Antiques Dealers Show At Waukesha Expo Attracts 300+ Collectors; Haggling Over 'Investment Value' Of Porcelain Figurines Lasts 'Entire Afternoon'

WAUKESHA — The 75th annual Wisconsin Antiques Dealers Association Show & Sale opened Thursday morning at the Waukesha County Expo Center, drawing more than 300 collectors through its doors in the first hour alone and filling the Expo's gravel overflow lot to capacity by 10:45 a.m., 45 minutes after doors opened at 10.

Inside, roughly 60 vendor tables stretched across the main hall offering Victorian-era hatpins, 1970s lamp collections still wired for the outlets of their era, and mismatched china sets priced individually by the piece rather than the set, a distinction several vendors said mattered a great deal and most buyers said they did not understand.

By 1 p.m., at least one haggling session over a shelf of ceramic figurines had stretched across four hours with no clear resolution, pausing only twice: once for a vendor-table lunch break, and once when both parties independently agreed to "think about it" and walked separate laps around the hall before returning to the same two figurines.

'Curated Investments'

Dennis Feeney, a dealer from Pewaukee working a table near the hall's east entrance, described his selection of 19th-century ceramic figurines as "curated investments," a phrase he used four separate times over the course of the afternoon. Asked about the provenance of the pieces, Feeney acknowledged that most had come from estate sales within the past two years, including one lot purchased, by his own account, "for eleven dollars at a Pewaukee garage sale on a day I almost didn't go."

"I'm not saying every figurine appreciates. I'm saying the right figurine, in the right light, held by the right person, appreciates."

— Dennis Feeney, antiques dealer, Pewaukee

Margaret Hendricks, 68, of Waukesha's west side, spent $340 over the course of the show on a set of seven ornate brass doorknobs she said she intends to resell within the year. Hendricks said she had researched doorknob values "extensively" on two collector forums and expected the set to appreciate "conservatively 12% annually," a figure she arrived at independently and declined to attribute to any specific source. She said she planned to store the doorknobs in a closet.

'Vintage Security Memorabilia'

Not every vendor was a professional dealer. Ned England, the Backslide Way resident and YouTube personality known to his 420 subscribers as Nedventuresout, rented a table near the hall's loading-dock end to sell what he had labeled, on a hand-lettered sign, "vintage security memorabilia." The inventory consisted primarily of surveillance equipment he said he had accumulated over several years of documenting speeding traffic and a neighbor's parking habits on Backslide Way, including two radar guns, a tripod-mounted spotting scope, and a lawn chair he described as "the command chair."

England said interest was "moderate but respectful" through the first half of the day. He sold one radar gun, the older of the two, for $40 to a buyer he said did not explain what he planned to use it for and whom England chose not to press. He said he was keeping the newer radar gun and the lawn chair "for ongoing operations," and that the spotting scope was not actually for sale but had been placed on the table "for atmosphere."

"This isn't surveillance equipment. This is documentation equipment that happens to be very good at surveillance."

— Ned England, Nedventuresout, Backslide Way resident

Parking, China, Afternoon

By early afternoon, the Expo's main lot and overflow gravel lot were both full, and arriving attendees were directing one another to street parking along nearby Northview Road, a development the show's volunteer parking coordinator described as "ahead of last year's pace by about twenty minutes." Show organizers said attendance was tracking toward a final count exceeding the 2025 show's total, though an official figure was not yet available Thursday afternoon.

Inside, the four-hour figurine negotiation referenced earlier in this article concluded around 4:30 p.m. with a sale, though neither party would disclose the final price. The buyer, who declined to give her full name, said only that she considered the figurines "a long-term hold" and that she did not plan to display them so much as "monitor" them.

The show continues Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Waukesha County Expo Center. Organizers said the mismatched china sets would be repriced "as a lot" starting Saturday, a change several vendors said they expected to cause its own round of haggling.