Hick Lures in a Whopper

Friday night, Hick bought a tackle box at the auction. He told me all about it on Saturday evening.

"I paid $20 for it. I saw that it had at least six lures in it, but I didn't have time to sort through everything. I usually sell the lures for $2 apiece. I set it down in the back of my Storage Unit Store this morning. If business was slow, I was going to look through it. Or if it rained.

I was setting my other stuff out to get ready. I'd forgot about the tackle box. My buddy Spudsy was looking around. He came out front and said, 'I see you have a new tackle box.' He buys fishing stuff from me all the time, and re-sells it.

I said, 'Yeah, I haven't had time to go through it yet.' I knew I could get at least $32 out of it, counting those lures I saw.

Spudsy said, 'Can I make you an offer?'

I said, 'Well, you can offer, and I'll think about it.'

Spudsy said, 'Will you take $70 for it?'

I said, 'I think I can do that.'"

"You fool! You probably could have gotten $75 or $80! Why did you give in so easy? It might have had something valuable in there that you didn't see!" I said to the man who spends a couple hundred on a gun, and sells it for a $10 or $15 profit.

"I know that now. I probably could have said I'd take $85, and he'd a-give it to me. My other buddy said, 'Nah, you don't want to gouge him like that.' He's right. Spudsy buys from me all the time, and I try to leave him room to make re-sell money, as long as I make money first. I'm sure he'll still make money off that tackle box, or he wouldn't have offered me $70 for it."

"Yeah. You're not a charity."

"I'm going back to the auction tonight. They still had three tackle boxes left, that didn't sell. If there's nobody driving up the bids tonight, I might be able to get them for $10 each. Then I'll make money for sure."

"You already made a $50 profit!"

"Yeah, but anything over what I pay for it is profit."

If I didn't know Hick so well, I'd swear he was a Tom-Sawyer-ish genius, setting that tackle box off the beaten path in his Storage Unit Store, letting Spudsy "discover" an unexplored treasure.