A couple of deals I passed over

Well, that didn't last long. I was all sorts of pumped that the discount grocery store in our area had opened its doors again. Only a few months later, it's out of business again.

The last day was Friday, and they sold everything at 75% off. For already discounted merchandise, this isn't bad at all. (“Discount grocery” is a misnomer; it used to have mostly groceries but this time around there were more clothes than anything else.) We loaded up on clothes, and I got about a dozen things to resell in my eBay store.

I also asked the cashier if the owner had a buyer for the rest of the stuff — basically whatever was left after the store closed — just to try to buy them out for a few cents on the dollar. She said no he hadn't, and I lined up a couple of folks who were willing to put up some quick cash. After talking to my wife about the merchandise, she didn't really think it would pan out, because although the clothes looked all right at first glance, she had gone through a bunch of them and found rips, stains, and other defects more unsightly than a misplaced stitch.

So I responded, “Well, I'll just make a lowball offer to make sure I can resell for profit even with a lot of unsaleable merchandise.” And my wife said, “Well, he can probably make more by just writing it off.” Which is probably true. That, and it would have been a whole bunch of stuff, which we don't really have room for right now. So I didn't pursue that one any further.

Another deal I passed over was at a yard sale. A woman's son was selling a large collection of sports cards — football, baseball, hockey, and basketball. This was probably several thousand cards, carefully kept in card boxes. I passed up on this offer for a few reasons:

• She smoked. Smoke odor embeds itself in stuff and it's a pain to get out. This would kill the value of the cards if she had smoked a lot around them, and I couldn't really tell from smelling them outside whether they smelled of smoke or not.
• She was selling them awfully hard. She was selling all of the stuff awfully hard, but if the deal was that good, she shouldn't have to.
• They were her son's duplicates. Which could mean that he pulled out all of the good ones to sell separately, and the ones that remained were not worth what I'd pay for them.
• I didn't see a whole lot of baseball cards in there. Not that the other kinds of cards aren't collectible, but I don't see football, basketball, and hockey cards at shows as much as I see baseball cards.
• I don't know a whole lot about sports cards in general. Even though the woman said that I could get my money back by selling the cards in my store, that would be the only assurance I'd have because I don't know them all that well, and she also really wanted me to buy them.

Getting a good buyout deal can bring in a lot of money, but getting too much inventory can overwhelm and drag down everything just as easily, and unless it's really a slam-dunk steal you can't be sure that you'll make money on it.