Alu-Minimum?

wow thats unheard of.
sure I get a little upset with that guy who parks his car in the middle of the way. carries his one or two buckets of all mixed commodities to the scale. then argues with the scale master over what he has. while I have a full truck close to a ton all separated ready to go.
or the little old guy who came in last week while I was dropping and put his plastic bottles on the scale and only spoke italian. he was at the wrong yard… the yard he wanted is about a mile up the road. so he just left the two bags of plastics and told them to throw them away. as he walked out mad and with no money….

now most of the scales in florida they stopped the homeless from walking in and doing little transactions. you have to be registered and have a car or truck no riding up on a bike any more.

Double "birdie" to that, Matador!!! Just for that, I wouldn't give those guys any non-ferrous if I could help it. Save it up, stuff my trunk with buckets/boxes and take it on the next larger place road trip I was going on. If you're in an isolated area, a business may think they got everybody by the nads but if you piss off enough locals to make them change their ways (like saving up nf metals and taking them further away), you'll be left holding an empty bag. Seen it more than once around here...

I can kinda understand their thinking on this. The scales are not very precise. They round to the nearest pound where sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It is better for the yard to lose a half pound off a 50# load then losing a half pound on a 3# pile.

I look at it in terms of weather I'd be willing to pay for 1 ac or 5 ac's. Volume gets the money. Simple. When you look at the cost of attracting customers it's easy to understand their reasoning. They're not just running ads on craigslist. For every scrapper walking in the door it cost them x amount of money to get them there. There's the lease or Morgan or whatever to have the yard, the cost of maintaining the scale, and all the other overhead involved in being able to hand over a pile of cash, so they have the upper hand.

The yard I go to here in STL doesn't have a minimum on non-ferrous, but does on ferrous. They require at least 300# if you want paid on that. Last time I went shred was $20 per ton so that would put a whopping $3 in my pocket at the minimum.

we have one yard here that actually told me the following:
Scenario: TMR closed there yard only mile from this small yard.
I was told that due to the TMR yard going out of business that they were taking advantage of the competitors loss and dropping prices across the board. that taking in steel is just a waste of there time and might even stop taking it. they paid out $0.01 and shorted me on the payout one dollar.
I will never go back to that small shop again. sure they are only four miles from the shop. but will go 17 miles to go to someone who wants my business.

There is a small yard in town that buys metal, I used to sell him my tin until he quit taking it period. Huge mistake on his part, but several of us warned him it would be a bad thing. Towards the end he was taking tin from everyone for free but only paying me for it(not sure I was the only one or not). But id bring him 4k a week MINIMUM. with all my non ferrous going to Reno, 30miles away. I would buy stuff from him all the time. Bought 80 microwaves from him. Paid $68 bucks. Most of them were identical so I fixed about 10 of them so far. Sold them immediately for $20 bucks each.
Point is, even if we had minimums here, I don't have to worry about it because I only make the 60 mile round trip only when I have to and when I do I roll in heavy

I still wonder why Scrapyard's buy in Lbs, or different versions of 'Tons'.... Even American scrapyards.

We deal in Kgs, a Ton is 1000Kgs. Simple.

1 litre water =1Kg. 1000 litres = 1 Ton. Simple.

Water freezes at 0degC and boils at 100degC. Simple.

You bring in 10Kgs of Copper, they make a average extra of 500gms..... Simple..... "Arrrrrhh, I just lost a Lb of Copper!!!!".

I can understand why they are imposing minimum weights, times are hard. 'Shrugs'.

If you are a scrap yard you need metal... with these low prices, I would not turn away any customer. The guy with the less than $10 load may have a lot more stuff to turn in. They could be just checking out a new yard you never know!

I just looked thru some receipts for this year...
Avg. trip to the yard made me $25.00 a trip down from $50 last year!
Low trip was $2.31 I needed an empty truck...
High trip was $344.46!

Cashier looked at me the same weather its $2 or $344 it keeps her employed!

I can think of many reasons this is a very good idea:

1. in a place requiring a hold period, tracking tiny amounts is harder then bulk
2. if you are required to pay in checks, well high end business checks cost $4.00 each or more
3. Wholesale business model ???
4. better customer service (lines move faster)