I was broke. Well let me rephrase that. I was a graduate student. So I guess you could say I was ‘comfortably broke’. My home was rented out to two other less broke students and I had plans to convert part of my garage into yet another bedroom so that I could hopefully get another $400 in monthly income. You could say that it was a beautiful time since I had a scholarship and no real responsibilities. But academia and me were not really meant to be. I had plans…
And none of it involved sitting in a class and listening to professor after professor talk about theories. The theoretical world of ‘how things should work’ was pretty much the dogshit of my program. You couldn’t help stepping in it and despite all the earnestness and goodwill of my education professors, I realized that their work wouldn’t have any genuine impact on any of us who were pretending to listen or the students they would later teach. Especially since everything they said was laced with the politics du jour (mostly PC, social justice and affirmative action for the 21st century). So like any arrogant student with too much free time I decided to pursue what I enjoyed.
Auctions. It was a complete addiction at that point. Every day I was combing through the classifieds and legals trying to find one. In the mornings I would visit the yard sales of the affluent and apathetic trying to find a good deal. Then I would sell it later that evening at auctions while taking my all too tolerant girlfriend out to enjoy it all. She actually did. It was fun to buy bikes, antiques (cheap ones), and jewelry that were uncoveted by one and see it competitively bid on by the many. But after a few months it just became mildly amusing work.
The kicker was when I bought 400 gallons of paint from a closed down Ace hardware store for $100. Nobody wanted to buy so much paint and it was being sold ‘all for one money’. As a young guy I couldn’t figure out why I got such a great deal along with a $20 paint color machine and a few $5 paint can shakers. I had the later two items sold within a few hours to an equipment wholesaler I knew. The profit would cover beer and groceries for the next few weeks. But what would I do with all that paint?
Well the first thing I had to do is stick as much as possible in the beat up old Camry. Pretty soon my car was a low rider with about 35 to 40 paint cans at a time placed in every odd angle. I had made a list of every weekly auction in North Georgia and rural Alabama and I proceeded to visit as many as possible with the paint in tow. The auctioneer gave me 30 days to get all of it out of the store and I was happy to oblige.
Most places made me a little money. Some didn’t even have more than two bidders. Then I found an equipment auction in Rockmart, GA and brought everything out there. Three hours of driving yielded only about 40 cans at a time. But pretty soon I got it all there for their big anniversary sale. I asked the auctioneer to sell it at ‘choice’ and then after everyone got their pick sell it for ‘times the money’ since I had realized by that time that most folks are not good with math. I was also dead bone tired from hauling around so many gallons of paint and wanted to get the best return for all that effort.
It worked… but not really. I made nearly $600 but I had spent at least four full days hauling, driving, unloading, and wasting gas on the whole deal. Surely there had to be a better way to make a living. Less than a week later I found one. It was a public auto auction in North Georgia. This was a time where about a third of the vehicles sold at public sales were actually good compared to the two to three percent of today. I bought a 13 year old Honda Civic for $500. Owned by a teacher who had traded it in for a Saturn (you could get ownership histories fairly easily at the time), the 1986 base model offered A/C, a radio, a four-speed manual and power nothing. It was perfect.
I borrowed a friend’s digital camera and spent about 15 minutes photographing it. Spent an hour typing up a glorious soliloquy of pithy summations and let Ebay do the rest. A week later it sold to a Polish PhD student from Emory, the very same school I was a student at, for $1576. No dead bone tired. No 16 hours worth of driving. Just a few pictures and a paycheck. From that moment forward I was transfixed on making any cheap beater car work for me.
Selling used cars I’m sure can be good money, but I would think it would get old doing so, especially in any organized fashion.
Two years ago I was shopping for used Cherokees, which included several small town, family run used car lots. I can see why these guys got into the business. They never have to own their own cars but just drive home what is on the lot, along with sitting around drinking coffee and bs’ing all day. They buy the cars at auctions, pay a punk kid to clean them up, then sell them to someone for more money that doesn’t know any better. Should be simple!
I loved seeing these dealer’s “techniques” first hand, such as pictures of Jesus plastered all over their office, the family photo on their desk (probably a picture printed from Google), asking me how much do I want to pay a month (which shut him up when I said I’d pay cash), told me their own mechanic has given it a close inspection and serviced it (when later I pointed out that the Jeep didn’t stop!), and the classic one was “I’ve got someone on their way right now to buy it unless you want to make me an offer.” Really?!
Of course new car dealers aren’t much different… come to think of it.
400 gallons of paint?? Bet all your friends started calling you “Sherwin”.
Thanks for telling us more of your story – always interetsting, Steven.
I know very little about public auctions. Why the drop in decent cars available (1/3 to nuttin’)?
Glad to hear you got away from the PC “education” professors/theorists and into work of more benefit to society.
Oh, and that “times the money” thing always confused me too. Is that why auctioneers do it?
I love the guys like AJ who think they are “smart” buyers. Trust me, I make a ton of profit on the “smart” buyers too. I will not accept anything less than $2000 gross on any deal I desk. Even then that sonly after I have come in and worked the customer. I like my salesman to make at least $1000 if they are going to sell a used car. We are a small family run store and average just under 100 units a month with about 40 used car deals. With our market adjustment addendum, we even do well on our new cars. I don’t care if the car has been sitting on the lot for 6 months.
Love it.
Did you paint your cars using a brush?
Buy low, sell high. If you break even increase the quantity.
Used-car sellers must despise me. I lowered the price I asked for a 1991 Previa with repairs done until I let it go for $500, a steal for the buyer.
A nice young man from Iowa just starting his family with a newly-birthed baby and and nice wife.
Good, decent folks.
I knew I was correct in my assumption while at the mechanic who was checking out the vehicle, mentioning a few minor repairs but declaring that the asking price was a good one.
Oh heck.
To assist the fine lad I said give me $300 and wear your seat belt and have a wonderful life.
He said “No.”
I think it’s worth more and you said $500 and that’s what I want to pay you.
$500 and off he went.
The proud owner of a “Bean” and I hope it did him well.
I even tossed in the snow tires already mounted upon Previa wheels.
Greed doesn’t rule/run everything, not that there is anything wrong with making a profit.
Maybe if some sort of “karma” exists (though I doubt it) perhaps I received a couple karma points.
Or I was just a fool.
Oh well.
The deal. Nothing like it. There’s one thing that capitalism has over socialism – it’s fun to turn a profit.
Sometimes it’s as complicated as manufacturing a consumer item, or as simple as leveraging a price differential, as Steven does with his used cars. Either way, it’s a gas when you make money on a deal.
The key, I suppose, is identifying two things: value and a market. One mans trash is another’s treasure. It’s trite, but true.
Years ago, at an auto show, I grabbed a handful of fact cards for the special edition Hot Wheels Pontiac Grand Am. Pontiac realized that many (most?) Hot Wheels collectors are grown men, so they made a full size Hot Wheels car for sale. Now to most people, it’s just scrap cardstock, suitable for recycling? Who would want a hype sheet from a car no longer made from a company no longer in business? Hot Wheels collectors, that’s who. We’re talking grown men who bribe KMart managers so they can get first crack at the new shipments. To someone like that, the Grand Am cards aren’t trash, they’re a cool item to put in one of your display cases behind your Hot Wheels models (still safely blister packed). Priced at a buck a piece, it’s a cheap impulse purchase. Pontiac may be dead, but I’ve yet to come across a Hot Wheels collector who hasn’t wanted one (or a dozen).
@Steve
I guess MAs in education have not changed much over the years. A good friend of mine last night was complaining about how theoretical (as opposed to practical) the education MAs were.
This is not a problem limited to MAs, either. A few months ago I was having a drink with some old hands at metalworking; they complained the new crop of engineers had exactly the same flaws. Very good at designing things on paper, but then the metalworkers usually had to alter the plans they were given. If they didn’t then nothing the engineers actually designed for them would actually work.
It’s that practical vs. theoretical divide again, like in Shop Class as Soulcraft.
Ronnie, your post reminds me of the Beanie Babies collectors. My mother has moved on from that these days. But back in the heyday she had dozens of them. She collected the hard-to-find ones, and found herself (with my retired dad in tow) waiting in lines and getting to know salespeople on a first-name basis. He got into it too, but I suspect it’s more because he adores her and not so much that he was into beanie-babies. As the Cheap Trick song goes, “Mommy’s all right, Daddy’s all right…”
She was not overly crazy about her collection, but she certainly became an “expert” on them, and even had a program on their PC to catalog the Beanies. If anybody had produced any type of posters or cards, my mother may have gotten them, especially if they were not too large or obnoxious.
I myself have a small collection of model vehicles: My three “Pinewood Derby” cars from Boy Scouts, each of them a trophy winner in it’s respective year. Those are special to me because my dad helped me make them, and they are on display in my home office today. My collection also includes a Hot Wheels knock-off type of car (brand called “Johnny Lightning”) of the Mach 5 from “Speed Racer”, and an assortment of die-cast Corvettes, Ferraris, and a Dodge Prowler, which I always liked (but would never actually want to own).
My collection is “brand agnostic”; ie, not Hot Wheels or anything, but I am quite selective about anything I buy. And I never EVER leave one in the blister pack. I don’t even save the blister pack! I understand the collectors’ fetish with this practice, but cannot bring myself to leave ANYTHING in the original box unless my intention is to take it back to the store or give it as a gift. To me, they should be on display and they should be occasionally dusted off and sometimes held in the hands and admired.
Leaving one in the blister pack seems to me like always having a deflector shield protecting it. Protection is good, but keeping my Batmobile in the original blister pack would be a sad thing; like putting plastic covering over the couch in the living room, which is a bit creepy, sort of like having a perma-condom on the couch. Eww.