When you see clean, late-model Toyota pickups in the self-service junkyard and nobody cares, you know you're experiencing Clunker Overload.

My local self-service yard, already jammed with customers thanks to the departure of Pick Your Part from the region, now has so many 5-to-10-year-old SUVs, pickups, and minivans that they've been forced to line them up in the paths between rows, door handles touching. How about a spotless '05 Jeep Liberty? Seen it. Early-2000s Explorers? Stack 'em like cordwood! All this value being squandered, much like the long-gone profits Detroit raked in on these behemoths… but soon the clunkers will pass through the system and we'll be back to normal recession-style junkyard inventory.

Send an email to Murilee Martin, the author of this post, at murilee@jalopnik.com.