The Scrapper's Mentality

Published 2015-09-23

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I've dealt with scrap dealers far more than the average human has. That's because I grew up collecting strange computer hardware as a kid — I even worked at a junk store ("Century Twenty One" in the Britannia Plaza, if anyone remembers). Today I had an interesting experience that brought it all back to me. I'm sure you'll get a laugh out of it (and I'll explain the picture of my garage at the head of this article).

I went to my local scrappers today, ostensibly looking for a water-resistant box. I figured I should be able to get one of those electrical / utility boxes that are about 1 foot square and about 6 inches deep. I wanted to put a Raspberry Pi and some control electronics in there, and stick it outside. The set of events that happened is pretty interesting.

I ask the guy out front, "do you have a box, about yay high by yay wide, and about this deep?" gesturing with my hands. We wander around the shop floor, and he says "oh yeah, there's an aluminium one out front for $5." I look at it. It's about 2.5 feet by 1 by 1, and it's one of those airplane compatible shipping crates for an oscilloscope, with lots of foam padding inside. "Yeah, that might do" I tell him, putting it on the pile. I wander around the store some more, and find some CAT 5e cables, and an assortment of fuses. And then I spot it. The perfect box. It's about 1.5' x 2.5' x 6in [45cm x 75cm x 15cm] deep, and it's got a nice lock on the front. There are two of them. They're those boxes that are used to hold keys, like at a security company or car dealership. We take one down, I look at it, and I tell him "Yup, this is perfect. You got a key for it?" (Of course, it's not a regular key, it's one of those round keys with the indented grooves.)

No key. However, after another 10 minutes of looking around, there's a box of keys and locks in another part of the warehouse. Betting on the odds, and after checking that the keys are all unique (well, I swapped two keys and they didn't open the others' lock, so I assumed they're all unique), I exhaustively tried about 40 - 50 keys.

Success! One of them worked. Much happiness and jubilation.

And then his boss wanders by, and casually says "the other box isn't for sale. This one is $200.00."

I burst out laughing. "Dude, I was thinking more like $35!" and then I added "and I've gone to the trouble of finding the key for you, so I'm thinking $25 should do it."

Anyway, the front guy and the boss guy go in the back and argue about it. A few minutes later, the front guy comes out and says "well, we could do $150 including the stuff you have on the pile there," indicating the CAT 5e cable and fuses.

I say "no way; I could go as high as $50, but that's about it." In the back of my mind, I've already got a nice shiny aluminium case for $5, and I'd offer them maybe as high as $25 for it and the cables and fuses.

So the front guy goes and talks with his boss again, and eventually comes back with $75. "No thanks," I say — it's three times more than what I have in hand. "I'll take the aluminium box and the wires and fuses, how much?" The guy struggles with the concept for a bit, so I help him out, "How about $20?" He's defeated, and agrees.

The back story is that the boss man wanted to use the box for keys at their new location. Well, then it shouldn't have been out for sale in the first place. I was kinda pissed that I spent 1/2 hour finding a box of keys, finding the key, and then being told an outrageous price. So, I tossed the key I found back in the pile, "I've returned your key to where I found it" and paid for my stuff. Let him waste 20 minutes finding the right key. The front guy thought it was appropriate.

What this brought back, though, was memories of Ford's in Smiths Falls, Ontario. Near the end, old man Ford bought an old elementary school that had been converted to a cheese factory (yes, this is true!) and stored all his stuff there. He had literally a school gym full of test and measurement equipment:

XL

But he thought all of it was immensely valuable. Indeed, some of it may have been. But a lot of it was just junk. Barely worth the scrap metal value, let alone the outlandish prices he wanted for some of it (now, to be fair, if you caught him on a good day, and it was a brand he didn't have a lot of respect for, you could get a deal out of him). I remember buying a 1000X microscope for $500. I was proud of myself for haggling him down from $650. See, microscopes aren't my thing, so I had no idea. But a buddy of mine who has a bunch said I should have been able to get that on eBay for maybe $100.

Anyway, a few years later, old man Ford decides to get out of the business (ca. 2006), and his son doesn't really want any part of it. So a poorly organized auction is called — everything was listed online, but it was very badly attended. I basically went through all the test equipment and put $5 (minimum bid) on about 50 oscilloscopes, signal generators, test & measurement devices, and so on, figuring I'd get a few of them. I planned on repairing them and recouping my costs, with a small profit maybe.

There was one lot of items, marked: "LOT (33) Gould Logic State Analyzers (no probes)" — I thought the "33" was a typo, and they meant "3". Anyway, $5. As you can guess from the picture at the head of this article, the "33" was not a typo, and $5 got it.

So, over the next month or so, I spent all my time testing out the equipment I bought, reselling what worked (or what I could get working), and scrapping the rest.

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The picture above shows my living room — on the coffee table are 9" CRT tubes from the Gould logic state analyzers; you can also see piles of boards and in the center is the aluminium scrap pile.

Old man Ford probably got $300 from me. I got around $3,000 out of it, of which $1,000 was the scrap metal value. How much did old man Ford get out of the entire auction, versus how much would he have gotten if he had sold items for "reasonable" prices? I'd hazard a guess that my ratio (10X) was on the low side — 30X wouldn't have surprised me. The "trick" with junk is not to get emotional about it. If it's scrap, then scrap it and get the raw materials. If it's useful, sell it for a decent markup, and move on. Don't try to value everything at full retail and offer a 50% discount — it's junk, and you probably got it for basically free.

Circling back, this relates to the lock box story. The guy needed one lock box, and I had done him the favour of showing him that he could probably find a key for it in his own junk pile. But, because he had the "scrapper mentality" (like a crow, I think: "Shiny! Mine!") he couldn't let go of it. He probably got it for free or close thereto, and he got emotionally attached to its perceived "value." Now it's going to sit in his warehouse for who knows how long.

LOL. Scrappers, eh?