Travels with Charley - Steinbeck on Antiques

I just finished reading John Steinbeck's travelogue Travels with Charley, In Search of America. Towards the beginning a bit jumped out at me as a seller of items found here and about. It made me think of the selling online that many of us do, finding treasures here and selling them to others all over the world.

He wrote:

I can never get used to the thousands of antique shops along the roads, all
bulging with authentic and attested trash from an earlier time. I believe
the population of the thirteen colonies was less than four million souls, and
every one of them must have been frantically turning out tables, chairs, china,
glass, candle molds, and oddly shaped bits of iron, copper, and brass for future
sale to twentieth-century tourists. There are enough antiques for sale
along the roads of New England alone to furnish the houses of a population of
fifty million. If I were a good businessman, and cared a tittle for my
unborn great grandchildren, which I do not, I would gather all the junk and the
wrecked automobiles, comb the city dumps, and pile these gleanings in mountains
and spray the whole thing with that stuff the Navy uses to mothball ships.
At the end of a hundred years by descendants would be permitted to open this
treasure trove and would be the antique kings of the world. If the
battered, cracked, and broken stuff our ancestors tried to get rid of now brings
this much money, think what a 1954 Oldsmobile, or a 1960 toastmaster will bring
- and a vintage Waring Mixor - Lord the possibilities are endless! Things
we have to pay to have hauled away would bring fortunes.