Master Pickers: CV Trading Post
Steve Ayers
Staff Reporter
CAMP VERDE - Marc Johnson is a picker.
At least that’s the term some use for those ambitious enough to spend their days rummaging through yard sales, estate sales, rummage sales and auctions in search of treasures, then flipping them for a profit.
In Johnson’s case he has been doing it most of his life, and in fact put himself through college, one treasure at a time, in his younger days.
“It wasn’t called pickin’ in those days. It was called dumpster diving. Today it’s fashionable. Back then it wasn’t…” jokes Johnson.
These days he does it as much for fun as profit, having retired from the career track his college education, bought and paid for from one man’s junk, got him.
And nowadays he doesn’t have to do as much pickings Now that he has a storefront, a lot of the stuff comes to his door.
Johnson and his business partners Chris O’Brian and Jeremiah Quintanilla are the owners of the CV Trading Post located at 873 Howards Road, just east of White Bridge on State Route 260.
It looks much as one would imagine a trading post owned by three veteran pickers would look.
The shelves are packed with collectables, for some of which one would wonder what the attraction is.
“There is a collector for almost everything,” Johnson says as he shows off a jewelry case made by a prisoner at some penal institution somewhere, made entirely of Popsicle sticks.
Among the treasures is a dummy bomb once dropped by an aspiring pilot, Barbie dolls dressed in designer outfits autographed by the designer and a chunk of polished stone containing a school of fossilized squid. There are also arrowheads, comic books and a Nazi helmet.
It is, in O’Brian’s words, “like a mini-museum around here.”
Johnson and his partners don’t own all the stuff. Some of it is on consignment. And they will buy, sell or trade for just about anything that interests them. And not all of it is sold over the counter.
“We do a lot of business over the Internet. It’s like a planetary yard sale and it definitely gives a little store in backwater Camp Verde a worldwide clientele,” he says.
CV Trading Post is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday through Sunday and by appointment. Their Website is CVTradingPost.com. Call (520) 261-5118 for an appointment.
