VintageGent’s Menswear Daily

Find the Missing Elephant in the Room

If you lose an antique, there were only a few ways to possibly prove it was yours and get it back. The first way is if you are filthy rich and own the chair George Washington used to drink his coffee in, there is only one of those and probably an anecdotal record in the antique world about who owns it. The second is to show photos of the item in the background of family photos to prove it is yours. I don’t know what the third one is. You can’t walk into a Home for Wayward Cell Phones or the Candlestick Town and go pick it back up.

TrackItBack is a service that is attempting to help people recover lost items. They say that the top reasons why someone doesn’t return an item is because there is no way to identify the owner. If a cell phone loses its charge, the owner cannot call it to attempt to locate it, for example. The other reason people don’t return found items is due to a language barrier. There was once a case of a found dog where the finder called the owner and couldn’t communicate to them the proper information on where to meet.

The service motivates people to return an item in several ways.  Firstly, there is a sticker affixed with instructions on calling TrackItBack toll free or registering the item on their website. TrackItBack then contacts the rightful owner and facilitates the return of the item from anywhere in the world.. They provide a reward to the finder as incentive, that the owner does not have to dish out.  The finder than receives a gift of TrackItBack labels from the company to try it for themselves.     It is like a microchip for just about anything else that doesn’t have four legs.  I meant anything with four legs that breathes, as antique tables apparently have four legs as well, but are a bit more challenging to misplace. You would be surprised, as I could probably manage to do it.