Observations of a single basement dweller who's dumb enough to hang out here ten times per day:

Stoke the campfire and pull up a Stump°, it's storytim.

It's early 2007 or thereabouts, and yours truly and future Mrs. 1to987955weretaken were looking for our starter home. Myself and the future ball and chain have great credit (an uphill battle up to that point for this fast strategy looser), extremely stable employment, low debt, and are in the 87th percentile of wage earners in the state or thereabouts (I can only project back, but close enough). Loading up the real estate sites, I'm thinking I'll enter in our upper price limit and be bombarded with houses you'd find on MTV Cribs. Instead, we spent the better part of a year on a festival of pain, touring shithole after shithole and feeling increasingly insulted and angry.

Finally, March 2008 or so, the rusty gears in my skull budged a bit, and I had an epiphany. I turn to the future Mrs. and I say, "This can't be right. If we can't afford to buy a first house, nobody can. And yet they are. These prices aren't real, and this is going to blow up. We buy now, and we're going to take it in the shorts. I'm out."

We agreed that it was stupid to buy something when a major correction was surely coming (I was right), but then the very next day she found the "perfect" place, and we stupidly ended up buying. That's another horror story. The point is, you don't always have to have your finger on the pulse of the market, have a booming Ameritrade account like Pumpy, or be a financial analyst to feel what's blowing in the wind. It's often pretty easy to observe the world around you and see that things are out of balance.

Which brings me to another such observation that I'm still right in the middle of. Like the good little vulture that I am, I've been trying for months now to pick the carcass of a COVID-killed business to steal a VMC for the shop. I've dreamed of having one for decades, since playing around on one in college, it's always been too expensive to justify, but I started seeing them go at auction for the price of a used motorcycle! I'd never seen prices like this, so figure it's either now or never.

Problem: As @Logistics could attest to, moving such a thing is no small matter. We're talking about a 10' cube of cast iron and steel weighing 10,000 pounds, containing sensitive electronics and extremely tightly toleranced bearings and whatnot. It's a fool's errand to try moving one yourself, and most auction houses won't even let you, so you're beholden to rigging companies, and there just aren't that many.

Since December, I've contacted no fewer than a half dozen rigging companies, most local but some national, requesting estimates. I've passed on four machines now because I didn't want to bid before knowing how much it would cost to move. It's been REALLY pissing me off that these businesses are seemingly not interested in taking my money in exchange for performing the service that they advertise. Finally--after two months of emails, calls, leaving messages, talking to office assistants--I got one of these guys to answer the damned phone and call me back. Really nice guy, we had a decently long chat, and it was enlightening: He told me he understands that it's frustrating, but every single rigger in the state is so damned busy that they literally don't have time to deal with new customers. I thought it was just modern communication incompetence, as discussed in the other thread here, but that's not it at all. So many businesses are selling off their shit and closing doors that equipment riggers literally can't keep up! He told me that usually most of their business is delivering new machines (business expanding), but lately their business has been over 80% auction removal.

Finally, over a week later and after taking a leap of faith and buying a machine, I got a bid to prep, rig, move, and place a smallish machine in the shop. It was about 100% higher than when I read online that I should expect. And why not? Supply/demand, right?

I'm not mad that a business would maximize profit when the gettin's good. But I am a little worried in a macro sense. It's another one of these moments where there's enough clues of bad things coming that it's hard to miss. I've walked through multiple places now to inspect potential purchases. These are not mom and pop shops. This last one, the first HMC sold went for $1 million, and the buyer got a steal. As I was walking through the building, I'm thinking, "No way this place employed fewer than 200 people. Now it's gone."

Point is, I don't think we've seen the worst of things at all. There are simply too many businesses that have closed, and the government can't prop everyone up forever. I've been completely insulated from the economic impact of the pandemic (even more insulated after all the daydrinking and commensurate gut expansion...), so it's a bit of a shock to me to see firsthand the level of carnage over the last couple of months, and it only seems to be accelerating. I can't stress enough that I've been eyeballing these things out of the corner of my eye for the better part of 20 years, and I've never seen anything like this market. I've never seen prices for used equipment even close to this low. I've never seen so many shops (many large) closing all at once.

Anyway, I just thought many some of you who are similarly unaffected might be interested in some observations from the front lines. Shit's coming.