American Pickers' Mike Wolfe Bought A TV Motel Clock With Broken Neon For $325
Do you ever feel like time is getting away from you? Like you're treading purposelessly on an unending slog through a joyless swamp where decay is the only constant? Exhausted by the thought of another day, grinding down what's left of the cartilage in your joints just for the opportunity to do it all again tomorrow, with each passing second slipping through your fingers like grains of quicksilver sand?
Then maybe you need a better alarm clock, like the one that Mike Wolfe bought for $325 on the hit series and occasional feud factory "American Pickers."
Back in 2016, in Season 15 of "American Pickers," Wolfe and then-co-host Frank Fritz headed into the warehouse collection of Texas collectors Danny and Max. "When Danny says 'we're gonna go pick somebody that creates art,' that gets my juices flowing," Wolfe tells the camera in an opening testimonial, which probably sounded less gross in his head. The collectors had quite a pile of whatnots stacked and sorted in their shared space, including one very special clock.
Mike Wolfe saw the value of a broken clock
The first thing that caught Mike Wolfe's eye in the Season 15 "American Pickers" bonus web segment titled "The Art of the Pick" was a big old clock — we're talking somewhere in the 18 to 24-inch size range, the kind of clock you could really clock someone with.
More than just a timepiece that would break your toes if you dropped it, the clock in question was a slice of Americana — a relic of a time when radio stations might advertise on big, neon clocks outside of a motel, and motel made sure to let passers-by know that the establishment had a television inside. The original collector revealed that he bought it from a local motel in San Antonio, and mused that Texans would be interested in owning something Texas-made.
Even missing the transformer necessary to get the clock's neon working, Wolfe knew that the vintage timepiece was a winner. After a quick back-and-forth of haggling between $300 and $350, a price was agreed upon: $325. Wolfe claimed that he would be able to get $525 from interested collectors, hypothetically netting the picker a sizeable $200 profit.