This Little Piggy Crashed and Burned: Don't Be A Greedy Little Piggy.

I got my first non-newspaper delivery job when I was eleven.  I cleaned up and helped pack orders for a then-little electronics company in New York.  The company was called DERF.  Yes, DERF.  As in Fred spelled backwards.  With all capital letters.

I was into hi-fi at the time.  For those chronologically impaired among us, hi-fi was a term used in the sixties and seventies to refer to a good stereo system.  Some dabbled in early multi-channel (my beloved Dynaco among them), but basically, this was two channel equipment.  It was heavy, electrically inefficient, ugly, large, and expensive stuff.  I still own an amplifier that I bought from one of the Brothers Derf (a crude but effective Hafler 200 power amplifier...).  I still reminisce fondly on the hours and dollars I "wasted" on my hi-fi toys.  If I'd have give all that money to Warren Buffet instead, I'd be paying someone else to write this blog today.  While I reclined and ate bon-bons.

So at any rate, a piece of equipment came up available via my boss' friend who was upgrading his system.  We used to call record players "turntables".  But yeah...it was a record player.  A Thorens 126 to be exact.  The owner of Derf wasn't terribly interested (his hi-fi was pretty phenomenal, as I recall...), but he told his friend that an employee might be interested.

I remember my parents stories of traveling to Egypt and Turkey and all over the place, and hearing about how they had to haggle for everything at markets.  I thought that I had to haggle for everything that was used.  I had the impression that I'd be a sucker if I did NOT haggle, regardless of the opening offer.

So when this guy offered me a Thorens 126 in good shape for fifty bucks, I offered him 35.  And he told me, in language unfit for 11 year old ears, to go screw myself.  And then he hung up on me.

That machine is now worth about $700.  And I'd have derived $10,000 of pleasure out of it between then and now.

The secret of a good deal is knowing what you want to pay for something.  Know what you could pay, and still be happy with paying even if it came up cheaper later.  Understand the difference between dog-eat-dog and the odd scenario when someone is actually giving you a hand up.  Take a fair offer at face value.  Pay in cash.  Smile.  And say "thank you".

That scenario might not happen every day; but it happens a whole lot more often than anyone is apt to believe.  And hey.  If it happens to you, consider making it happen for someone else.  The wheel of business karma you know...it is so very small.