While not involving retail goods, your story is reminiscent of the wire & cable factory I worked in. Most of the machines in that plant were dinosaurs. They were old, but very well designed and very well maintained. My predecessors in the maintenance department had put together a rock-solid maintenance plan and carved out a respectable portion of the plant, gated off, which stored all the spare parts. The majority of the machines came from Europe; primarily Germany and Austria, and a few French machines too. The parts for these machines were very hard to source, had unfathomable lead times, and were very costly.

Most of the other maintenance techs weren't comfortable replacing parts unless they were exactly a direct replacement, from the same manufacturer, same P/N, same exact everything. So they had identified and ordered in advance, everything that they thought might ever wear out or break over time. It never ceased to amaze me when, for example, a 1963 German Baumuller dual winding/dual voltage analog tachogenerator fails, and what'd'ya know, there's one on the shelf, been there since 1996, and the record of its order is filed away so we have a supplier and a starting point to order a new one (because our sales reps at Grainger and Applied Industrial would give us a blank stare) - and good thing too, because when we do order it from the German supplier, it's a bespoke item and it takes 6 months to arrive.

We had massive single-input, muliple output, multispeed gearboxes for the lineshafts on both of our most critical machines. They weighed more than our forklift and had 6-figure price tags. They were ordered in the early 90's for 1970's machines, from the same Austrian company who made them in the 70's, and the company shut down in the late 90's. These gearboxes literally irreplaceable, and were proven to last over 40 years in that application.

In comes this cancer born out of a university "think tank." Wet-behind-the-ears Manufacturing Engineers go out for a quick brainwashing session for a few days and come back chanting the mantra of "5S" and "Lean Six Sigma." We spent the next 6 months throwing away millions of dollars worth of "stagnant" inventory (critical spares). Their mandate was "If you haven't used it in the last 2 years, and you don't have any scheduled maintenance in the next 2 years that calls for it, throw it away." We had to get the forklift from next door to help us load those gearboxes onto the "scrap vulture's" (as we called him) truck as he grinned and rubbed his clammy hands together. We had a 40ft rolloff container that got hauled off every friday, full or half full. Brand new motors, drives, bearing assemblies, rebuild hydraulic assemblies, anything you could think of. Our detailed maintenance records bit us in the behind because if we tried to claim that something needed to stay (because "it had been used in the past 2 years" - which it hadn't), there was no record to back it up. In some cases we even had entire fully functional machines hauled off, because they were only used for special projects which only come up every few years. Anything that collected dust, had the red sticker put on it.

Our spare parts bay slowly shrunk from from ~10,000sf to ~1500sf, at which point they told us that the maintenance department was to relocate to a small ~3,000sf building across the lot from the plant. We are talking about 1,500sf worth of spare parts, 2,000sf of workshop/machine shop, and ~1,000sf worth of offices, that were located in the epicenter of the production floor - the most logical place for it, since nobody in the plant was ever too far from the maintenance office to go get help, and we were never too far to run back for tools, parts, to look stuff up on the computer, etc. We had to throw away even more parts, and tools, and office furniture, and cram ourselves into this tiny space. They set up an intercom so the operators could call us from wherever they were, and we had to push our tool cart across the lot to the plant to check it out.EX: Oh, the machine quit running? Ok hold on, I'll be there ASAP...10min later... Oh, hold on, the batteries in my DMM just died; be right back...15min later...Oh, never mind, the problem isn't electrical, I need to go get the computer cart and check out the PLC...30min later...Hey, it's raining outsite and I looked all over the maint. shack and we don't have any tarps for the computer cart. Do you guys have any here in operations?...20min later...Ok, I'm back, where did everybody go? Did I miss shift change AGAIN?! Oh well, whatever the problem was, we don't have the parts to fix it.

And guess what they did with all that prime real estate after they kicked maintenance out of the center of the plant? They demolished it! And what did they replace it with? NOTHING! They moved some machines around to get more space between them (you already couldn't spit from one to the other) and they pained a bunch of stupid lines on the floor. "Forklift parking" for 8 forklifts when we only had 3. "Full spool storage area" when full spools don't just "sit around" in storage; each cable is made to order and ships out once its done. "empty spool storage area" - for the empty spools that were stored outside for 40 years with no issue. "QC area" so that QC people who used sit right next to each other and pass parts between them, now had 6ft of separation between the workstations and the privilege of getting up and walking across to pass parts. And my personal favorite: "Crane Parking!" For the friggen overhead gantry crane!

I left shortly after that. I DO NOT miss that mentality. Totally bonkers! "oh it's for efficiency," "don't worry, once you get used to it, you'll see the beauty of it," "soon you won't know how you ever got along the old way!" BUll$k1T! I see the pitfall of companies like Sears, Radio Shack, et. al. not being willing to change, but come on! Can we get a side order of logic with our entree of change?!

Same thing where I worked, Delphi. When ever we made a new mold, we knew from experience most of what would be "breakage" parts. So since set up is usually one of the biggest costs of making parts, we made extras.Those extras cost next to nothing compared to having to make them later. Then the new management bean counters took over. Every thing was tracked in the computer. So anything that hadn't been needed for a certain time was scrapped. Millions of $ of spare parts. Plastic molding is kind of a luck thing, the molds can run for a long time with no breakage, then the luck runs out. And usually when you really need the production. So then with no spare parts, you have both the cost to make the parts, and the loss of production while they are made.

But the bean counters saved a few cents while costing many dollars in the long run.

 

At least not from places like Harbor Freight

I have 3 sets of impact sockets from Harbor Freight and none of them has ever failed.
On the other hand, their Chicago Electric tools are pretty bad. I bought a half sheet hum sander and the switch failed in an hour.

 

I have to disagree with that. It may have been that way around 5 to 10 years ago, but not now. At least not from places like Harbor Freight. Their hand and power tools are of every bit of the same quality as the old Craftsman tools, some even better. And for stuff like sockets they have the same replacement guarantee. Don't know about other places quality though.

It was an attempt at humor. The "case hardened peanut butter" was coined maybe 20 years ago. Me? I confess to a stash of Harbor Freight stuff.

Ron

 

I have 3 sets of impact sockets from Harbor Freight and none of them has ever failed.
On the other hand, their Chicago Electric tools are pretty bad. I bought a half sheet hum sander and the switch failed in an hour.

They have been upgrading that kind of thing lately. The aren't using the Chicago Electric name now on the new models.

 

Because the business gets to write off the $100k in inventory as a loss if they discard the old inventory. Now, if you made $100k in profit off of new, active inventory and had to pay ~25% as taxes, I bet most people would decide to toss $100k 8n old inventory that they don't think they would ever sell in order to reduce that tax bill to zero. The additional saving would be that they wouldn't have to build another $10k worth of storage.

I understand the concept of the short term pseudo-gains (look good on paper now but ultimately screw you later in reality) in taxes write off's (the government loves that fatal flaw in the short term gains at long term sacrifices logic) but as others stories have already shown they always come with a long term financial hit (many ultimately fatal for the business as we are seeing now on a grand scale with too many big corporations) that's way more than what the immediate write off value was worth.

On the short term and on paper yes, In long term reality, obviously not.

Believe me as someone who has worked in the scraping business all his life I totally see where Strantors comment about,

the "scrap vulture's" (as we called him) truck as he grinned and rubbed his clammy hands together.

Comes from.

As a scrap guy I love seeing fools dump thousands to millions of dollars worth of goods on me and people like me so that they can get there quick cash now tax breaks. We make a very good livings off that penny wise pound foolish business practice and he knows it.

So much so that even with selling only a few percent of what your writeoff got you for whatever you threw out back onto the market it's hugely profitable at our end well before the rest of the cash we got for buying your perfectly good million dollar items for pennies a pound and selling it to the smelters later for 5 - 10x that came into play!

So what if you get a million dollar tax write off for dumping a million dollar machine in the scrap? I gave you $1000 for it then either sold $20K worth of parts off it then melted it down for another $5 - $10K profit (or sold the whole rig to a startup company for $50K) on that and then when you needed to do the job that machine could have done for you for nothing you will instead spend $5 million to do it of which the tax man will make his million back plus interest between all of us when it's all done and ultimately it all came out of your pocket!

And sure, you could raise the price of your products to pay for the new $5 million dollar machine but then you risk the likelihood of your customers going someplace else (like the startup company who bought your million dollar tax write off rig for $50K from me and now makes your same parts for a fraction of what it takes to be profitable for you) and you're now stuck making nothing for your investment that took you nowhere but backwards.

The tax man ain't your friend ever and if you think he's giving you a break in the form of a write off he's not. He's happily letting you screw yourself over for his advantage later just as big corporations like Sears are dealing with today.

 

As a scrap guy I love seeing fools dump thousands to millions of dollars worth of goods on me and people like me so that they can get there quick cash now tax breaks. We make a very good livings off that penny wise pound foolish business practice and he knows it.

And that is your joy of a tax system that is based on revenue (transactions) rather than actual cash flow. The owner of the obsolete inventory is happy to give it to a scrapper (they are not stupid for giving it to a scrapper).

The scrappers documented cost of acquisition is nearly zero so they have no taxable inventory value. They can show the local authorities that their lot is full of zero-valued crap. It is expected they can find a gold nugget in the scrap (eventually) and nobody is going to squawk if they sell something of significant value and make a profit from it. That is what makes a difficult decision for the original owner of the NOS obsolete inventory. If they write it down on their books and keep the inventory, then they find a gold nugget themselves, they can be accused of tax fraud for not paying inventory taxes or for taking a write down on valuable stock.

Also, most manufacturing companies are not in the business to speculate on NOS sales and continually acquire land for additional warehouse space for that NOS inventory - they are in the business to build and sell valued products.

 

I have to disagree with that. It may have been that way around 5 to 10 years ago, but not now. At least not from places like Harbor Freight. Their hand and power tools are of every bit of the same quality as the old Craftsman tools, some even better. And for stuff like sockets they have the same replacement guarantee. Don't know about other places quality though.

I always liked S-K for my sockets and ratchets. The last time I bought a complete inch and metric set. Many of the sockets have cracked. When I took them back to the place I bought them for replacement, they refused. S-K has a new policy that they don't reimburse the seller for warranted items, so sellers now don't exchange tools. Guess who will never buy S-K again?

I've been burned by HF tools so many times that for a while I stopped shopping there altogether. Then I started shopping there again, but with a few assumptions before I purchase, and since have been much happier with My purchases.

1. HF is a good place to buy tools with no moving parts, to an extent. Hammers, wrenches, wheel chocks, magnetic parts dishes, builder's square, etc.
2. If you're going to buy something with moving parts (power tool, engine hoist, compressor, etc.) consider it less of a "tool" and more of a "kit" that comes with some disassembly, upgrade, and reassembly required. Like for example if you buy their benchtop milling machine, you take it home, drain all the inferior lubricant out of it, finish cleaning the sand out of the casting where the oil sits, replace the cheap plastic gears with metal ones,and put it back together.
3. Don't be compelled to buy something just because it's on "sale." Feel free to walk away and come back 2 years later when you really NEED it. It will still be on "sale."


From what I've heard in this thread I might need to adjust my assumptions.


P.S. why on earth can I not find an all-metric mechanics tool set? Every car since 1989 is born with all metric fasteners. Every last kit for sale from HF or anywhere else, comes with a useless half. I'm talking about a small kit that fits under/behind a seat or in the spare tire well, for roadside or offroad emergency repair. With DMM or at least test light, wire strippers/pliers, screwdrivers, flashlight, wrenches & sockets (all the way up to wheel spindle nut size would be cool), spark plug sockets, nut driver for sockets, etc. etc.

Does not exist AFAIK. They exist only with SAE&Metric combo.

 

The owner of the obsolete inventory is happy to give it to a scrapper (they are not stupid for giving it to a scrapper).

Seems too often they are in fact stupid for giving it away as Strantors example showed, plus in the fact that now so many big corporations are going under exactly for such financial and working assets mismanagement issues, Especially if/when its what ultimately kills their business because they can't financially compete with the smaller guys who built themselves out of their scrap they were all too happy to throw out.

You live your life your way I will live mine my way which is likely about the same as your retirement is except I am only in my mid 40's for having lived my life the scrap mans way of making big profit off dummies who are sure they are smarter than us in throwing away their good junk and buying new.

If I can live the same life you live, do everything you can or more and have more stuff than you too plus do it all for less invested plus operational cost than you, who exactly is the dummy?

 

P.S. why on earth can I not find an all-metric mechanics tool set? Every car since 1989 is born with all metric fasteners. Every last kit for sale from HF or anywhere else, comes with a useless half. I'm talking about a small kit that fits under/behind a seat or in the spare tire well, for roadside or offroad emergency repair. With DMM or at least test light, wire strippers/pliers, screwdrivers, flashlight, wrenches & sockets (all the way up to wheel spindle nut size would be cool), spark plug sockets, nut driver for sockets, etc. etc.

Does not exist AFAIK. They exist only with SAE&Metric combo.

When I updated my tools a bit more this last year finding all metic stuff under the Cresnet name was not a problem. If anything finding just the standard American Imperial sets locally was the harder part. http://www.crescenttool.com

Beyond that the only answer is to do what I always did in the past. Buy a proper and decent mini tool box that fits the vehicle and load it with individual tools that you do need for that kit. For me a basic kits needs 1/4 and 3/8 sockets, open/box end wrenches a multi screwdriver, a hammer, utility knife, needle nose pliers, side cutters, Vice Grips, zip ties, assorted nuts bolts screws and electrical components, and a few other items I have not found in any basic kits that didn't also have a bunch of other useless to the application other stuff included with it.

That and where I live the blow moulded plastic case pre made tool set cases don't hold up simply due to the plastic hinges and locking tabs being too brittle to bend without breaking in our winters here.

 

I agree with all of this. It's such a shame to see the brands that once were synonymous with high quality become cheap crap. /--/.

For me, the change has actually been a dissolution of the concept of branding. While not a "tool guy" as has been discussed here, growing up and as a young adult, Craftsman, meant a great deal. Unimpeachable - they didn't break often and if they did, you got another one with no questions asked.

That concept has fundamentally become weakened (I mean the concept, not just the Craftsman example). There are precious few examples that I can come up with that are meaningful to me personally anymore.

Things with names are not made by the same people, in the same way, for very long - I just accept that. The consequences are serious because if you do not have the stability to evaluate a reputation, you simply can't discriminate.

It has even got to the point where reviews are becoming almost meaningless. I never swore by them, but I did read them - throwing out the bad ones where it was clear the the reviewer was clueless and disregarding the top ones that looked too much like a pay for play.

Case in point - this is an actual quote from an email that I received recently:

Would you like reviewing a ESP8266 WiFi Relay Module, a DIY Electronic Clock, or a WiFi Relay Switch from our Amazon Store?
We will arrange fully refund after you received products with 5 Stars Review.

Mind-boggling.

 

P.S. why on earth can I not find an all-metric mechanics tool set? Every car since 1989 is born with all metric fasteners. Every last kit for sale from HF or anywhere else, comes with a useless half. I'm talking about a small kit that fits under/behind a seat or in the spare tire well, for roadside or offroad emergency repair. With DMM or at least test light, wire strippers/pliers, screwdrivers, flashlight, wrenches & sockets (all the way up to wheel spindle nut size would be cool), spark plug sockets, nut driver for sockets, etc. etc.

Does not exist AFAIK. They exist only with SAE&Metric combo.

Just buy the dual set and put the inch-based tools in the garage. The saving is not that great according to the pricing schemes used by retailers. Notice that the bigger the kit, the cheaper the tools are (per piece). For my son's birthday, we bought a 300 piece toolset for about $30 more than the 160 piece set. The inch-based tools are still needed for lag bolts and other hardware you get at the Lowe's /Home Depot.

 

Seems too often they are in fact stupid for giving it away as Strantors example showed, plus in the fact that now so many big corporations are going under e9xactly for such financial and working assets mismanagement issues, Especially if/when its what ultimately kills their business because they can't financially compete with the smaller guys who built themselves out of their scrap they were all too happy to throw out.

You live your life your way I will live mine my way which is likely about the same as your retirement is except I am only in my mid 40's for having lived my life the scrap mans way of making big profit off dummies who are sure they are smarter than us in throwing away their good junk and buying new.

If I can live the same life you live, do everything you can or more and have more stuff than you too plus do it all for less invested plus operational cost than you, who exactly is the dummy?

I didn't mention this in my original dissertation, but I did also benefit from the dissolution of the maintenance dept.
If you've ever tried to fish a 250lb drill press out of a rolloff with 8' walls by yourself, at night, in the cold rain, then you know the true meaning of "one man's trash is another man's treasure." I didn't have the opportunity to take much of it home, sadly. It was a conflict of interest for me to be the one deciding to toss something, and the same guy loading it into my truck. It might be gray area or worse, but I'm not the one who threw it away, and I just couldn't watch the drill press go. When I left that company, I left with a hole in my heart for industrial spares, started my own business, and ended up taking payment for a few jobs in unused Surplus from my customers.

I've had a garage stocked with pneumatic cylinders, archaic PLC parts, 3ph & DC motors, etc, for a long time. I've moved twice and brought this crap with me each time. Several times over the years I've needed something and had it, and in those moments I felt justified in not having any room in my garage for anything but all this crap , but I am starting to seriously consider a little 5S purging with my own stock.

 

It was a conflict of interest for me to be the one deciding to toss something, and the same guy loading it into my truck

I appreciate a man with ethics (or at least a man who can point out when he is crossing the line).

 

When I left that company, I left with a hole in my heart for industrial spares, started my own business, and ended up taking payment for a few jobs in unused Surplus from my customers.

I've had a garage stocked with pneumatic cylinders, archaic PLC parts, 3ph & DC motors, etc, for a long time. I've moved twice and brought this crap with me each time. Several times over the years I've needed something and had it, and in those moments I felt justified in not having any room in my garage for anything but all this crap , but I am starting to seriously consider a little 5S purging with my own stock.

You're my long lost twin!

I went down the same path and same decisions making processes and now don't regret it for a second.
(first few years were pretty iffy though.)

And as with you, I took every opportunity to score other junk when it was morally and ethically possible to manage which surprisingly pretty much every place I have ever worked for that was dumping surplus stuff was all to happy to have one of their own people take it off their hands for free or even pay them for it and do it all on their own time while also agreeing to bring up any overseen treasures the company for further review may want to actually keep while doing it!

Same with the now doing almost all of my custom work on a-trade for junk- deal system. They think they win and I most certainly win so what's not to like for either of us?

Downside is, like you, I need to do another scrap purge to clear out the legitimately worthless stuff once more, at least 3/4 of what does come is nothing but scrap metal and burnable garbage materials once the valuable usable/sellable stuff is stripped off, which now that I have the heated workshed set up for doing more detailed projects I have been slowly working my way through that process one box and scrap item at time striping the good stuff off while tossing the sortable metals into their proper bins for when the scrap prices go up sometime again.

Unfortunately Scrap steel is worthless now at ~ $$30 - 50 a ton (I'm back up to 30+ tons again that's not worth the time and effort to process and haul right now) but aluminum is pushing 50 cents a pound (700 - 1000 #'s done so far) and copper seems to hanging in $2 - $3 a pound range (~ 150 - 200#'s sorted so far) for some of reason which makes it worth sorting that out out and selling as I do the actual legitimate inventory sorting work.

The other downside is all the mini projects that bringing all the sortables in for processing starts. I have way too many small projects that need to be completed for future use or resell that are now going as the parts to make or just finish them come to light again. So far I've built/rebuilt half a dozen high capacity battery chargers now just to use up good high current power supply parts and surplus digital volt/amp meters and heavy cable bits that havent been used for anything else in years. Too good to scrap yet don't really have any foreseeable use for either so why not use it to build things to give away to family and friends they can use?

In the end I rather hoping to have at least 15 - 20 feet of three level pallet shelving in the main unheated shop plus a few hundred square feet of shop floor space open by next spring even if I dont sell a dime's worth of scrap while doing it. At least it will be sorted and aluminum and copper standing ready in totes when the iron prices do go up more and I will have all new fresh space to fill with whatever work trade and general auctions worth of junk I bring home next summer!

 

a 250lb drill press

I know the feeling. That's why I fished a cast iron 1937 drill press out of a dying machine shop and redesigned it to use modern bearings.

Every car since 1989 is born with all metric fasteners.

I musta spent 150 hours rehabilitating my 2005 Explorer and I can't swear that I ever used an American socket. I think there are a couple in the rear hubs, but I'm not sure. I might have merely found an American socket that was close enough like the 1&1/16 water heater anode rod that fits a 27mm socket because 27mm is 1.063" instead of 1.0625" in American.

Buy a proper and decent mini tool box that fits the vehicle and load it with individual tools that you do need for that kit.

What I have is a little plastic tool box for all 1/4" sockets, drivers, and tips, then a 5 gallon bucket with a tool liner from Home Depot for hand tools. Between those two, I can do anything except cars and trucks.

 

I understand the concept of the short term pseudo-gains (look good on paper now but ultimately screw you later in reality) in taxes write off's (the government loves that fatal flaw in the short term gains at long term sacrifices logic) but as others stories have already shown they always come with a long term financial hit (many ultimately fatal for the business as we are seeing now on a grand scale with too many big corporations) that's way more than what the immediate write off value was worth.

Let's give the devil their due. They don't always come away with a long term hit. Those are just the stories that strike us as noteworthy and that we share. The vast majority of the good decisions passed without notice precisely because they worked pretty much as expected.

Looking at your inventory and the alternatives is not inherently bad. Things that are sitting there for years do have a cost associated with them, even if they and the building they are in are fully paid for. You can sell the parts and use the money for something else and you can use the space for something else. Recognizing that that's the case and asking if there is a better use is not a recipe for disaster. Neither is asking for a reasonable justification for why the twenty widgets back in the corner that have been sitting there for twenty years should be left sitting there. The problem comes in when managers insist on a pure numbers only approach and fail to give appropriate weight to the myriad other considerations that are difficult to put dollar figures on. That's not easy to do, but it's what needs to be done and it is their job to do it. I think a big part of the problem is that many of these considerations are inherently cultural, for lack of a better word, and the good reason why those widgets are still there isn't something that is written down anywhere, it is something that is just "known" by all the people that have been working there for ten or twenty years. When you hire managers from outside, particularly freshly minted college kids, not only do you have people that lack the general wisdom of experience, but they lack the specific knowledge of that company's unspoken history and realities. I think people that come up through the ranks and move into management after many years of working in the trenches are almost always going to be better at taking those other things into consideration, but that is increasingly a thing of the past.

 

For me, the change has actually been a dissolution of the concept of branding. While not a "tool guy" as has been discussed here, growing up and as a young adult, Craftsman, meant a great deal. Unimpeachable - they didn't break often and if they did, you got another one with no questions asked.

That concept has fundamentally become weakened (I mean the concept, not just the Craftsman example). There are precious few examples that I can come up with that are meaningful to me personally anymore.

Things with names are not made by the same people, in the same way, for very long - I just accept that. The consequences are serious because if you do not have the stability to evaluate a reputation, you simply can't discriminate.

It has even got to the point where reviews are becoming almost meaningless. I never swore by them, but I did read them - throwing out the bad ones where it was clear the the reviewer was clueless and disregarding the top ones that looked too much like a pay for play.

Case in point - this is an actual quote from an email that I received recently:

Would you like reviewing a ESP8266 WiFi Relay Module, a DIY Electronic Clock, or a WiFi Relay Switch from our Amazon Store?
We will arrange fully refund after you received products with 5 Stars Review.

Mind-boggling.

Mind boggling, indeed.

I will be in the market for a new DVD/BD player at some point in the near future and I am completely at a loss as to what brands to consider or not consider. I'm also hoping to buy some new tools and Craftsman was always my first choice, but no longer. So what brand can I buy now that will give me quality tools? I also want to get an air compressor and I used to have a very good notion of the good brands and the bad ones -- but not any more.

It shouldn't be this way -- and I don't think a truly free market would let it be this way, at least not to the degree that it is. I have no problem in the notion of you get what you pay for. I have no problem walking into a Home Depot and seeing five brands of wrenches in the tool aisle with a factor of ten in price difference between cheapest and most expensive. I have no problem with expecting that if I buy the cheapest tool that it is going to be the lowest quality. But I also think it reasonable to expect that the if I buy the most expensive tool that it is going to be of significantly higher quality, and not the same tool made in the same place by the same people just with a different name on it.

 

You're my long lost twin!

I went down the same path and same decisions making processes and now don't regret it for a second.
(first few years were pretty iffy though.)

And as with you, I took every opportunity to score other junk when it was morally and ethically possible to manage which surprisingly pretty much every place I have ever worked for that was dumping surplus stuff was all to happy to have one of their own people take it off their hands for free or even pay them for it and do it all on their own time while also agreeing to bring up any overseen treasures the company for further review may want to actually keep while doing it!

Yeah I also identify a lot of similarities between us - minus beef with @GopherT .

There were some purges a while back at the company I currently work for, and I thought that having my LLC on the side would enable me to walk away with some of that scrap legitimately, on the books, paid for in scrap prices. But no, it still went into the dumpster, because my boss was reluctant to sell it to me because my surname was part of the name of my company, which someone might catch, and bring up the potential conflict of interest. So lesson learned, my new LLC does not include my surname.

 

Let's give the devil their due. They don't always come away with a long term hit. Those are just the stories that strike us as noteworthy and that we share. The vast majority of the good decisions passed without notice precisely because they worked pretty much as expected.

Exactly, but if the game isn't played right and conservatively (too often it's not because the up front growth gains potential bait look too good to pass up) with the long game in mind it's very easy to fall into a postive feedback loop that ends with the Tax man eating you alive. Way too many small farmers and ranchers got wiped out by that game to not be common knowledge in my area.

It's a sort of grow or die game once it starts and no matter how good a business is they come to a point they simply can't grow any larger and then the death spiral from the tax man catching up to them starts taking them down piece by piece year after year. If they are really big they can restructure and shrink and repeat several times as they bleed out for years before they die like many of the big corporations are now. Every time they sell of something to get their tax "smart" break or pay the bills what they sold off might just be going to support their competition just as my earlier scrap man and your widgets Vs new management anaogy tells.

One wrong move and it's way to easy to start financial/hard assets resources death spiral and not even know it until it's way too late to stop it simply because you sold of all your long since paid for assets to the scrap man or to your competitors (directly through clearance auctions or the scrap man) just to appease the the tax man who got you hooked with his tax write of incentives game.

The catch as I see it they invest to get the tax write off and grow but then at so time they don't take that write off because they have no way of growing any more so the tax payments that year hit them hard and then if everything was not perfect the next year they might not be able to afford new equipment or general operating expenses they need to keep going, or to pay the Tax for that year on top of it, and the downward spiral begins.

I typically go to multiple farm and or small/medium sized business auctions a year that are almost entirely from that death spiral catching up to someone and the end result being sell of everything they have to pay the tax man one last time.

 

Yeah I also identify a lot of similarities between us - minus beef with @GopherT .

No beef here, just long running annoyance to seeing a grown man act like a unending snarky petty child and troll over political views and losses a sane grown man should have emotionally resolved in a a few day's time let alone in a year plus.

I know full well he's smarter and more knowledgeable than he acts on certain subjects so I just try to hold him up that standard even when he does his damnedest to try and make me and others look dumb by sinking to pointlessly lower and lower standards in choice of social behivior.
He started the downward spiral game and worked very hard to earn the troll title he holds in a lot of people's eyes and that's not my fault being I, and many others, tried to to stop him many times because I/we all knew full well where it was going to take him, and those of his same mindsets, in the forum social hierarchy. Not a good place to willingly go just to spite others.

The thing is, nobody can make others look dumb or shamed in front of their peer group by acting more ignorant/dumber and more shameful than they themself! You can frustrate them with feigned stupidity and continual acts of petty spite and maybe even get them to feel a tiny bit of shame through their empathy for your continual ignorant dumb and shameful actions, but you can't actually make them look like the shameful group dummy in everyone else's eyes for it.

Just look at anyone who tried to Grammar Nazi someone and then failed miserably at basic sentence structure and word usage while doing it. Their target never ever comes out looking dumb or shamed in the end even if they were in fact grammatically wrong in some way!
Its a low-wit looser card that never pays out positively for the player who throws it.

That's the problem. As long as he keeps playing the low-wit snarky troll card to get at people he's going keep paying for it. (Friends don't let friends post stupid, if they can.)