have you ever noticed sometimes your scrapyards heaps seem to only grow..now this is obvious to us lifelong scrappers but you new guys should see a corralation between the sizes of the scrapyards piles and the prices they pay...you can always tell when prices are down because they will not be selling only buying so their piles will get huge...this is a trick used by scrapyards to get the mills to higher their prices..when the prices are down and the mill ships out an order and the yards dont sell the mills are forced to raise their prices or they wont be able to meet their quota..so they are forced to raise prices..so heres a trick i have used in the past and it works great...when the yards are low i always sell just enough to cover my expenses..and pile the rest on my farm ground..of course its prepared already and im just waiting for the prices to recover..so if im at a customers place and they have say a 20 ton bridge platform and i quoted them 150 a ton..so i will sell 10 ton of it (bridge is plate and structural and on a bad day i get 340 a ton for it) so i will pay the guy his 3 grand...ill keep 400 for my time and then ill set on the rest until it gets back to the average price which is around 400-415 a ton for p and s..once the prices are up ill back the lugger box truck up and use the skidloader to load 15 ton on the truck and take it in and thats all pure profit...this only works if you dont need the money right now..we call it drowning the yard..because they are used to me bringing 150-200 ton of steel a month and when prices are down they struggle with that big a hit and i have it where they are calling me to make a delivery...
last winter i had them so desperate they offered to broker me through the mill so they would meet their quota with the mill and all they wanted was the 500 dollar freight that the mill pays for shipping it to them lol
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