Pinehurst, N.C. — Moore County in the North Carolina Sand Hills is best known as a golf mecca. Check it out on Google Maps for yourself: There are golf courses everywhere. The Pinehurst Resort, with eight of its own courses, has hosted the U.S. Open twice, and will host the U.S. Women's and Men's Opens back-to-back in 2014.

The nearly year-round nice weather that made it a mecca for golf also makes it a mecca for retirees — Pinehurst came in fourth in Money Magazine's recent listing of the 25 best places to retire — and that makes it a mecca for stuff. Not just golf stuff, though there's plenty of that: spiked shoes, rain suits, golf umbrellas, golf books, golf memorabilia, golf art, new golf clubs, used golf clubs, vintage golf clubs, antique golf clubs, etc. The area also attracts all sorts of other stuff: dining room tables, turkey fryers, Parcheesi and Scrabble games, Hollywood bed frames, patio furniture, ironing boards, waffle irons, lawn mowers, toss pillows, picture frames and so forth.

"There is, in fact, an enormous amount of stuff here," Kathleen Howard of Michael's Auction in Southern Pines says. "What you might call a glut."

In that respect, it's a lot like the rest of America, only more so. It's what the rest of America could look like if the recession ever ends and we go back to shopping like there's no tomorrow.

A new cohort of retirees arrives every year. Drawn by the sun and the Carolina-blue sky and the nice weather and the 46-and-counting golf courses, most of them with nice new houses clustered along the fairways, they move down here to Pinehurst, or Southern Pines next door, or Whispering Pines just up route 22, or Aberdeen a couple of miles south on 15-501.

They leave the snow shovels and snow tires and sacks of Sno-Melt behind in Westchester, New Canaan, Waukegan, Minneapolis. They get rid of tired family room sofas, Naugahyde chairs patched with duct tape, the kids' old bunk beds, spoons chewed up by the Dispos-All, snow boots and mittens, cracked teapots, moth-eaten sweaters, unmatched jelly glasses, old pressure-cookers, meat grinders that haven't been used in years. But they don't come empty-handed — far from it. Trundling along behind them come moving vans jam-packed with the good stuff, the nice living room furniture, the antique breakfronts and secretaries, crystal champagne flutes, monogrammed dessert plates, great-grandma's whatnot shelves, the good china, the wedding silver, the giant flat-screen TV, the trophy gas grill.

They settle in and live the good life for 10 or 15 or 20 years, and then they downsize, move to a smaller place, or a retirement community, or assisted living, or back to Albany to live with their daughters. Or else they die.

Most of their stuff outlives them. It has to go somewhere. Their kids already have stuff of their own. So their stuff goes to auction, or is sold at tag sales, or is consigned to consignment shops or donated to thrift shops. It's a massive, complicated, ongoing redistribution of stuff.

And it shows you some interesting things. For one, your treasures aren't worth what you thought. Most people already have too much stuff of their own, so they're not willing to pay much for yours. For another, people may enjoy watching Betty Draper's elegant dinner parties on "Mad Men," but nobody wants to live that way anymore.

Rita Briskie and her children organized a giant yard sale to empty her house in Whispering Pines before she moved to Lake Placid to live with her daughter. She and her husband moved down here from Westchester County, N.Y., in 1994; he died last December. She says it's been "a wonderful place to live," and "the happiest time" of her life. Her children and grandchildren are keeping the things that have memories; the rest had to go. But where? "Everybody here already has all this stuff," she says, with a gesture that took in the neighborhood.

She had one stroke of luck: The house next door had just sold. The new people came over the first day of the sale and bought her whole Carolina room. But she admits it broke her heart when her son put a 25-cent price tag on a figurine of three little mice she remembered buying for $34.95.

"Down here everybody entertains," she says. But not the way people used to, with good china and real silver and crystal candlesticks. At the Friday night auction at Michael's, a dozen glass dessert plates monogrammed CYCfail to bring an opening bid of $1. An elegant platter with a wide band of 22-carat gold and eight matching cake plates, once the pride of somebody's china closet, are withdrawn when nobody will bid $5 for the lot. "It can't go in the microwave, and it can't go in the dishwasher," Kathleen Howard explains later. "What are you going to do with it?"

There's no market for fine china unless it's collectible — i.e., has a famous name. You can sell Limoges, "but it has to be the right Limoges."

Logos sell, but they have to be the right logos. A silent valet — one of those stands with a place to hang a suit coat and a pair of trousers and a little tray for cuff links and a wallet — is withdrawn when nobody bids $5, despite its slightly worn gilt logo from Tripler's, a long-gone Madison Avenue haberdasher that in its day was stuffier and more expensive than Brooks Brothers.

With so many people downsizing, Howard says, small tables are "enormously popular." But forget big pieces of furniture: They sit around and don't sell and take up space, and that's expensive.

She says she feels bad when people come in after a parent has died, wanting to sell the household goods from the estate. She'd like to be able to help, but "we don't need any more old Tupperware."

Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.