Brand, price, and theft

Late last week one of us (nobody's stepping up to take responsibility here; certainly I'm not) left the garage door unlocked. Not the big door that the cars use, the little door that the humans use. When we woke up in the morning, here's what was gone.

The quarters that we use for parking meters. The thieves were thorough. But not the ridiculously expensive tennis rackets. The thieves were from a different culture.

The iPhone of #2 son, which, no matter how many times we'd asked him not to, he left in the car. At least it was a two-year old, first generation model. He'd inherited it from his brother, and he'd had it for a week.

Two bicycles, one good but old, one not-so-good but old, both necessary.

Enter the Minneapolis police department bicycle auction.

If you've ever wondered what's east of Bachman's in that wasteland that looks kind of like the less pretty parts of New Jersey, some of it is a huge shed where the police keep bicycles they recover but that no one claims. About once a month they auction them off.

You can show up two hours early, at 4 pm, and look at each of the roughly 150 bicycles seven or eight times, trying to decide which ones are worth bidding on, and for how much. Here's how to do it when you're not a bicycle mechanic.

Like all marketing victims, choose by brand. Trek, Cannondale, Specialized, Giant, and Gary Fisher are acceptable. Schwinn, Murray, Huffy, and anything you haven't heard of are not. Like all peasants, pay no more than the fair price. The French still regulate the price of a baguette because there's a fair price for bread that has nothing to do with the market. It's why your grandfather, when you tell him you paid $200 for that Hermes tie, says, "I never paid more than $9 for a tie in my life." The fair price for a ten year old bike that may have spent a Minnesota winter outside is a hundred dollars because it's the symbolic, magical limit for a pig in a poke.

Once you're that smart, everything falls into place. We bought one bike for $90, which allowed us to spend $110 on the second one. They're both a brand called Next that I've never heard of and that I doubt still exists, but they look cool and the kids like them. So nuts to brand.

The next step is to send #2 son out on his new used Next to stand on random street corners and see if anyone wants to trade a bicycle for an iPhone.