After the day's auctions are completed, the winning bidders sort through the lockers, estimating the prices they will set on the contents and/or consulting with experts for an appraisal of unusual items.

He provides a quick explanation of the show's premise at the beginning and does a recap of the featured buyers' profits or losses at the end of each episode.

He has stated that the series avoids delving into behind-the-scenes stories of the lockers' original owners because "all you see is misery there, and I didn't want to trade on that".

[2] The show enjoyed ratings success, and its second-season premiere attracted 5.1 million total viewers, making it the most-watched program in A&E's history to that point.

Hester has had confrontations with the other main buyers, especially Darrell and Brandon Sheets, and is known to frequently raise bids when somebody else wants to buy a storage unit.

He makes his living by selling items from his purchased lockers at his weekly swap meet, and through his online store.

[17][18] In an interview, Sheets indicated that some of his biggest finds in lockers included a sizable comic book collection, four drawings by Pablo Picasso, and a letter written by Abraham Lincoln that sold for over US$15,000.

In the season-two special "Unlocked: Sell High", Darrell revealed that he once found a plastic-wrapped human corpse in a storage locker.

In the season three finale, Darrell bought a locker for $3,600, which was discovered to have contained many pieces of original artwork by Frank Gutierrez.

On April 24, 2014, A&E premiered the special Brandi & Jarrod: Married to the Job, which focuses on the two balancing running their business and raising their two children.

A former mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter and arena football player[30] , he owns the Grandma's Attic thrift store in Palmdale, California.

A native of Germany, Rene owned the Bargain Hunters thrift store in Poway, California near San Diego until its closing in 2021.

By trade, both Dahan and Registre are insurance brokers; they often attend auctions in their spare time, having developed a love of vintage collectibles at a young age.

The pair also run a YouTube channel called "Thrifters Anonymous", where they document items found in either storage units or thrift stores.

Since starting, Bryant has used the profits from the units he has purchased to help buy his mother a new home and also employed his older brother.

Brown and Karlinger also made an uncredited appearance in the episode "Jurassic Bark" where they pranked Dave Hester and earned the nickname the "tank top twins".

[43] They appeared five times in the fourth season in the episodes "Oysters on the Half Plate", "The Shrining", "The French Job", "There's No Place Like Homeland", and "Total Wine Domination".

Earl and Johan Graham are a father-daughter auctioneer team, who appeared in six episodes in season four, as the network tried to shake up the show by introducing some new cast members.

[47][48] Critical response was mixed, with Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times calling Storage Wars "a strangely uplifting show – hope being one of the many things one can apparently find in an abandoned storage unit,"[49] and Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times called the series "an especially entertaining addition to the genre.

"[51] Writing for Slate magazine, Troy Patterson gave a mixed review, referring to the series as "trash TV" as well as "trivial and magnetic.

[3] The combined season premiere outperformed competing original episodes of NBC's Love in the Wild and ABC's Primetime Nightline.

[56] Executive producer Thom Beers has stated that the vast majority of the storage lockers investigated during production contain nothing of interest and therefore do not appear in the final show.

[9] However, Beers admitted that half of the lines are scripted, and so is moving items between storage lockers purchased by the same person.

[57] In December 2012, a main auction buyer, Dave Hester, filed a lawsuit against A&E and Original Productions, claiming that the producers staged entire units, planted items in lockers after having them appraised weeks in advance, and funneled cash to weaker teams to buy lockers that they could not have otherwise afforded.

The suit claims that Hester and other cast members met with network officials to express concerns that those actions violated federal laws[58] that are intended to prevent viewers from being deceived when watching a show involving intellectual skills.

[59][60][61] In January 2013, rather than deny the accusations, A&E responded by stating that its composition of the show is covered by the First Amendment and that Hester's claims do not apply; the network also said that the Communications Act of 1934 is inapplicable to cable television, which did not exist in 1934, and that the TV format of Storage Wars involves no "chance", "intellectual knowledge", or "intellectual skill" and so is not a game show.

A&E also stated that there are "notable inconsistencies in [Hester's] exaggerated self-portrait", referring to his claims of value on the items that he finds in lockers.

The court ruled that Hester "can move forward with the wrongful termination portion of his wide-ranging lawsuit against A&E and the producers of Storage Wars.

"[64] On July 15, 2014, it was announced that Hester and A&E came to a settlement,[citation needed] setting the stage for his return to the show on August 12, 2014.