Guy calls wanting me to tell him what a bunch of guns are worth.....doesn't go like he planned.
Locust Fork
Member Posts: 32,088 ✭✭✭✭
I don't know what this guy is thinking. He obviously wanted me to tell him some bottom rung, steal it, type numbers....but that isn't what we do. He is a friend of a friend and we've only seen each other a few times, I might could pick him out of a crowd....but maybe not. So, he calls and says "I'm looking at some guns and I need to know a fair price to offer this lady." I tell him I'm taking pictures, but I'll put him on the phone with someone that can pull up what things have sold for so he knows what he's looking at. I hand the phone over and go back to my work. I hear them going back and forth....everyone is on speakerphone....on both ends of the call, so I hear the people in the background talking to the guy who called and they can hear the prices that we are telling him.
Whenever someone sells an item to us or I price anything I am always 100% upfront and show the people what things have closed at when we can find it. If we can find a good many of something and they've all ended in the same price range I will offer whatever the lowest sale price found because we expect to do better than the average and I'm pretty confidant that we will make money if I'm paying whatever the lowest sale did. Even though he explicitly said "I need to know a fair price" thats not at all what he meant......why he has us on speakerphone I'll never know, but when we gave over the prices we saw it upset his plans.
Later on I get a text....."when I call for prices, don't give me retail, give me wholesale." I replied.....we do not have wholesale prices on anything, I don't order or keep an account with any distributors. When we buy something ourselves we look at closed prices and offer what is fair from what we see there.
I don't know why this irks me so much. Some guy.....dabbling in being a gun dealer.....trying to cheat someone out of getting a fair market price out of things and trying to use us to do it. If I had been the one on the phone with him I would have found a way to tell them about our consignment sales and how we could take all the worry out of things for them.
Comments
If he doesn't know what a gun sells for he should stay home.
You are a hell of a lot nicer than me woman.
We get calls asking what something is worth pretty often, not like what this guy had going on.....but someone in the market for something just trying to figure out if what they are about to pay is a deal or not. I get that.....its easy enough to help someone with some numbers if they are about to buy something, but this scenario was a totally different deal.
About everyone in the civilized world has a computer. They can look on GunBroker.
You messed up his scheme........GOOD JOB !!!!!
We are pretty well known in our area as being the place that gives the best price to sell guns to. When we buy larger estates from 20-100 guns at a crack it seems like there's always a brother in law or cousin lurking in the shadows that has made "an offer" on some guns. We pretty much always get the whole estate.
People disgust me that try to steal the guns from some widow. I could see if they just want a special memento or something but seems like they just want the whole collection for 10% of what its worth.
Was this guys name CatFish... a bottom feeder? I speak to folks in the classic car arena quite often. Wanting to know what their car is worth? or if they want to buy they want to pay ridiculous low money. And I love the phase... I have cash. Well what do you think it takes..
Ricci took the words out of my mouth.
I used to be like that trying to help these type of people. I found all that it did was take away my time for people who I wanted to help because they appreciated my help.
Being self employed most of my working career I also found that these types took away my time that I could have used to make another sale.
I had a yahoo call me a couple of times, asking, "What can you get me a XXXXXX gun for?" So, I would research and get back to him with a quote for ordering him a new XXXXXX.
He did this a few times, and never ordered anything. Turns out, he was trying to buy a XXXXXX from another source, and used my quote as a bargaining tool.
Last time he called, I advised him to do his own research, or else come by my shop and put down a deposit for me to order him his XXXXXX gun.
Supply and demand, that is why I like the GB auctions 😀 I like Kasey's penny starting price with no reserve.
He has some nerve calling you back and complaining after your people spent their time helping him.
Yep
We had a guy that used to come in the store, he would ask about an "out the door" price on several things.....leave, then come back with money. We finally figured out that he was running around telling people he had things and would sell them for _____ and if he could make money he would come back and buy the gun. We were ready to tell him we were done dealing with him when we got a phone call. A dealer had a gun "we sold" and needed to return it to us because the buyer couldn't pass the background check. Checking into things it wasn't one of our guns....but it had been sent with our FFL. I told them to send it on back here to us.....and looking at Gun Broker we figured out that it had been sold on line by this same guy that was doing the crazy nonsense in the store. I WAS SO MAD! It wasn't my FFL....this was the store, so I let Jimmy decide how to handle it, but if it were up to me I was keeping the gun and telling him we would call the ATF if we ever saw his face again. Jimmy took him into the office and I never asked what he said to him. He let him have the gun. There are some real pieces of work out there.