The local chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) is having their annual book sale this Friday and Saturday.

The sale is always located in the middle of the main corridor of one of our local shopping malls. Because of the large number of books to be put out each year, the ladies from the AAUW always start setting up for the sale Thursday morning and enforce a strict policy of “no sales” until the sale begins at 10:00 Friday Morning.

I have a friend named John, a retired school teacher, who has been selling books on Amazon for the last few years as a way to supplement his retirement income. John’s wife sent him to the mall shortly after it opened Thursday morning to pick up something for her. On his way out of the mall, hoping to scope-out the location of a few good books, he asked one of the two women there if he could “just look” at what they had out.

Her response was, “Go right ahead. If you find any you are interested in, buy them. We’re here to sell them.”

“I can buy them now?”, he responded.

“Buy all you want”, she replied.

At this point in time most of the books hadn’t been unpacked yet, but John began looking. Nothing of any great interest out on the tables yet, but then he spotted several boxes with “textbooks” written on them. He began opening these boxes. The first three were filled with textbooks ten to fifteen years old. The fourth box was filled with brand new textbooks that had been sent to professors at the local University by publishers hoping that they would choose to use the publisher’s textbooks this school year. A couple boxes later, he found another box filled with all new textbooks. When he was done, he had thirty-six brand new textbooks.

When he was telling me about this Friday morning he said he wanted to keep looking but was afraid one of the other women would tell him he couldn’t buy anything until the next morning, so he paid for the books and took them home. He’d bought more than a thousand dollars worth of textbooks that should all sell within a short time on Amazon for a little more than $50.

Once home, John had a cup coffee and decided he should go back and, hopefully, they would let him do some more looking. This time he just grabbed an empty box and started looking. Anything that looked interesting was checked with ScoutPal. After a while he had three boxes full of books and he started feeling nervous about being told he couldn’t buy anything on Thursday, so he paid for what he had, brought them home, waited for about a half an hour, and went back again.

By the time John quit for the day, he’d made five trips to the mall, spent a couple hundred dollars, and had bought books that should bring him several thousand dollars over time.

Basically, he had the entire sale all to himself for an entire day because all the other serious book buyers in town knew, from previous years, that they couldn’t buy anything until Friday.

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