The Tear Gas Story
A
true story written 4/5/2015
Howard Yasgar
Unedited
Some how during a recent discussion, someone
mentioned tear gas, and it reminded me of an experience I had with the stuff.
Back in the early 1990’s, I had a wholesale
automotive parts warehouse located in Miami called Automotive Parts Industries.
One of our methods of sales was by using
telemarketers, our telemarketing department was headed up by
my son Jack. He had two or three motivated telephone salesmen working for him.
They called all our customers on
a regular basis to advise them of deals and weekly specials
we were offering. All of these fellows were salaried and also on commission.
At the time, I had a good friend who had an automotive
electrical parts business located several blocks down the street from us called
Auto Electric of 54th Street, his name was Joel Friedman.
Well, one day
Joel called me, he said that he was moving to Naples Florida, so naturally I
wished my friend the best of luck. Joel said that the reason he was calling me
was because he needed my assistance. He said he had obtained
at an auction a quantity of tear gas
canisters called “Lance”, and he had them in a rented self storage unit. Joel explained
what his problem was. 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 the storage. Joel said that he knew that I had extra warehouse
space, and he said that if I would agree to it, he would turn over the whole load
of teargas to me as a partner. He said I could store the teargas in my
warehouse, and pay him when we sold it, the deal sounded great, as Joel said he didn’t want any
money. I thought, how, could I lose, I was getting the teargas for free until we
sold it.
That afternoon
Joel came over to my office with cardboard carton full of Lance. In the carton, there were twelve beautiful black aerosol tear gas canisters. The aerosol cans were,
about one and one half inches in diameter and about eight inches tall, with a picture
of a silver knight on horseback holding a lance. I recognized that the tear gas
canisters were the same kind that the Miami police carried on their belt. My
first thought was that the canisters
were small enough, so a woman could carry one in her purse to use for personal protection.
So as 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
by asking too many questions, he might change his mind. The following week we
rented a twenty foot U haul truck and went to the storage unit to pick up all the
boxes
of teargas and transport them to our warehouse. When we got to
the storage warehouse, to my surprise there were enough boxes of teargas to fill a forty foot container truck.
We had no choice, so we made several trips, and filled our whole main warehouse
building with the cases of teargas.
We did
some research and found that each can sold for twelve to fourteen dollars
apiece, so my son Jack told our phone salesman to sell them for two dollars
each, or twenty dollars a case. At first sales seemed pretty good, the
telemarketers sold at least a hundred cans. Things looked good, and I was so enthusiastic about it, I took a case
of it home to show my fiancé. My fiancé Katherine managed a large freight forwarding company in
Miami with quite a few female employees, so I thought perhaps she could offer
them to all the women to use for self protection. I was advised that everyone
loved them, but no one wanted to buy any.
After a few
weeks, we realized the huge quantity of teargas was blocking up our warehouse.
There were so many cases of teargas we could hardly walk around it, so we
decided to move the teargas to another one of our buildings up the street. This
move took us several days to do, an as we were doing it, I noticed that
everyone involved was scratching what
seemed to be a rash on their skin. Someone said that they thought a few of the teargas
canisters might be leaking, but there was no way to tell which ones were
Leaking. As we were moving them out of our main building
anyway, it didn’t present a terrible
problem at the time.
Our
telemarketers continued trying to sell the tear gas by the case, but after
several weeks, my son 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. It
looked like my wonderful deal wasn’t so wonderful after all. At our next
meeting my warehouse manager said it was better if we stopped selling the
stuff, he said that because no one could enter the building where they were stored.
It appeared some of the cans were now leaking
so bad that no one wanted to go into the building. He said that if anyone went
in the building their skin would become irritated and their eyes would start tearing.
Well, that scared me, I got to thinking that we might have an EPA problem,
and if the EPA 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, not to mention the potential for a fine.
We had a brain storming session with all
the telemarketers to figure out a way to get rid of the stuff, and do it quickly.
My son Jack told me that they had only one potential customer that showed any
interest at all in buying the whole load from us. The problem was that he was a
well known out of state dead beat, that never paid his bills. I remembered that
last time when he owed us money. We had big problems trying to collect from him,
and eventually had to use a bill collector.
I thought long
and hard on the situation, and I went over to the warehouse to see how many
cases that we still had there. Well, there were a lot of cases, we still had almost
a whole forty foot trailer truck load. The worst part was that as soon as I
entered the building my eyes became watery and I began scratching all over. No
wonder my friend Joel Friedman was so happy to have me take the tear gas off
his hands for free. He knew that if the EPA ever got wind of this pollution nightmare
there would be no end to the problems. I thought that Joel was smart enough to
get me to take the deal off his hands, I needed to do the same thing.
I suggested to
my son that he call up the deadbeat potential customer and tell him we considered
him a valued customer, and because of that we were giving him a thirty day open
account. I assumed that once he heard he had credit with us, he would buy
anything we offered him, with no intention of ever paying us.
Jack told me that the customer was so
happy that he now had credit with us, h said he wanted to buy the entire
trailer load of teargas, and he offered one dollar a can, he said 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. I was
told the customer received the shipment and he did pay the freight. As expected
he never made any payment to us after the thirty days when the money was due. I didn’t ever try to collect the money as I was afraid he would return the teargas to us.
As time went on, I spoke to Joel Friedman several
times, but he never mentioned the leaking teargas, nor did he ever ask me about
his share of the profit.
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