One Man's Trash is Another Man's Moral Conundrum

I knew something was off the second I met him.

Twitchy, talking fast, a look of paranoia in his eyes, the whole thing. But he was selling a lot of sealed board games for a crazy cheap price, and my reseller instinct overrode my survival skills, so I stayed and kept talking.

As we talked, he kept walking in and out of his house, bringing out boxes of board games.

“You know, I’m a scrapper and I go around meeting people, and you’d be surprised what I get my hands on,” he said as he plopped another box in the back of my car. “Oh, you like board games? Here, check this out.” He disappeared into his home again and emerged holding three expansion packs for a Lord of the Rings role-playing game.

“These go for a lot, you can look them up,” he mentioned as he went back in.

I did look them up. $40-50 sold comps.

He came back out holding two new-in-box Hess firetrucks. “You like those? Ten bucks each. Here,” he said, putting the firetrucks in my hands. “Ten. Both. I don’t care, I just want them out of here.” He paused and looked at me.

“You want to see what else I’ve got? Come on inside,” he said.

I tossed the toys and board games in my car and promptly followed him inside.

The place was packed. Every room, every corner, stuff stacked on stuff. As soon as I got in he started piling things on me.

A box of sealed garage door openers, a bundle of rifle bipods…

a pack of self-lathering washcloths?

“Look, can you sell this?” he said, putting a Charlie Brown Christmas tree replica into the box. “I just have so much, I’ll give it to you cheap.”

“Do you sell perfume?” He put a sealed bottle of Chanel perfume in the box.

Every time I said yes, he came back with more. At some point I stopped being a buyer and started being a pack mule.

“Okay, okay. That’s enough,” I finally said. I had to stop him.

I paid, loaded up, and drove home feeling too caught up in the deal to notice anything off.

Back home, Caithlin looked at the pile and said what was already in the back of my mind.

“This stuff has to be stolen, right?”

I didn’t want to believe her. “No,” I said, “he just meets a lot of…interesting people for his job, right?”

Wrong. She was right. But my pride and the margins didn’t let me admit it. A few days went by, and things started to sell. The bipods, then the Hess trucks, then the board games. All very profitable.

One night my phone buzzed. It was him. Picture after picture of more stuff, and each price was somehow crazier than the last.

And I was torn.

Right there in my texts was a golden goose. A guy with a house full of inventory and a stack of deals every reseller dreams about. But brand new, still-sealed stuff, from a guy who gives me those vibes, at prices no one in their right mind would take?

It felt obvious. This was stolen merchandise.

I can’t prove it. I didn’t need to.

And every sale that popped up on eBay made me want to text him back. Just one more haul, I told myself.

But I kept thinking about why Caithlin and I started Off The Shelf in the first place. We wanted to build something we could be proud of. Something run on better practices.

So I finally felt the conviction to say no.

I blocked his number. Then I deleted it. Forever lost in the abyss.

I killed the golden goose. On purpose. For the sake of my business.

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