Wichita’s own version of ‘Storage Wars’ leads to a Treasure Depot

Wichita has its own version of “Storage Wars” with a couple of jokesters who have found a way to have some fun and make some money in retirement.

Jamie Schoenhoff and Shannon Burton have opened Treasure Depot in Delano to sell whatever items they find by buying contents of unclaimed or unpaid storage units.

“Honestly, it’s kind of like a treasure hunt,” Schoenhoff said. “You really don’t know what you have.”

Schoenhoff, who retired from law enforcement in 2019, has been running the business from his garage for the past several years.

“If not for my organizational skills, my garage would have been labeled a dump site,” he said. “Tetris taught me a lot, too.”

Then Burton, who retired from running car dealerships, got involved.

In retirement, he said he’d already painted the entire inside of his house once.

“I wasn’t going to take the chance of doing that again.”

The two decided to open a 6,000-square-foot storefront at 1440 W. Douglas next to NuWay.

The store’s grand opening was Saturday, right near the Shamrock and on the same day as the Paddy Day Parade in Delano, “which was the most clever idea ever,” Schoenhoff said.

Customers were so excited to buy, he said, “It was like fishermen in Alaska catching salmon.”

The store is a bit deceiving at first. It’s packed with all kinds of items in a front area and a side room, but then it opens onto an even bigger stocked warehouse space.

“That’s where people are taken back,” Schoenhoff said.

Items range from as cheap as $1 for a cat toy to more expensive, such as $3,000 for an octagonal mirror.

A stringed harp, a Greek bouzouki and an electric guitar were some of the first items sold on Saturday.

“Those three went really fast,” Schoenhoff said.

There are all kinds of storage units nationally whose contents are for sale in bulk online, though the Treasure Depot guys mainly shop in a 500-mile radius of Wichita

Schoenhoff said a lot of the time “it’s me cussing behind the screen of a computer.”

He and Burton pay a percentage up front, and if people claim and pay to retrieve their units before Schoenhoff and Burton can pick up their purchases, they’re reimbursed for their deposits.

They “don’t get the heartache back, though,” Schoenhoff said.

As much as customers may be surprised at what Treasure Depot carries, so are Schoenhoff and Burton.

A friend of Burton’s wanted a pocket knife, and Burton was going to just let him have one he’d purchased from a storage unit. Then he did some checking on it and learned the knife is worth almost $700.

“Little things like that are just amazing,” he said. “Something that sits in a tub.”

His friend politely declined to take the expensive knife, so Burton gave him a different one.

The store has a big variety of merchandise at any given time, such as boat bumpers, Pokemon cards and furniture.

“When I tell you we have everything, we really do,” Schoenhoff said.

Sometimes, a storage unit might be a bust, but others come through in big ways.

At an Oklahoma City unit, the guys found themselves with 680 50-gallon trash cans.

What they didn’t know until they hauled them all out was that there was $10,000 worth of furniture behind the cans.

That may sound great, but Schoenhoff said, “I was already exhausted when we found that furniture, so I really wasn’t that happy.”

It can be a tiring business for the two since they’re both over 50.

However, if all goes well, they plan to work even harder by opening more stores in Wichita and elsewhere.

Burton joked and asked isn’t that the goal, “to retire and just work harder than you ever have in your life?”