I buy a toaster, a GE, at the WalMart, it comes with a two year warranty. After twenty-five months a heating element fails, or the plastic foot falls off the bottom and there's no way to reattach it without taking the whole bottom off, a procedure that requires tools I don't have and experience I don't have either. Oh well: I got two years out of it.
The Swedish sailor has shore leave in Manhattan. He goes to Times Square. Oh, Boy! movies! whores! drug dealers! The avenue is lined with electronics store fronts. The sailor buys a boom box with a five year warranty, for $9.98 plus tax. The sailor puts in on his shoulder. It's not very loud, but what the hell. By midnight the boom box doesn't play at all, it has zero volume. The next day the sailor takes the boom box back to the little store front. There's the same window display, the same counter display, the same Sephardic Jew who sold it to him. "That warranty is no good here. The company you bought it from is out of business, bankrupt. This is a different company. We have nothing to do with that other company."
(The sailor's mistake was that he didn't have the whole Swedish navy with him in the little store front. I bet his warranty would have been good if the ship's gun were aimed through the store window.)
I was an art dealer. But before I was an art dealer, I was a student, and a teacher: perpetually poor, almost as it were deliberately poor: a monk of sorts. As a student I always had art prints on my cell wall: big Rouault, big Klee, big Picasso, I'd bought for $1 each, put up with thumb tacks. I never spent more that $1 for any art (until I sold pre-Columbian originals, and they were consigned to me, I didn't have to pay for them until after I'd been paid for them: I sold one for $40, I owed the guy $20: back in 1958) until one day, coming back from the dentist, on Third Avenue just below Fifty-Seventh Street, in the 1960s, I saw a gallery with $10 framed art prints jamming the sidewalk. I got another Picasso. It was a small reproduction, but it was framed: the first framed anything I'd ever bought! Years later, in the 1970s, in the graphics business myself, a publisher, distributor, artist-rep, I noticed that "same" gallery. It seemed to be exactly the same. It seemed to have the same huge banner over the door: 50% Off: Everything Must Go. This time I was going there deliberately, to see the owner, one "Alan." I had an introduction from "Artie," the owner of a string of crumby schlock galleries downtown. Artie was an Ashkenazi Jew who'd married into a Sephardic family: Alan was Artie's brother-in-law. Artie always gave me a hard time, then bought dozens of things from me, always four-figures worth, always paid cash on delivery (always almost-always: I did get a bad check from him once). (I had Ashkenazi customers who would have cut me off permanently if they known I'd so much as spoken to a Sephardim!) The framed junk on the side walk was still the same size, still $10. But this visit I noticed that by the entrance to the store began a series of huge price tags all slashing everything in "half": $50 crossed out / $25; $100 crossed out / $50; $150 crossed out / $75 ... and so forth. As one progressed into the store the crossed-out prices escalated to $200, $250, $300 ... $500 ... $1,000. Now: here's the hook: toward the back of the store one began to encounter Calders, and Dalis: and there were no price tags. Alan bought four-figures worth of stuff from me, I delivered on the spot, he paid me on the spot: cash, $1,400 or so. I came back a month or two later to see how he was doing. There was my stuff. Things on my price list for $100, Alan had up with a huge tag: $200, crossed out / $100! He was offering my stuff at retail, pretending it was half-price. I'd sold at Alan at 50/20. In other words: if my list price was $100, any retailer understod that they'd pay me $50 for it. $100 was what they sold it for, not me. I always quoted retail prices so their custumer would only hear one price: the public's price. Any retailer also understood that if they bought in volume, they could expect a special consideration: 50/20: fairly standard. Alan, Artie, sold, relying on ignorance. But here's the thing: in the back of the store, where only Alan himself reigned, where none of his Sephardic baseball team of salesmen trespassed, there were all these Calders, Dalis, I knew the list price of almost all of them. One Dali I didn't recognize. "Alan," I said, "What do you sell this one for?" Alan answered that Levine had it on his list at $500: he'd sold one that morning to a New Jersey lawyer for $1,200. The lawyer probably thought it was $2,400! The lawyer had been set up toassume a 50% discount. Actually Alan got him to pay whatever Alan thought he could get for it. The store's structure softened the sucker up: no one had to say anything to him.
Please don't misunderstand: I am not saying that the Sephardic Jews are crooks, and no one else is; no, I am saying that some Sephardic Jews teach their children some standard business swindles early: they don't wait till they're middled aged and discover them for themselves.
But what I'm really saying is that the culture is full of swindles while the culture pretends to represent law and order! It doesn't. It hasn't. It never will.
These are stories intended to suggest general patterns, not absolute structures. We live in a far from honest society. We live in an economy of planned obsolescence. But of course there are also durable goods, honest merchants ...
My girlfriend gets incredible service from Harry and Davids, from LL Bean ... Decades ago a friend lived with his wife in Colorado in a Coleman tent: they lived way out in the woods, 24/7 for a series of years. The tent had a three year warranty. Having no other home, two adults, going in and out of the tent, in all weathers, finally, after two years and eleven months, managed to get the tent entrance zipper stuck. Coleman apologized that it had discontinued that model which had sold for $100: So, sorry, but would you accept our Olympic model as a replacement? It's bigger and sells for $150. My friends had the balls to accept!
It isn't just merchants who are crooks.
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