest

Beneath the Surface

We feel like foreign correspondents these days, with many of the observations you read here written on the go, what with scratching odd bits on the back of reading schedules and permission sheets, regularly scrounging around under ketchup packets and outdated registration cards for crusty pens and stubby pencils, and writing by the glow of a low-watt light—all to be typed up later. We are not writing from anywhere exotic, though. Don’t envision reports from Rick’s Café in Casablanca or any other distant locale. We are writing to you from beside the dumpster in stage-door parking lots and from now-defunct elementary school cafeterias, waiting on children (excuse us—young adults) to be finished with what they are doing. (What they are doing seems to be eating truckloads of snacks with their friends and building robots and theater sets.)

One of these “young adults” has gotten particularly interested in robotics, and we were fortunate enough to find a FIRST robotics team in our area that was willing to take middle schoolers on the high school team. FIRST stands for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.” It is an international organization with a multitude of programs for kids from elementary school to high school, designed to introduce young people to a variety of technologies, while also teaching them all the valuable lessons that one gets from team sports—“friendly sportsmanship, respect for the contributions of others, teamwork, learning, and community involvement,” as the organization’s website puts it.

As a result, our previous conversations about the provenance of blanket chests, the latest industry gossip, and the geometric limitations of the van’s rear door have been replaced with all kinds of new acronyms, such as CAN (Controller Area Network) and PDH (Power Distribution Hub). Why doesn’t the antiques business have more acronyms? This seems like a shortcoming. We need to create an insider jargon! Stat! Of course, no one likes BP (Buyer’s Premium). How about NASW (Not Another Spinning Wheel)? Or MHS (More Heavy Stuff)? We continue to be annoyingly slow at learning all these acronyms and abbreviations, and using all these acronyms and abbreviations is also annoying, but we were much quicker to pick up on some of the FIRST principles, including the idea of “coopertition” (a combination of cooperation and competition).The idea has been around for a while, but FIRST actually holds the copyright on that particular version.

Coopertition goes hand in hand with the other key concept FIRST kids learn: gracious professionalism, which is the idea that when we act with respect, empathy, and kindness, we encourage the best in everyone. Coopertition does not mean you do not compete; you actually compete fiercely. Coopertition means acknowledging that you are really competing only when your competition has everything they need to be successful too. After all, if we believe that the act of competition strengthens competitors and makes us all better, then that happens only if we have opponents who demand our best attributes as we demand theirs. A win against someone who is unable to compete fully would not really be a win, and a victory that is not really a victory does nothing to improve the skills of the victorious. FIRST challenges are designed to encourage cooperation between teams in the arena, with activities having built-in additional points awarded when a score is achieved through cooperation between teams.

If you watch NASCAR, it is very similar to the efforts of all drivers on a team to ensure the best possible outcome for each other. Sure, you want to win, but if you can’t, then the next best thing is a win for another driver on your team, and as a driver, you drive in a way that supports your other team members.

When we first learned about these concepts, we realized that the antiques business is cutting edge! The antiques business is all about coopertition! It is the lifeblood of our business and explains some of the stranger stuff we have done over the years. For example, recently, Andrew (let’s call him Auctioneer #1) purchased a bunch of things from two auction houses, both several hours away from us and from each other. He was trying to work out how to manage a long day on the road to make a big loop (one of his “I’m going to swing through Chicago on the way to St. Louis” trips) and to deliver some things that Auctioneer #2, an old friend, had purchased from us. (You’re not alone if you’re hearing the old joke “Two antiques dealers were stranded on a desert island—business was brisk.” Hollie laughs at this stuff a lot.) When Andrew called our friend, Auctioneer #2, to set up a time to bring over his stuff and also to pick up our stuff, our friend said he was not available that day. He was actually planning to go pick up some stuff from a third auctioneer, henceforth to be creatively known as Auctioneer #3. So Auctioneer #2 agreed to pick up our stuff, and we agreed to just bring him his stuff, and he and Andrew met up at Auctioneer #3’s place and just swapped! Confused? So is our Google calendar and our GPS, but that is coopertition!

We try to do this regularly ourselves, especially around shows. We started our auction careers working for others as representatives at shows, chatting with people on the floor about upcoming sales. We went everywhere from Nashville to New Hampshire, collecting business cards, introducing ourselves, and trying to learn. Before very long it seemed to make sense that if we were making the trip anyway, we would offer to bring consignments back as well. We still do this today. If you buy items from one of our auctions, we can bring your purchases to the show next week! In fact, we made the trip to Nashville a few weeks ago with the van and a rental car, because we were delivering too much stuff to pack both children and all objects into the van alone. So we went down with a loaded van and came back with a loaded van (we opted to make room for the children to come home with us), bringing back pick-ups, purchases, and a couple of items a friend picked up from an auction on the other side of Ohio for us. And yes, it actually was more convenient for them to haul it to Nashville so we could pick it up there!

Dealers know this about each other too. You know who is “on the team” and who isn’t. There are always people who park in the aisles and seem oblivious to the struggles of others to get around them, but there are far more people who will lend a stepladder or a drill, who will watch your booth while you run out for a bathroom break, or who will say, “If you like cast-iron toys, make sure you catch that guy along the back wall!” There is nothing more endearing than seeing all the help that comes out of the woodwork when someone is in a rush to get home to deal with an emergency. Vans get loaded in record time.

Dealers and auctioneers are locked in coopertition. They are competing for both buyers and sellers, but auctioneers need dealers to make sure things sell for market-rate prices, and dealers could hardly ask for a more efficient way to find new material than auctions. Competition gets a little heated sometimes, but it is undeniable that coopertition is what drives the whole industry forward.

It’s fascinating how woven we are into community without realizing it. We tend to think of ourselves as a community of individualists—all self-employed, setting our own agendas, managing our own time. No cookie-cutter, corporate cogs here. We do things our own way!

But do we really? We are a tightly networked community. (If you don’t think so, then hang around during a show setup or an auction, while everyone is updating everyone else on whose spouse is recovering from surgery, who had their van broken into, and who just bought what in New York. It sometimes sounds like a grownup version of high school hallways.) One of the first things we often do when we meet new dealers is try to place them in the context of other dealers, auctioneers, or shows that we know. We ask, “Where are you from?”; “Do you do other shows in this area?”; “Do you know so-and-so?” We always have the expectation that we know some of the same people, because we usually do.

Further evidence that we aren’t as independent as we think is that we have all these antiques shows and malls. They are a significant percentage of the antiques marketplace. Why? Because we know that more of us together is a bigger draw. When shows started to have less traffic, we created online communities and collector groups—again, places of gathering, if only virtually. If we did not believe in community, we would just post on our own social media accounts that we were setting up in our garages on Saturday from 9 to 3 and call it a day, but we know that we gain from participating in a collective, which is why all the big national shows are actually multiple shows. Take Nashville, for instance. Four shows, all competing for buyers, but also all cooperating to draw them in. They stagger the opening times of the shows and even do some collective marketing! That’s coopertition at its best.

The English poet John Donne said that no man is an island. (Let’s just move from technology to antiques to John Donne. Hope you’re wearing your seat belts, folks!) Human strength lies in our ability to innovate and to adapt but also in our ability to collaborate and to cooperate. Despite working for small, independent businesses for decades, we know that success is not a solo effort. These pages, the shows and auctions we love, the very marketplace we work in, and on down to the little things that fill our walls and shelves all exist because of a sustained collective effort that all of us engaged in the coopertition in this little corner of the world see as necessary and valuable, and we are grateful you are here with us. It is very easy to become so busy that we get pulled more tightly into our own daily lives. To say that we are better and stronger together might sound like a cliché, an old-fashioned idea, but like the old stuff we live with, those old ideas we carry are still here for a reason.