EstateSales Net

First of all, he prides himself that he "individually inspects and hand prices each item with a description". The fact that many of the things I inspected at his sale were broken and/or defective and when I brought these items to his attention he attempted to negotiate a side deal from the price listed was the first red flag.

The second red flag was when I did buy several items from him at a recent sale, his cashier lumped approximately ten items into her own "total sale" amount listed on the receipt without listing the ten items individually. Fred then alleged that one of the items I loaded hadn't been paid for but there was no way to tell from the receipt if it had been included since there was no record of individual calculation. He again insisted I hadn't paid for it so paid him again for that single item. I probably paid twice at that point.

Fred's Estate Sales has a "one hour hold" policy on the table (more on this later). After paying for the aforementioned item twice, we departed with a truckload of merchandise which had been loaded by his staff because they were heavy items. One of those heavy items was a long leg bench vise which I had purchased the night before on placing a bid. I immediately went home and proceeded to unload the truck.

I discovered that the vise, which I had also previously paid for, was missing from the truck which leads us to red flag #3 I immediately called Fred approximately 50 minutes after we left the sale. Fred had attempted to call me shortly after we departed but I missed the call. I said to him, "I assume you're calling me about the vise I left behind.". He affirmed this and asked when I would be back.

I told him 5 pm, he said "[They'd] still be at the sale. I was running behind so I called him at 5pm and updated the time to 5:30. He said, "we'll still be here". I arrived at approximately 5:37 and asked where my bench vise was, he said, "we sold it.

you abandoned it!", He then attempted to gaslight me stating I never called him He proceeded to go into full scale blame the victim mode. Even though the sale ended at 4pm and I had called him at 3:03 pm to inform him of the missing vise and what time we would be returning and that this time span was their hour hold policy for unpaid items and this had been paid for and I'd made a commitment to interrupt my farming schedule that day to ensure I had gotten the vise which we desperately needed. One of his staff attempted to interject because Fred was cascading rapidly down the slope of misogyny laying all the blame on me, he turned to her and snapped, "Stay out of this!". That poor woman shrank right into her shell.

He grudgingly refunded all but $.40 of what I paid on bid for the item and gave a left handed apology stating, "I can't keep track of everything that goes on here." despite how he chased me down earlier to insist he believed I hadn't paid for an item.

In sum, he uses gaslighting and shell game tactics to wring money out of unsuspecting consumers. Lord help you if you're a woman!