When I reached Jeff Schwartz at his Palm Springs vacation home last week, the Canadian entrepreneur was in the midst of trying to find a way to sell a truckload of bananas that recently overturned.
“You’re trying to flip bananas to whoever you can,” he said, presumably sunning next to a pool.
The banana deal is one of thousands Schwarz, the star of a now-cancelled Canadian reality show, “The Liquidator,” has executed over his decades-long career as essentially a flipper of stuff. Schwarz hunts down damaged merchandise and businesses on the verge of death offloading their inventory and looks for ways to sell the items for a profit.
Most may be hesitant to make an entire career of hustling goods, but in an age where everyone has a side hustle and retailers are dropping like flies, Schwarz’s experience has made him an evangelist for flipping merchandise to provide a stream of extra money.
“You go to a shopping mall and you see a closing out sale, why not walk in?” he said.
Schwarz got his start in the liquidating business decades ago at, of all places, his wife’s great aunt’s wake. At the time, he was 22 and working in construction when he learned that someone had offered the family $450 to take the aunt’s stuff off their hands. Schwarz offered $500 and began hawking her estate at flea markets. He discovered he had a knack for offloading unwanted goods.
Soon, Schwarz began buying and selling antiques, which morphed into buying entire houses-worth of stuff as people were moving out, which spiraled into factory rejects and ultimately led him to connections with bankruptcy trustees, insurance companies and others who provide him with leads to his latest purchase. Now he owns a 38,000-square-foot facility in British Columbia full of stuff that he stores, auctions and sells in other ways.
“I’ve been doing it for so long that people call me,” he said.
Schwarz has made a lucrative career out of buying and offloading a variety of goods (in addition to the home in Palm Springs, he recently built a new house in Vancouver’s North Shore). He was recently in possession of about 40,000 sets of women’s lingerie that weren’t packaged properly. In the past, he’s sold a stock of sex-related merchandise — including 40,000 dildos and a 53-inch trailer-worth of stuff — as well as 10 trailer loads full of horticulture equipment used to grow marijuana. He once bought 100,000 pickled peppers and an inventory of pianos in the same day.
Still, there are items he’ll pass up. Schwarz recently described a call he received from a large computer manufacturing facility looking to offload DVDs and CDs. “What’s that worth? You have to be careful because you don’t know.”
Some of the items he’s had the easiest time selling include tools — “men like tools,” he says — and designer sunglasses. Men’s clothes are also often a big seller, but Schwarz said he’s more careful when evaluating a stock of women’s garb. Women tend to be more particular, so Schwarz tries to limit his purchases to inventories of brand name clothing in a variety of sizes, he said.
Regardless of what types of items he’s buying, Schwarz says he always tries to sell as much of the merchandise in advance as possible, by contacting businesses or people he knows who might be interested. When that fails, he has other means of making the sale. One time he held onto a stock of 200 bamboo coffins for months, until Halloween rolled around and they flew off the shelves.
He’s also traveled with samples of his products on vacation. “There’s always somebody that’s willing to buy something and you’ve got to be on top of it,” he said. Schwarz sells his wares to buyers ranging from big box stores to individuals.
Some critics have accused Schwarz of taking his deal at all costs motto a bit too far. “I get hate mail like you wouldn’t believe,” from viewers deriding the show, he said. Schwarz admits that some of his business dealings may not make him look like the sweetest guy. Once he convinced the Bosnian refugee owners of a restaurant he frequented daily to sell him the business’s inventory, which they had invested $100,000 in over the years, for $4,500.
“I don’t screw people. I do buy stuff cheap and I do re-sell stuff at a profit,” he said. “Anything we do in a free world is buying and selling.”
Even people who aren’t ready for a career in buying and selling can use Schwarz’s dealing approach to shopping, he said. That’s true even at large, name-brand stores. At Costco, for example, any item priced at $XX.97 instead of $XX.99 is something they’re hoping to get rid of, according to Schwarz, and so there may be some room to negotiate. Ambitious shoppers could also attempt to buy out the whole stock of the item, hold onto it until Costco sells out its inventory and then turn around and sell the items for a profit. (Costco declined to comment.)
Shoppers may be successful negotiating a discount at any store if they pick up damaged merchandise or show workers evidence of an item priced lower on Amazon. He says as long as you’re nice about it, people are willing to negotiate — even at name-brand stores — about 70% of the time.
“If you don’t ask, you’re never going to get a deal,” he said. “Why pay the full retail?”