# Buying "hot" stuff



## digger242j (Nov 22, 2001)

Just during this past week there have been a number of thefts from the site I'm working on. These weren't break-ins in the middle of the night, but things that disappeared from the back of trucks in broad daylight. From 3 different trucks, belonging to three different employees of three different contractors, 2 cut-off saws, a chain saw, a laser level, and a small generator. The chain saw and the generator were the guys' personal property, not company property.

What I'm curious about is, do you buy stuff you know is "hot"? We've all had guys come up to us on the job with great deals on tools and equipment, some brand new, and some slightly used. Have you yeilded to temptation?

I've posted a poll, because that way if you need to answer "yes" you won't have to admit it by name. If you want to post a reply and admit to it by name, that's fine. Be honest in answering the poll though.

It'd be interesting to hear what stuff you may have lost, and how, over the years too. Personally I've lost a couple of chainsaws, a couple cutoff saws, an 18 inch backhoe bucket, etc. , and came within a couple feet of losing a whole dumptruck, trailer and backhoe once.


----------



## A.L. Inc. (Jan 4, 2002)

I would never consider it. I would never want to support the dirtbags that make a living by stealing from hard working people.


----------



## Mick (May 19, 2001)

Besides being morally opposed to stealing, I wouldn't take the chance of it being found in my possession. It could be considered that you should have known or had reason to believe it is stolen and be charged with "receiving stolen property". At best, you just lose it and are out the money.


----------



## Rob (May 15, 2001)

Nope... I don't do it

Aside from the fact that I hate people taking stuff from the guy that earned it, I'd rather give the business to my local companies that way when I have a problem they may be more likely to help me out.

Also, you may be on the buying end today, but soon enough you'll be on the supplying end.. know what I mean ?


----------



## Pelican (Nov 16, 2001)

I refuse to provide a market for these scumbags!

Before I went into business for myself, I didn't realize the importance of a man's tools. I knew this black market existed, but never participated in it for fear of being caught like Mick suggests. 

Now, I've seen the light, I wouldn't participate if the tool was given to me, and wouldn't hesitate to turn the scuzball in.

The only thing I've lost is a 20' extension ladder out of the back of my truck at a shopping plaza.


----------



## eatonpaving (Jun 23, 2003)

well guys i have taken something that was not mine. it was a plow. i needed one for my case skid steer. an aribic guy cut my price in the middle of winter and took two mobile stations away from me, even thought i had a contract for the stations, the owners were aribic, so the guy plowed the snow twice, and droped his drive shaft one night, he had the truck towed and left the plow next to the building, it sat there till summer, the station called me to patch the lot with asphalt, when i showed up the plow was sitting there, we did the patch work, i asked the owner about the plow and he said the guy had quit the plow biz, and to take the plow if i wanted it, it was in his way. later that day i loaded it in my pickup and drove away, i new from the get it was wrongbut i took it anyways, i mounted it to my case, from that day forward for a year, business sucked and i could not make my payments on the new plow trucks so thay went back to the bank. thay repoed the case with the plow on it, i lost everything i had except my dumptruck and rollar, i had to go to work as a mechanic in a shop till this spring when a buddy wanted a driveway installed, the money from the driveway got me going again, then a guy wanted to trade my race truck for thisa truck i have now with a plow on it(trust me if i find a dollar on the ground it stays on the ground, if it were 10 million it would stay on the ground, the main man tought me a lession.(IF ITS NOT MINE I WILL NOT TOUCH IT) if i ever see the guy who ownes the plow i took he will get a new one. randy. ps dont take anything, what goes around comes around.


----------



## CARDOCTOR (Nov 29, 2002)

only thing your doing is helping to supporting some crack head
i had a plow stolen the night before a storm had it attached to my shop with a chain

now i plasma cut my name and # on the blade





cardoctor:yow!: 

sure is hot:yow!:


----------



## Workhorse2500 (May 13, 2003)

I was a little shocked by this poll. First of all, I would think that the majority of people on this site are honest, hard workers. I have a special kind of hatred for anyone who steals. These scumbags steal from innocent hard working guys trying to make it being honest. These rats truely make me sick, and make my blood boil. 

Another thought, if you buy stolen property, without knowing that it is stolen and you are caught with it, it will be returned to the rightful owners by the authorities and you will be out of the money you gave that crackhead dealer.

Tip-My local police station has engraving tools that any person can use to mark their property in case it is stolen. Just make sure you mark your property carefully to give you the edge in claiming your property back.


----------



## eatonpaving (Jun 23, 2003)

:realmad: ya know what, yea i took the plow, with the permission of the station owner. ( still was not right). but i guess puting down a ton of salt and telling the customer you put down two, na thats not stealing, thats just fuging a LITTLE.i have read almost all the posts on here and almost all on here agrees you got to lie about the salt cause the price has fallen. no one on here has ever went and plowed snow on a 2 inch trigger when you had a 1.5 snow fall, na you guys would not do that.(BULL**** YOU OWN A BUSINESS AND YOU WILL DO WHAT EVER IT TAKES TO STAY ALIVE). cheating the customer is stealing.


----------



## Mick (May 19, 2001)

> _Originally posted by eatonpaving _
> [B but i guess puting down a ton of salt and telling the customer you put down two, na thats not stealing, thats just fuging a LITTLE. [/B]


I would consider that stealing, too. Unless you have a "minimum".

Like you said, "what goes around comes around". I've found that to be true, over and over.


----------



## meyer22288 (May 26, 2003)

I would never take someone elses equipment. It makes me sick the fact that a person could steal from the hard working class like us.:realmad: Everyone needs equipment to keep working and the fact that ive had equipment stolen is enough to stop me from taken something that dont belong to me.


----------



## eatonpaving (Jun 23, 2003)

well guys, i see the poll is 82 persent to the good, boy somebody is not telling the truth. if you go back and read all the posts on salt and triggers, you will see what i mean. i see alot of guys on here are auto techs, do we fuge in that feild also, like telling the customer the rotors are just under spec, when theres 20 thousands left, or that the rear main is leaking when its just the rear manifold gasket. we dont do that do we.(NEVER) i got some bad feedback from my post on the plow i took. i done that one time, looks like the salters on here have done that a long time. not all but most. lets do a new poll and post are names and lets see what the results are, cause we can go back and read all the old posts and see. bet it wont be 50 persent to the good.


----------



## Mick (May 19, 2001)

eatonpaving, I hope you didn't consider my post as beating up on you. I didn't intend it that way. I wondered after my second post if maybe you'd gotten some PMs blasting you.

Basically, eatonpaving simply related an experience in which he learned it is better to stay on the right side. I, for one, commend him for relating the tale. I think he could have made a case that it wasn't stealing if he had reason to believe the garage owner was now the owner of the plow. Most places would have claimed it as abandoned property. For me, any property left by tenants becomes mine after 30 days of moving out unless they make arrangements through me.


----------



## CT18fireman (Nov 30, 2000)

I think when you physically take someone elses property for yourself that is a lot different then loading a yard of salt, spreading 3/4 of it and charging the customer for the yard. Or doing 50 minutes of labor and charging and hour. Those are legitiment, stealing is not.

It is not a good feeling to walk out to your vehicle, shop, job site, etc and discover something is missing.

Mick I agree about recovered property. I have cleaned up a lot of properties after people abandoned them or moved on. All this stuff (furniture, tools, yard equipment, etc) gets taken to my shop and held by me for an additional 60 days. If no contact is made then I may sell it or use it. Most of the time it is clear when we clean it out but occassionally someone comes looking for something.


----------



## Pelican (Nov 16, 2001)

eatonpaving, I'd be very careful throwing around the generalized statements you've made. While there *might* be a few who practice the claims you've made, and I'm not pointing fingers, I'd like to think the numbers who do here are very low. Those who do are the ones that cause legitimate businessmen a lot of grief in government regulations being handed down.

I've got my business set up with minimum fees which are clearly spelled out before any service begins. This avoids any controversy at billing time about amounts of salt or snow which might be questionable.

I thought your original post was worthy, and taught a lesson in morals. In that post you speak of learning your lesson and sounded remorseful. Perhaps you should have quit while you were ahead. With all the accusations you've made, I tend to think you're much too familiar with the tactics you describe. If I'm wrong, you have my sincere apology, but this is the air that you give.



> BULL**** YOU OWN A BUSINESS AND YOU WILL DO WHAT EVER IT TAKES TO STAY ALIVE).


If I could not operate my business honestly, I'd sell my equipment in a heartbeat. Perhaps this is why I've been successful thus far. I don't care what people call me, *******, Right Wing Nutcase, grumpy, old fashioned or most anything else, but if someone calls me a thief or a liar, they better be prepared to face the consequences.

I've got a feeling some auto techs will be checking in....

Geez digger, you've gone an' done it again!


----------



## CARDOCTOR (Nov 29, 2002)

> _Originally posted by eatonpaving _
> *well guys, i see the poll is 82 persent to the good, boy somebody is not telling the truth. if you go back and read all the posts on salt and triggers, you will see what i mean. i see alot of guys on here are auto techs, do we fuge in that feild also, like telling the customer the rotors are just under spec, when theres 20 thousands left, or that the rear main is leaking when its just the rear manifold gasket. we dont do that do we.(NEVER) i got some bad feedback from my post on the plow i took. i done that one time, looks like the salters on here have done that a long time. not all but most. lets do a new poll and post are names and lets see what the results are, cause we can go back and read all the old posts and see. bet it wont be 50 persent to the good. *


you must take you car to pepboys or sears 
if my techs ever sold something the customer didnt need
id throw them and their tool box out the door
you can make more honest money long term than screwing somebody short term

cardoctor

ase master tech

L1 cert


----------



## BWhite (Sep 30, 2002)

*buying hot*

Buying hot stuff just keeps the cycle going . The problem is the courts don't have stiff penalties when the are caught . They have no reason to stop either the stealer's or the buyers (stealer's).You need to be careful buying used equipment


----------



## digger242j (Nov 22, 2001)

> Geez digger, you've gone an' done it again!




Well, it wasn't my intention to incite a riot, although I guess I should know better by now. 

I think we're probably all subject to what's called "situation ethics"--we try to hold ourselves to a certain standard of good behavior but do adjust our standards to fit the situation. I'd be willing to bet that there'd be very few of us who could honestly, after deep reflection, answer that we've *never* fallen victim to the tempatation to rationalize the rightousness of our own behavior, when if we were on the other end of the transaction we'd feel cheated.

I think the way some folks are billed for salting is a good example. The rational reasons it's done the way it's done have been discussed in other threads, and don't need to be rehashed here.

I think there's a continuum with "saintly honesty" at one end and "murdering someone in the course of a robbery" at the other end. At least in my opinion, shakey business practices fall someplace below saintly honesty, but above outright theft of property. Where "buying stolen property" falls on that scale, relative to how scrupuolusly honestly you treat your customers, is apparently a topic of debate. (But let's keep it a friendly debate.)

As far as patronizing theives by buying stolen merchandise, I'm not surprised at the replies so far. I'll bet there's a slighly larger fraction of the readership that would have to honestly answer something other than "never", but they've probably chosen not to answer at all, so the poll results are probably skewed a little in favor of honesty. My compliments to those who had the forthrightness to answer "maybe". I hope you never end up owning anything of mine (or anything of our friends' here), but there's something to be said for recognizing, and admitting to, your own faults.

I once knew a guy who would have bought a stolen stero, or camcorder, etc. , but who drew a very firm line at buying stolen tools. His point of view was that the theif was not only stealing material goods, but stealing a man's way of making a living. Situation ethics, to be sure. I was wondering how he'd have answered when I asked the question to begin with.

We once worked on a site only a few blocks from a Sears store. Every few days a guy would come by with brand new Craftsman hand tools--hammers, tape measures, etc. A lot of the guys would buy them. Whether they'd have bought a used tool that had obviously come out of somebody's truck, I don't know.

My personal reply to the question would be that I haven't ever bought anything I "knew" to be hot. (I did once buy a brand new briefcase from a friend who had a dozen or so of them in his trunk, and later on figured out that they might not have come from where he said they had.) I pretty much agree with all the reasons everyone else has given, but my own top reason would be that I simply refuse to support those who steal for a living.


----------



## speedracer241 (Oct 13, 2001)

*Hi I'm speedracer241, I'm a thief*

I fix accident damaged vehicles based mainly on Insurance company estimates. All the parts prices and some of the labor times all come out of books or computer estimating guides.
If I beat the estimated times I put a few extra dollars in my pocket on Friday.

I don't see this as stealing. I see this as being very efficient. I make my best time straightening(mudding up)panels.

Maybe I am stealing 
Mark K


----------



## digger242j (Nov 22, 2001)

> you must take you car to pepboys or sears
> if my techs ever sold something the customer didnt need
> id throw them and their tool box out the door


Getting off topic in my own thread--There was a news story a while ago around here about Midas Mufflers (I think). It seems it was pretty much company policy to tell the customer they needed stuff that they didn't really need. I posted a reply in the thread about what kind of ethics to expect from your employees where I said I think most employers would demand the same level of ethics they practice--that they'd expect employees to be as totally honest as they were, or at the other extreme they'd expect employees to cheat customers on their behalf.

I guess Cardoctor's position would be a good example of the former....


----------



## CT18fireman (Nov 30, 2000)

Digger, I think your comments are pretty accurate. I too would say I have never bought anything I "knew" to be hot. I will not buy something from someone who just comes up to me on a jobsite or in a parking lot. I have bought stuff from friends and other contractors that I could believe with 99% accuracy was legit. The reality is unless you buy it or witness the purchase from a store then you can never be positive. 

As most of us have said we try to run successful businesses. The best way to do this is with honest, hard work, not cheating. It does not pay in the long run. I was weary when this poll was put up. The simple matter is that most people if they did steal will not admit it even on a "secret" poll.


----------



## eatonpaving (Jun 23, 2003)

:realmad: well i know i posted what i did, not proud of it at all, then the name calling and ******** started. no one is perfect, but those who knowingly have done wrong in the past should not jump my ****, when thay have posted on here how thay overcharge for salt and a couple other things, i had read the posts on the salt issue i did not say anything about the guys doing this, then i posted what i did and the very guys who had stolan from their customers jumped in with their stupid remarks. and for the auto repair, i have worked at the pepboys,and dennys service and jack demmer ford, and i will tell you now when it gets slow and theres no money comming in and your on commission you will cheat, not all, but alot do. the pepboys in gardencity mich was closed because of complaints and the state inspections,, the poll at last look was 19 said that thay would not steal, well there is five thousand members here, in a half hour i read forty some posts about overcharging for salt, only one member had said he did not do that and stuck to his guns on many different posts,so on this forum if ripping someone off and making a good excuse is the norm, i know i will never take another plow or anything for that matter, but this winter how many of you will put down 10 tons of salt and only charge for 10 tons, and i am not talking about miniums either.


----------



## digger242j (Nov 22, 2001)

Randy, I for one, respect the fact that you had the guts to actually admit to doing something you believe was wrong. It challenges the rest of us to check our own level of honesty, not only with the rest of the world, but with ourselves. Thank you.

I remembered a quote last night. I don't remember who said it, but it was a famous lawyer from a hundred years ago and it went something like this: "I'd sooner defend a man charged with murder than one charged with stealing a horse. It's a whole lot easier to convince a jury that a man needed to be killed than it is to convince them that a horse needed to be stolen."

Somewhere along the line people have convinced themselves that they need to charge customers the way they do, and some have set stricter standards for themselves than others, but right or wrong, that's a different question than actual theft of property.

It's been discussed in other threads, and can be discussed further if anyone wants to. We can discuss the relative merits of armed robbery as a source of business capital in a thread too, if anyone wants to. My question in this thread was about the actual stealing of property.


----------



## Ohiosnow (Sep 20, 2001)

*Well I have bought from the local pawn shop*

And I would believe some of the stuff sold there is HOT :yow!: but I don't go looking to buy HOT stuff :waving:

I've had plenty of tools & supplies stolen from my trucks  that's how I started going into the pawn shop looking for my stuff but never found any there. I did get a call from a scrap yard once stating they had a roll of pumpcable ($800.00) with my Co. name & Phone # on it. Said a guy sold it to them & if I wanted it I could pay them back the $20.00 they gave him.  Oh well, at least I got it back.


----------



## Lawn Lad (Feb 4, 2002)

Ahh theft... such a gray area. I think you're spot on Digger with you analysis about situational ethics. 

Some people believe that if they quote a job and they complete it ahead of the firm quote that they should refund a portion of the contract to the customer rather than reap the rewards of being efficient. 

To others trying to cheat the customer by not using stated materials or cutting corners is stealing from the customer what it is that they are buying. Some view this as being efficient. 

With our landscaping business I struggled with the notion of billable vs non-billable time. About 6 years ago we went to 5 min increments of time when billing for hourly work (I keep track of everything in 5 min increments) from 1/4 hr increments. Showing up with 6 guys to do fall clean ups and having a 5 or 10 minute swing meant that a customer could be charged for 1/2 hr to 1 hour of unused labor. Is that fair? At the time I was doing curb side billing. I was finding that I was about 70% billable over the course of the year, which was way to low. I changed my billing policy a bit to add more portal to portal billing which helped to up the billable percentage, but I was upfront. I'm still not over 80% annually (winter time overhead) and I doubt I'll ever reach 90% plus. The time and attention required to do 5 min billing added overhead for us. To be ethical cost me more money! 

A local contractor was telling me that he was coming back 100% or 125% billable on the day. Billing for more hours than were actually produced. At the end of the day he would add in his hours across the customers for the day and if he could pad the bill a bit more he knew the customer had the money and wouldn't squeal. Is this right? Well, if his hourly rate was lower than mine since I added my admin costs into the hourly rate and he just recouped his cost based on where his crews were for the day - isn't he doing the same thing? Does he have to disclose this to the customer?

When you don't plow the full parking lot but you charge the full trip price, is this right? What if you just plow 1/3 of the lot at night to clean up from the day before? How do you bill? 

When you can't truly measure 3/4 of a ton salt vs 1 ton of salt, how do you charge when the market says bill by the ton but you know that you should be billing by the application since it's more fair to do so since you don't have a certified scale on your truck?

I guess situational ethics can be controlled to some degree by how you structure your business and your billing practices. By setting up contracts that don't put you into a position where you have to question how to charge, you won't find yourself making those tough on the spot decisions. 

Being ethical means doing your homework up front and stating what you intend to do and how you intend to do it for the customer and then doing it that way. If things change, communicate it to the customer. Being ethical costs money sometimes as I found with our billing practices. But to me, it's worthwhile since I can always justify how a bill is generated and substantiate it with the appropriate paperwork. 

Buying stolen goods - it's just a no no, may they be tools or otherwise. As already stated, it just provides a marketplace for the thieves of the world to off their loot. I'd rather not have something or wait until I can afford it then to buy something that I know someone else lost through theft. I hate the feeling of being violated when something is stolen from me, I can't imagine contributing to that for someone else.


----------



## cat320 (Aug 25, 2000)

Didn't any one hear of they guy who was takeing home some dirt from a contruction site every night with a wheelbarrow.Who would ever think that it was not the dirt but the new wheelbarrow he was steeling. And the guard let him by every night.


----------



## Pelican (Nov 16, 2001)

Randy, it is unfortunate that some would condemn you for your honesty, I'm not sure you stole that plow. The way you describe the incident, you removed abandoned property at the request of the real property owner. I'm not sure how the law would deal with this case.

My beef is how you've painted the membership here as dishonest with a broad brush. Using your numbers, and I'll round 40 something to 50, even if each post you cited was made by a different member, this only represents less than 1% of the membership, not the 50% you seem to believe are dishonest.

Taking this further, the number of posts you reference represents less than .06% of the total posts, again hardly an indication that things here at Plowsite are as crooked as you are trying to have us believe.

None of this has anything to do with digger's poll which asks about stolen equipment, and I don't feel the general membership at Plowsite should come under fire as have in your posts.


----------



## paul soccodato (Nov 9, 2002)

if any of you have ever had anything stolen off the truck or job-site, then you know how i feel when some low-life comes up and tries to sell you someone else's stuff.

:realmad:


----------



## eatonpaving (Jun 23, 2003)

pelican you said you did not know if i stole that plow or was removing abanoned property, i should have gotten the guys phone number from the station owner and called the guy and offered him some cash for it, i did not, and when i took it i did not feel right, so to me it was stealing, i did not mean that everyone here was cheating, and i cannot do polls,so i hope that 99 persent of you guys are not pissed, i had the scammers come to the house this morning thay wanted to rent my dump truck for the day to do some patch work, so i ran the truck for them all day but thay did not do any scamming, i gave them a lesson in asphalt paving, i was kinda mad cause thats work i could have had, thay had told me that thay were gonna put down 6 tons when i got done thay had laid 14 tons, the work was done right but i dought thay will ever ask me again. but i did get paid.i understand how it feels when you drive down the road and see someone doing your work at half price and do a **** job, and i understand about the salt,thats how i felt when i saw the guy doing my stations, i refuse to do bad work cause it will come back to haunt you, when i pave anything it is by the book , no other way will i do it, and i tell the customer that and it shows in the price, cause you cannot buy a cadillac with just enough money for an escort.i think this poll has tought me a lesson, i was kinda letting up on my morals a little,now no way.tell em like it is you only get what you pay for if you dont want to pay for it to be done right dont ask me. have a good day guys.


----------



## repo_man62 (Oct 24, 2004)

What you do or say always comes back on you 10 fold, doesn't it???


----------



## gpin (Dec 5, 2003)

NEVER AGAIN. I bought some hot tools from a guy who pulled up to my site in a van in the early 80s. The next week I left my truck on site when I went out to lunch and it was empty when I got back. I laughed for ten minutes. My 1st major lesson in karma. I was the thiefs best customer, both ways.


----------



## Guy (Sep 13, 2004)

Tools? never. New electronics? maybe. I have a story about "situational ethics". A guy returned from boating to find someone had stolen a leaf spring from his boat trailer. The guy figured, "he must have needed it pretty bad." Similar, but not quite as dishonest, are stories of people lost and cold in the woods, break into a cabin, "steal" some wood for the stove and a little grub.
Not too many tool stories here, if you see tools for sale, it's most likely the owner selling to get past a rough time. Maybe it's our lax gun toting attitude here,( Concealed weapons by permit, or worn openly) that makes a thief think twice.


----------



## johntwist (Feb 10, 2004)

Two things I can't stand are liars and thieves.

Whenever I work in Boston it seems like there's always some rat pulling on the job in a crappy old van loaded up with 'great deals on tools'. And as much as I hate to say, it seems like there's always a guy who'll use another guy's misfortune to his advantage by buying something from the jerk. I like it better when the crane operator starts swinging the hook over towards the van and a couple of other guys walk over with some rigging straps and invite him to get his scumbag a-- off the job before they do it for him.

When I worked on one of the 3 new natural gas power plants they built around here during the last 5 years you guys wouldn't believe the stuff that was flying out of there. Anything small enough to fit in a gym bag would disappear, palm grinders, welding stingers, all sorts of hand tools, you name it. It got to the point where they started doing random searches of bags and lunchboxes in the lines of guys clocking out at end of shift, which just made it take longer to get home after working 10 to 14 hours. One day I just happened to be saying to a guy how much I'd like to get one of the new Ridgid tri-stand chain vices someday when one of the laborers who was walking by came over to me. "Where's your truck", he says, "I'll get one for you." I told him I was all set.

If it was up to me, we'd go back to taking hands off for that stuff. It's the only thing the arab cultures do that I actually agree with.  Thieves.


----------



## all seasons (Nov 1, 2004)

there are fine lines between right and wrong and good and bad,buying stolen property is definitely not good although you may justify it by the savings,what about the guy it was stolen from,that now most likely bought it twice.i tend to look at it like this ,if i would not like that done to me then i don't want to do it to someone i don't know.besides,thats bad karma and what you put out always comes back to you.


----------



## KatWalk (Oct 12, 2002)

*No Comparison to plowing at 1.5" instead of 2"*

CT18fireman has got it right, 50 minutes equals an hour charged. 3/4 of a ton of sand/salt is charged as a ton......If we could buy and get 3/4 of a ton consistently maybe you could charge for It. If you plow at 1.5" instead of the 2" trigger you are still providing a service of showing up and doing something. Stealing is stealing is stealing.....it's wrong and we all know it but it is not going away. I had an employee filling up his car with gas out of our gas caddy. He denied it and his best buddy that rides with him everyday threw him under the bus!!!!! I broke his nose with a hard right..haha just kidding.


----------



## glenspot (Aug 11, 2004)

*stealing*

Would I buy stuff i KNEW was stolen. No.

Would I buy something that I came from an unknown source? Yes.

Don't ask, don't tell.

I bought my plow from a guy I trust, I think. I got a good deal, it was used. I guess I never ASKED him if it was stolen. I don't think it was. But on the surface it might have looked stolen.

Used plow, cheap price, don't know where it came from. I didn't ASK if it was stolen. (BTW, It wasn't stolen, I found out as time went on, that it came off a guys truck that works for him)

I buy used stuff off ebay all the time. Where did this particular ebay seller come across this "New In the box laptop"....and why does he have 14 of them for sale. I don't know. But I do know that I'm bidding on it. And I'm not going to ask if its stolen.

But, to be clear...if someone came up to me and said "Hey, I got this plow cheap....just don't tell anyone where you got it from..." Well, gee. I think I'd be able to figure that out...and pass on the deal.

Billing for work not done.... is that stealing? I think someone said that it depends on how you address the subject in the first place. In another thread we talked about billing per hour or per push. One guy started the season and it took him 2 hours to plow a driveway. He billed for 2 hours. As time went on he could do the driveway in 15 minutes, but he still billed for 2 hours of work. Did he steal? Maybe he did, because he was telling the client that he worked for 2 hours.

If the driveway was bid at $250, with no mention of HOURS....and he was able to do it in a short amount of time. Then he's not lying. Not stealing and not being dishonest. He's being efficient

I would like to think that most people on plowsite are honest and would never KNOWINGLY buy something stolen. It hadn't even occurred to me until now, how HONEST we all are on here. Meaning....that we leave the door open for dishonest people to take advantage of us.

I think there was a discussion somewhere about what we do with our blades during the off season. A dishonest person would have to scan that thread and know where to go to steal a snowplow. We post pictures of our trucks, the insides of our garages, our equipment, our wives  . It wouldn't take a resourceful thief very long to figure out where the best stuff was. And how to get it. Many of us have even posted our business cards on here, so the dishonest people could even find out our addresses, phone numbers.....jeez.... I'm scaring myself now.

Glen


----------



## bdemir (Dec 31, 1999)

Yeah i would buy it.

Then i would wack them over the head with it and call the pigs in to do their job. Then i might slap em up a little. I hate thieves with a passion. They should rot in well ill keep that to myself.   


Bedros


----------



## scuba875 (Dec 22, 2004)

I never have or would I purchase anything stolen. I have had tools stolen from me. It's not even so much the money as not having the tools when you need to use them for work. If I knew that someone was selling stolen goods I would turn them in friend or not. It's wrong and it cost all of us in higher insurance rates.


----------



## Guy (Sep 13, 2004)

glenspot said:


> I'm scaring myself now.
> 
> Glen


LOL, got a pic of that aluminum shovel, and where ya keep it?


----------



## BreyerConstruct (Aug 17, 2004)

I've just recently had a Milwaukee cordless drill walk off w/ a battery (but they left the rest of the kit!!!)
And a 2' ball hitch was taken off my brother's truck outside of Home Depot. Pretty stupid, huh?

I try & stay away from stolen stuff. I believe that is the most honoring path to take.

~Matt


----------



## scuba875 (Dec 22, 2004)

You got to watch your hitch I have had 3 stolen in the past. After the first one I used one of those locking pins. The problem is after 1 winter try and get it off. So I just take my hitch out now and stick it in the tool box. The few times I was either to lazy or forgot to take it out it was stolen. Watch your load levelers to I used to place them in the back of the bed now I put them behind the seat.


----------



## zipp669 (Jan 23, 2001)

Nope!!!!!!!!


----------

