The Tear Gas Story

1991

A true story

Written 4/5/2015* 1369 Words*

#165 By Howard Yasgar

Recently during a meeting, someone mentioned tear gas, and it reminded me of an awful experience that I had with it a few years ago.

It was in the early 1990’s, when I had a wholesale parts company located in Miami Florida.

One of our sales methods was using telemarketers to contact our customers.

Our telemarketing department was headed up by my son Jack.

Jack would have our salespeople talk to our customers weekly to advise them of whatever specials we were offering.

One of our customers was a friend of mine named Joel. Joel had an automotive parts business located not too far from us.

One day Joel called me and said that he was going to move from Miami to Naples Florida.

Joel said the reason he was calling was because he had a proposition for me.

He said that he recently had gone to a bankruptcy auction and he was the high bidder on a truck load of aerosol tear gas canisters, called “Lance”.

I immediately recognized the brand-name, it sounded like the same kind of tear gas that all the police carried.

Joel said that he had the teargas stored in a rental self-storage unit and his problem was that now that he was moving to Naples, he didn’t want the expense of shipping the tear gas over to Naples and then paying to rent for another warehouse to store it in.

Joel said that if we had warehouse space, and if I agree to it, he will turn over the whole truckload of teargas to us as a partner.

Joel said we could store the teargas in my warehouse, and I could pay him his share

of the profit as we sold it.

The deal sounded great, because Joel said he didn’t want any money from us.

I thought, how could I lose, I would be getting all the teargas for free until we sold it.

The next day Joel came over to my office; he was carrying a cardboard box.

Inside the box were twelve aerosol tear gas cans. Each aerosol can was black and about 1-1/2 inches in diameter and 8 inches tall.

Joel said he was moving in the next few days and he gave me the key to his self- storage locker which he said was already paid for to the end of the month.

The following week my son Jack rented a 20-foot U haul truck and he went to the storage unit to pick up the boxes of tear gas.

When he got to the storage warehouse, he found there were so many boxes of tear gas, he could have filled a twenty-foot shipping container.

Now we had no choice but to make many trips back and forth, until we emptied the storage warehouse.

.

Emptying the storage unit took us an entire day, and a lot of hard work for several of our employees. But finally, we brought all the teargas cannisters to our warehouse.

I couldn’t believe it but there were so many cartons of tear gas that we were forced to fill up all the isles in our warehouse.

I did some research and found that each can originally sold for around $12.00 apiece.

So, Jack told our telemarketers to try selling the teargas for $2.00 each, or $20.00 per case of 12.

The first week sales seemed pretty good, and the telemarketers sold over a hundred cans, and everyone was enthusiastic.

I even took a case of it home to show my fiancée. She worked for a company that employed quite a few people and perhaps they would buy the teargas for self-protection.

After a few days she said everyone loved the stuff but no one wanted to buy any.

After a few weeks, we realized the teargas were not selling well, and the worse problem was that it was blocking the entire inside of our warehouse.

There were so many cases of teargas we could hardly walk around them.

So, that’s when we decided to move the teargas out of our main storage warehouse to another building, we owned up the street.

That move took us several days, and while we were doing it, we noticed that everyone was itching and scratching.

Then someone suggested that they thought a few of the teargas canisters might be leaking, thus scratching and itching, but there was no way for us to tell which boxes were leaking gas.

As we were moving them out of our main building the teargas leaking didn’t present a terrible problem at the time, and our salespeople continued trying to sell the stuff.

After several weeks, Jack informed me that the sales for the teargas had dropped off to almost nothing, it seemed that no one wanted to buy the stuff.

The wonderful deal that my friend Joel gave me wasn’t so wonderful after all.

At our next sales meeting our warehouse manager suggested that we should stop selling the teargas, because now so much teargas was leaking, no one could even enter the building where we were storing it.

Well, now that scared me, I got to thinking that we might have an EPA or OSHA problem, and I knew that if the EPA or OSHA ever caught us with this leaky teargas we could get in a lot of trouble, and it might cost us a fortune just to dispose of it.

I realized that my friend Joel had screwed me good, I was sure he knew the stuff was leaking.

We had a brainstorming session with all our employees to try and figure out a way to get rid of the teargas, and we had to do it quickly.

My son said that he had only one potential customer that showed some interest in buying the entire load from us.

However, we knew the customer was a deadbeat who always wanted everything at bargain prices and never paid his bills.

I thought long and hard on the situation.

I knew that if the EPA or OSHA ever got wind of our pollution nightmare there would be no end to the problems.

So, I thought that if Joel was smart enough to get me to take the deal off his hands, I needed to do the same thing to someone else.

I suggested to my son that he call up the deadbeat customer and tell him it was a bankruptcy sale.

The customer thought it was his chance to take advantage of us. He replied he would only offer us a maximum of $1.00 a can.

My son told me that the customer was so happy to have beaten us down on the price,

We agreed that we would sell him the entire load for $1.00 a can if he paid for the truck freight.

We all knew that he never had any intention of ever paying us.

loading the trailer truck was quite a problem, but we managed to do it with everyone crying about the leaking teargas.

The next day, I was told the customer received the shipment and he did pay the trucking company for the freight.

As we expected he never made any payment to us, and I was hoping he wouldn’t call wanting to return the teargas.

As time went on, I spoke to Joel several times, but funny he never mentioned anything about his share of the profit from the teargas.