Big money to buy, small money to sell
by
Robert LaFrance
I recently took some beer bottles,
alas empty, to the returnable place and was quite amazed to find out that they
weren’t worth a whole lot more than they would have been when I was a teenager,
and that ain’t yesterday. The contents, however, seemed to have appreciated in
value much like the price of a new car during that period. Not that I would
know anything about the price of beer. Lemonade is my drink as you know.
I was living in Hamilton, Ontario in
1971 when a friend bought a brand new Chev Impala. One might not have thought
it was a luxury car then, but its size and furnishings would certainly mark it
as one today. He paid $3200 for that car. The last new car we bought, last
October, cost $1800 for just the air conditioning and power doors/windows. The
motor, frame and body were extra, and we’re not talking Rolls Royce here. It’s
one step below a Camry.
My point is this: there is inflation
on some things, but on others, not so much. Usually this translates into
inflation on whatever I might want to buy, but just the opposite on whatever I
want to sell. Two years ago I bought two tires for a total of $254 including
taxes, installation, balancing, dusting, etc. and I put fewer than 5000 km on
them. They were as good as when I had bought them. I put them up for sale on
Kijiji, eBay, 48 newspapers, and bulletin boards. A month later I felt lucky to
get $110 out of them.
In the year 2000 I bought a 1997 Plymouth
Voyager van for $15,000. Of course by the time I paid all the taxes and various
imaginative fees it came to $23,000, but that’s neither here nor there, as
Grampy used to say. Everyone I spoke to at the time praised my business acumen
and they all emphasized how well vans ‘hold their value’.
Two years later, just for the
halibut (as Grampy also used to say), I visited a Chrysler dealer just to see
what they would ‘allow’ me on that van if I were to buy a new one. The salesman
looked it all over and came back inside the showroom where I had been chatting
with a Tibetan monk and a fisherman from Cape Tormentine. “I could probably see
my way clear to allowing you thirty-five hundred dollars on the old van,” he
said.
“The OLD van!” I spluttered. “It’s
five years old. I have socks ten years older than that!”
“Well,” he said reasonably, “you know the carpet is
pretty worn.” It took that Tibetan monk, the fisherman, and two janitors to
hold me back from popping him on his carpet, which Grampy would have called a
toupée.
So that’s how it goes when I am thinking of selling
something. After I had cooled to a body temperature of less than 45 degrees
Celsius, I walked out onto their used vehicle lot. Side by side were two vans,
both of them 1997s by nature. How much were they, you ask? One was $10,999
(damn close to eleven thousand), and the other, which must have had a worn
carpet, was only $9,995. I considered going back in the showroom and asking the
‘sales representative’ if I could trade my 1997 van for one of his 1997 vans,
but sometimes it’s best for the blood pressure and the psyche to just let
things go.
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Here in the Colony we have had a wonderful addition
to the population, and I’m not talking about the Ganderson baby. Last week
Flug’s third wife’s second cousin’s nephew George Hantry, a real and true
veterinarian (as opposed to the last horse doctor we had), moved to the Serinan
house, which is right next door to the club. His first day in town he showed he
was a true democrat by buying us all lemonades.
“I’m looking forward to practising my profession
here,” he said, raising a glass to us high-class citizens of this place. “You
know, a vet can make a lot of money nowadays. Imagine, two hundred dollars for
giving a needle to a poodle. When my grandfather was practising he would have
been lucky to get ten dollars. Of course he wasn’t a trained vet. When he came
back from the war, people referred to him and the other returning soldiers as
vets, so he just naturally drifted into taking care of animals’ aches and
pains.
“Now,” he continued, “when I look at a beagle or a
yapping terrier, I charge five times that for just making what I call a
‘dognosis’. The treatment could be a thousand dollars if it’s something
complicated, like giving it a needle or something. People just hand it over
without complaint. If it was spending a hundred dollars to take their
grandmother for treatment in Saint John, they would yelp.”
-end-
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