The Tear Gas Story

                                                    The Tear Gas Story

                                                                1991

                                                           A true story

                                      Written 4/5/2015 and Re-written 1/2016

                                                         Howard Yasgar

                                                 

Somehow during a recent discussion, someone mentioned tear gas, and it reminded me of a hell of an experience that I had with the stuff.

Back in the early 1990’s, I had a wholesale automotive parts company in Miami.

One of our methods of sales was by our using telemarketers, and our telemarketing department was headed up by my son.

The telemarketers regularly called all our customers, to advise them of deals and weekly specials we were offering.

At the time, I had a good friend named Joel who had an automotive electrical parts business located several blocks down the street from us.

Well, one day my friend Joel called me, and he said that he was moving to Naples Florida, so I wished him the best of luck.

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

Joel said, “He had gone to an auction and bid on a truck load of tear gas canisters, the brand name was “Lance”.

I recognized the name immediately, it was the same brand I saw the police carried on their belt.

Joel said that he had them all stored in a rented self-storage unit.

He explained what his problem was that now that he was moving, he didn’t want the expense of shipping the tear gas over to Naples.

Nor did he want the expense of  continuing to pay for storage.

He said that he knew that I had extra warehouse space, and if I would agree to it, he would turn over the whole load of teargas over to me as a partner with him.

He said I could store the teargas in my warehouse, and pay him his share when we sold it.

The deal sounded great, Joel didn’t want any money.

I thought, how could I lose anything, I was getting the teargas for free until we sold it.

That same afternoon Joel came over to my office with cardboard carton full of cans of teargas.

Inside the carton were twelve black aerosol tear gas canisters.

The aerosol cans were, about one and one half inches in diameter and about eight inches tall, they had printed picture of a silver knight on horseback holding a lance.

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 paid for to the end of the month.

Because I was so excited, I never asked Joel exactly how much tear gas there was in the storage facility, after all, he was practically giving it to me as a gift, and I didn’t want to appear ungracious.

The following week we rented a twenty foot U haul truck and went to the storage unit to pick up all the boxes of tear gas.

When we got to the storage warehouse, to my surprise there were enough boxes of  tear gas to fill a twenty foot container.

So  now we had no choice, and we made several trips, emptying the self storage unit, but filling the isles in our warehouse.

I did some research and found that each can sold for twelve to fourteen dollars apiece, so my son Jack told our telemarketers to try selling them for two dollars each, or twenty dollars a case.

At first sales seemed pretty good, and the telemarketers sold at least a hundred cans, and everyone was enthusiastic about it.

I took a case of it home to show my fiancé, as she managed a large freight forwarding company in Miami with quite a few female employees.

I thought perhaps she could offer them to all the women to use for their own personal protection.

My fiancée advised me that everyone loved them, but no one wanted to buy any.

After a few weeks, we realized the huge quantity of teargas was not selling well and it was blocking up the inside of our warehouse.

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

So, that’s when we decided to move the teargas to another one of our buildings up the street.

This move took us several days to do, and as we were doing it, I noticed that everyone was scratching.

Then someone said that they thought a few of the teargas canisters might be leaking, but there was no way to tell which ones were bad.

Well, as we were moving them out of our main building anyway, leaking didn’t present a terrible problem at the time.

Our telemarketers continued trying to sell the stuff.

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

My wonderful deal wasn’t so wonderful after all.

At our next sales meeting our warehouse manager said we should stop selling the stuff, because now, no one could enter the building where we had stored them.

It appeared many of the cans were now leaking, and  some were now leaking so bad that nobody wanted to go into the building.

The manager said that if anyone went in the building their skin would become very irritated and their eyes would immediately start tearing.

Well, that scared me, I got to thinking that we might have an EPA or OSHA problem.

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.

My friend Joel had screwed me good, he knew the stuff was leaking.

We had a brain storming session with all our telemarketers to figure out a way to get rid of the stuff, and do it quickly.

My son said that they had only one potential customer that showed some interest in buying the whole load from us, he had offered a low ball price of $1.00 a canister.

The problem was we knew he was a deadbeat customer that never paid his bills.

To get paid you needed a bill collector, or a lawyer.

I thought long and hard on the situation.

Now I knew why my friend Joel was so happy to have me take the tear gas off his hands for free.

He knew that if the EPA or OSHA ever got wind of this 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 sell him all the teargas for $1.00 ea.

Then he should give him an open account, even though we knew he would never pay us.

My son told me that the customer was so happy to have beaten us down on the price, and that he had open credit with us, and didn’t have to pay us for 30 days..

He said he wanted to buy the entire trailer load of teargas, at a price of one dollar a can, and he would pay the freight to get the teargas to him.

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

Well loading the trailer truck was quite a problem, but we managed to do it with everyone crying and scratching.

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

As expected he never made any payment to us after the thirty days when the money was due, and I didn’t ever try to collect the money from him. I was afraid he would want to return the teargas to us.

As time went on, I spoke to Joel several times, but funny he never mentioned anything about the teargas, nor did he ever ask me about his share of the profit.