The British Car Parts Story
1995
Re-written 1/2019
Howard Yasgar
The following true story will best be appreciated by anyone that knows anything about the auto parts business.
In 1995 I was in Detroit, I was there looking to buy deals on large quantities of auto parts that I could bring to Florida and sell for export to Central and South America.
Our company always had importers coming in that were looking for deals on quantities of car parts.
My good friend in Detroit, Barney Kaplan, told me that he had just received a large quantity of automotive electrical parts, and I should look at it.
The next day I went to look at what he had.
It was four large pallet boxes filled with electrical parts made by the British company Lucas electric, located in the U.K.
Right away I knew it would be difficult for me to sell, the reason being that Lucas parts only fit British vehicles, and I knew nothing about British cars.
All my export customers wanted U.S. Car parts.
Well, I looked the parts over and there were lots of red tail lights, and all kinds of British relays and car switches, I knew the parts could be worth a lot of money.
So, against my better judgement I bought the whole lot for $1.00 a pound.
I now owned a thousand pounds of all new British car parts.
We shipped the entire lot to Miami. One by one our customers came in and looked at it, but nobody wanted British car parts.
I started thinking perhaps I had made a bad deal.
Someone suggested that I spread the parts out on the warehouse floor, and make a master list of each Part number, then I could sent the list to foreign car parts dealers.
It took me over a month, working every day spreading everything out and put it all in numerical order, After sorting, I could see there were mostly tail lights for British cars.
Once I had it all spread out, one of my friends, a Venezuelan exporter named Vasquez stopped by and said he was very interested, he said that he had a customer.
Vasquez asked how much, and I said $1.50 a pound.
Vasquez was a good negotiator, he knew I was sick and tired of sorting all the parts, so he offered $1.25 a pound.
He was right, I was ready to sell at any price, and I accepted his offer.
I asked Vasquez if he wanted to complete the numerical list or did he want to come and pack the parts in boxes.
Vasquez said no, he said his customer had to ship the parts to his country as mixed junk to avoid paying any duty. so if the parts were all mixed up it was perfectly ok.
Vasquez was driving a big Ford station wagon, so he rolled up all the windows 3/4 of the way up and we threw all the British car parts inside, until we filled the car completely up.
It took Vasquez two car loads for him to take all the parts. But when we were done I was happy the stuff was gone.
It bothered me that I had wasted over a month of my life working on sorting the parts, and now they were all mixed up again.
I was out of town for a week, and when I returned, I was shocked to see all the Lucas British car parts piled up on my warehouse floor again.
But now it was like real junk with all the parts falling out of their boxes.
It seems my friend Vasquez returned everything saying that his customer refused the merchandise, and Vasquez had no intention of paying me.
I asked him why his customer rejected the parts, and he told me.
His customer came from a country with American cars, and all the British cars were left hand drive like American cars.
It appears all my parts were for British right hand drive cars like they use in some of the former British Countries.
My next move was to the trash dumpster.
