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Central Illinois | I went to an auction at our local tiling company. They are closing after over half a century open. I went to bid on a small utility tractor, if it went cheap. Was surprised by some of the prices on equipment. A large track hoe went for 10,000, a extra heavy duty volvo daycab went for 7,000 and of course the small utility tractor was the opposite going for somewhere around 4000, I was willing to go 2500. I went with a cousin visiting from out of town and as the auction moved on we noted the good deals available, he is a long distance trucker so the Volvo was not something he was interested in due to the daycab but he said the almost new tires alone were around 6,000 on their own. Though I would have liked the utility tractor that is not my missed opportunity. We were watching an old 50's era F350 sell with a flat bed, it ran great, not any rust through, plenty of surface rust and had a dump bed but needed paint, thought about bidding but did not, it sold for 1200. Then while we were talking about how I should have bid on it we did not notice the next vehicle up for auction an early 2000's F150 with some rust in all the expected places, but ran good and had almost new tires, when we caught on to what was happening it was just a hair too late, the bidding had dropped to 400 and he said to me, "what the heck...bid bid bid", so I throw my hand up just as the auctioneer was about to say sold and they did not see me in the 1 second I had put my hand up before they said sold. The kicker is that it had an aluminum tool box on it, to go with the almost new tires. Walked away empty handed and have been kicking myself ever since as I would have loved to have fixed up that F 350 for our service truck and could have made enough money off the f150 to pay for the initial purchase of the f350.
What was worse was we said lets tell my dad we bought the old f350 expecting he would say something about how it will cost a fortune or something about why would we buy a truck like that..., but instead he got excited and started going into how he had seen that truck new when he was a teen when he would drive by the tiling company (they are right down the road from us). He was able to tell the whole back story on the truck and how it was the first service truck for the company.
In a way I wish I knew who purchased it and see if I could still get it giving them a small profit, my dad was disappointed when we broke the news that we were only kidding expecting he would tell us it was a bad purchase. | |
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Missed Auction Opportunity
