Latest / WCHS Network Podcasts / 06/04/2024 Ask the Expert with Ron Hughes
Transcript
- 0:00Unlock your dream property with Meek's Realty Group, where Rich the realtor makes real
- 0:04estate dreams a reality, whether it's residential or commercial. We've got Charleston to
- 0:08Huntington covered. Your key to exceptional real estate experience is start here Meeks Realty
- 0:12Group. Contact us at Meeks dot us. The views and opinions expressed on
- 0:17this program do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of five eight wchs it's
- 0:22employees or WVRC Media. And then we have a version up up in Maryland
- 0:39too. We have thirty two stations or thirty thirty three stations in the state,
- 0:44and all of our stations participate, so you're going to have stations from
- 0:48Morgantown, Clarksburg, Beckley, Charleston, Cumberland, Maryland, Martinsburg. So
- 0:53you can go in and search for items and bid for them at up to
- 0:56sixty five percent off. Some things are sixty percent off. What I really
- 1:00love about. By the way, if you heard a little bit of a
- 1:03disturbance in the forest to begin the program there, apologize for that had a
- 1:07connection on relay. So this is actually the expert. This morning, Ron
- 1:11Hughes is in studio with us this morning. I think it caught most of
- 1:14that. But we're talking a little bit about the WV Bargains and Turtle Bids
- 1:17auction that we have that's going on right now, and like you were saying
- 1:19right before I came back on, some of these deals can be really fantastic
- 1:25when you look at it. By the way, it's WV bargains dot com.
- 1:27You can go there and there's all kinds of things on there that you
- 1:30can take a look at. We've done this before where we've talked about some
- 1:34of these things when air sometimes and there's sometimes always that item that people want
- 1:38to go to. I'm going to get it out of the way. Now,
- 1:40there's a there's a fire truck on there. Right. Look, we
- 1:42go there and you can see the fire truck. The fire truck is really
- 1:45cool. It's an incredible starting bid is like fifty seven hundred dollars or something
- 1:49for this thing. It's pretty incredible, I believe. So, yes,
- 1:53everything's starts to neither sixty or sixty five percent off. So the fire truck
- 1:59is an anti a collector's item for people, and there are people that collect
- 2:02fire trucks, or if you've got a farm, and you just want a
- 2:06fire truck nearby, or if you're an organization, you know, like a
- 2:12civic club. You know, I'll say Shriners off the bat or one of
- 2:15those that do good public service and you want something to put in parades,
- 2:20this would be it nice. It's a nineteen eighty one GMC firetruck with about
- 2:25seventeen thousand miles, so the guy that's putting it in there. You see,
- 2:31businesses give us items. They basically trade us for advertising. So if
- 2:37they sell something at retail price, we give them the retail price in advertising
- 2:42is how it works. So there's no big secret on how we get the
- 2:46items as long as we get a minimum bid on it. And if you
- 2:52go to auctions online or you watch meek them auctions on TV, you know
- 2:57there's kind of a reserve. Well, the reserve on these is usually about
- 3:00thirty five to forty percent of the of the retail price. So this nineteen
- 3:05eighty one GMC auction sorry fire truck. In the auction, it's got a
- 3:10GMC three sixty six big block, which apparently for car collectors and people that
- 3:15like working on cars or collecting cars, that's a pretty popular engine. So
- 3:23the guy at Gravely Polaris it's putting in there. His name is Chester Smalley.
- 3:28He owns it. He's putting it in in order to get some advertising
- 3:31dollars and sell it at a good price. He says that there are people
- 3:37that will just buy this for the engine because it's such a such a popular
- 3:40workhorse that never fails. So it's got like a seven hundred gallon water tank
- 3:46and with pumps that work. He says that they chied them out. They
- 3:50work. It's got a new ignition system and fuel pump, new wiring and
- 3:54nylon tires. So it's kind of a cool thing. It's an off the
- 3:59wall thing, but there are people out there that collect these. And the
- 4:03reason I bring it up but one thing, I'm trying to talk Happy Joe
- 4:05into getting it for the CHS vehicle. You know, we CCHS needs a
- 4:10new vehicle right now, and man, that thing will look awful nice with
- 4:12some CHS stenciling on the side and our parades and sight and our logo has
- 4:16read. And then when we go to call football games, we can put
- 4:20we can put Crystal Warrens up on the ladder and he can Yeah, some
- 4:25of these boxes at the field get crowded. It's a way for him to
- 4:29be above it all, be above the frame. That's right. But I
- 4:31brought that up first because I wanted to I wanted to paint like the the
- 4:35absolute different levels of things that we have here. So the fire engine would
- 4:40be a perfect thing for someone that's looking for that, even a church or
- 4:43something. I mean, you never know who needs that, that that big
- 4:46piece to go in there. Uh, the thing they want to do with
- 4:48you might have some other creative thing you want to do with it, or
- 4:50the engine like they were talking about. So that's like an item You're like,
- 4:53well, I mean sounds cool, but I don't know what kind of
- 4:56use that is to me. Okay, fine, how about some tires?
- 4:59How about access to the seasonal access to the wavepool? How about a YMCA
- 5:03membership. Right, you start with something like a fire engine, which is
- 5:05great, but now you get down into things that you use on a daily
- 5:09basis, and those are offered on here too. Absolutely. I mean you
- 5:12can go to you know, just just google WV bargains dot com or just
- 5:16go to it, or you can even search turtle bids. You can look
- 5:20it up by category. If you look it up by category. It's got
- 5:24all of the different cities that have stations that we own, and you can
- 5:28order from any of them. You can bet on any o there've been on
- 5:30any of them as long as you're willing to go up there to get them
- 5:32right. So if it's in Morgantown, you might have to go to Morgan
- 5:34right. So here's how this work. You you go online to one of
- 5:40our station websites, or go to WV Bargains dot com, or you could
- 5:43go to WHS network dot com or V one hundred dot FM, any of
- 5:47the stations that we own, and click on the link to the to this
- 5:51bargain site and you'll see a homepage with a box up in the upper right
- 5:58hand corner where you can look under different categories, so you can look at
- 6:02things in each city, or you can look under automotive items. There are
- 6:05sixty five items under automotive. Once you start looking at automotive, it's not
- 6:12broken down, I mean, it's everything from all of our different cities are
- 6:15in there. So you have a rustproofing package from z Bard and Morgantown,
- 6:19but you also have things from Eddie's Tires five hundred dollars gift certificates or a
- 6:25truck driving school tuition at the Boone County Truck Driving Academy. You know,
- 6:30there's a shortage of truck drivers these days, and a lot of businesses are
- 6:33looking to pay pretty good wages to have an accredited truck driver. So this
- 6:40one in Boone County is basically starting bid as two thousand dollars on a five
- 6:45thousand dollars retail value. And think of the certification you get for that and
- 6:48how you can pivot that into a career. You know, my mom,
- 6:51years and years ago, when I was growing up, my mom always used
- 6:55to semi joke that when she retired, she was going to buy a truck
- 6:59and be a hole driver. She's that's how she wanted to livery there.
- 7:01I see a lot of women driving trucks these days. She ended up not
- 7:04doing that. She ended up retiring to the country and she's very happy there.
- 7:08But still for a long time in her life she would be like,
- 7:10you know, I just want to get a truck and drive across the country,
- 7:12which you know, I mean I could see where that would would certainly
- 7:15be something somebody to want to do. Well, yeah, but you have
- 7:18to come back, yeah, eventually, probably, especially my mom. I
- 7:21don't wonder you have to be there at a certain time, you know,
- 7:24at a certain day. Well, what I really like about this, and
- 7:27what I've always liked about Turtle bids or now WV Bargains, is that it
- 7:30does run the gambit of things that are on there. So we talked about
- 7:32something like the fire engine, the Eddie's tire thing. I mean, I'll
- 7:39that the last time I got my new tires. I think of all the
- 7:41things we put on the auction over the years that I've been here, I've
- 7:45been back here, Eddie's tires with the five hundred dollars gift certificate into either
- 7:50Winfield or PoCA. It's probably one of the most anticipated items, and sometimes
- 7:57the bidding gets way above the minimum. Yeah, because I mean if you
- 8:01end up even if you end up saving one hundred dollars or two hundred dollars
- 8:03off of your tires, that's a pretty good amount. And tires are are
- 8:07you know, that's that's a pretty major investment into your vehicles these days.
- 8:09So that's a that's a great thing that you could get if you're into cars.
- 8:13You also have auto detailing that you can get there. So maybe you
- 8:16have that car you want to spiff up a little bit and you want to
- 8:18get and it's from the Auto Spa too, So I mean, this isn't
- 8:22just like somebody that's going through and running a vacuum and uh and Washington and
- 8:26calling a day. This is a real, real detail. This is Elk
- 8:28City Auto Spa. And of course Elk City is the West side. So
- 8:33they have a five hundred dollars gift certificate for interior exterior auto detailing. Now
- 8:39when you click on that to bid it, you know you're going to see
- 8:43a picture. What you do is you see a picture of the of the
- 8:46item, store logo, a link to the you know, to the store,
- 8:52so you can kind of learn more about it. And sometimes they don't
- 8:58have restrictions like you have to use it with in one year of purchase.
- 9:03But you know, everybody wants to get a nice clean car, but that
- 9:07can be fairly labor intensive, you know, with all you know, with
- 9:09all the waxing and vacuuming, cleaning the engine and so forth. So the
- 9:15starting bid at two hundred for five hundred dollars detail is pretty good. In
- 9:20that same vein there. We've had bedliners. Noticed in Morgantown they have a
- 9:24z Bart bedline or package, so it might be worth driving to Morgantown to
- 9:28say half on a on a bedliner for your pickup truck. There's also tires
- 9:35from all of our different locations. But I see a Bobcat tractor compact tractor
- 9:41you know regularly like seventeen thousand now for seven thousand dollars. I think if
- 9:45you really were a contractor you wanted something like that, that Bobcat, you
- 9:50would be willing to drive to another city to look for it. That's a
- 9:56significant investment. That's not a gift certificate. It gives you to people quite
- 9:58mail, by the way, but the the something like a tractor, that's
- 10:03a significant investment that you know, people shop for deals anyway. And we'll
- 10:05go out a location about for that's there's no question right but that's and that's
- 10:09up in Cumberland, Maryland. But you know, if I really needed one
- 10:11of these, you know kind of looks like a little bulldozer on one end
- 10:15where you'd scoop dirt up, you know with it. But it's it's it's
- 10:18not huge, forty six inch with but you know, if you had a
- 10:24contractor business, this would be this would be worth it, worth the drive.
- 10:28We've also got some items that are not automotive, believe it or not,
- 10:33those seem to be fairly fairly popular. But just diving into what's in
- 10:37Charleston by itself. You know, if you're you're any kind of outdoors person,
- 10:41outdoorsman or outdoors woman, and you listen to Chris Lawrence all the time.
- 10:45Right spring Hill Rod and Gun has some Botech and Hoyt and Barnet either
- 10:52bows or crossbows excellent value, like two thousand dollars carbon ultra bow from Hoyt.
- 11:01You know, starting bid is like eight hundred dollars. The kid and
- 11:05the somewhat kid in me, I'm not personally a active hunter, not that
- 11:09I have any issue with It's just not something that I took up as a
- 11:11hobby. But when I was a kid, I definitely went and played war
- 11:15all the time in like like the woods and that crossbow man, I mean,
- 11:18it would have done some actual damage, but I had so many toy
- 11:22crossbows that look similar to that thing. And just just to this day,
- 11:26as a nearly fifty year old man, whenever I think of a crossbow.
- 11:28I get a little chill down my spine because I like those things. Yeah,
- 11:31that's that one that is fairly lethal, you know, it's it's like
- 11:35a it's almost like a handgun in exactly a way. But the Barnet Viper
- 11:39hyper Raptor crossbow, you know, starting at six hundred dollars and the opening
- 11:46bid now is two hundred and thirty nine dollars sixty cents. Now with these
- 11:50items, you can go to you know, you can click on the item,
- 11:54go to the link. It'll take you to page that goes into more
- 12:00to tail about the crossbow. But they have a buy it now price.
- 12:05So if you just say, oh nice, yeah, I don't I don't
- 12:07want to go through this bidding and then rebidding and then you know, getting
- 12:13out bid and having to rebid, you can just buy it now for like
- 12:16well like on this instance, six hundred dollars item for about three hundred and
- 12:20ninety bucks, you could buy it now. I mean, that's not bad
- 12:22at all. And anybody that's used to the eBay convention understands how the buy
- 12:26it now thing works. You can kind of shortcut the bidding process by agreeing
- 12:30to pay for a predetermined price, and most of the time it's still at
- 12:33an extraordinarily good value. So I mean it's not even risky a lot of
- 12:37the times because you might end up getting even a better value than if you
- 12:41let the auction play out. You never know, right, right, So
- 12:43it's not a bad idea to do that. If you see that you know
- 12:46there's beginning to be a few bids on this item, you know, you
- 12:50definitely want to step in and you know, make a grab for it.
- 12:54I like how you can be creative too. There's a couple of ways you
- 12:56can be creative and piecing things together here, not only for yourself, but
- 13:00if you are looking for other people. You know, some of the things
- 13:03that you can take advantage of. You know, for example, if you
- 13:05got a if you got a huge guest certificate to like kid aarous or something
- 13:09like that, right, you know, if it's a if it's a dollar
- 13:11amount guest certificate, you can use those to apply those to a huge party
- 13:16that you're doing. I was looking and I saw that there was a bunch
- 13:18of there was some cannabis items. When here with some gift certificate, it's
- 13:22like a five hundred dollars certificate. What I was thinking about that is if
- 13:26you are if part of your like gift giving during the holidays and stuff,
- 13:31is you give stuff that has you know, cannabis, and you know,
- 13:33because that's often those are part of gift bags and things like that. Now
- 13:37you can get one gift certificate, use that to buy all of your different
- 13:41gift items for Christmas season or whatever it might be, put together your gift
- 13:43bags, and suddenly you get that for you know, a fraction of the
- 13:46cost of what you would normally have right pay for. Yeah, this is
- 13:48a five hundred dollars gift certificate at Apple Actionian Cannabis and the current band is
- 13:54two hundred bucks. But then you can go on and do the buy it
- 13:56now and you know, get a pretty good deal. Appalachian Cannabis is uh,
- 14:03probably one that's been with us the last few years, if I remember
- 14:07right, one of our loyal participants over in Golf Mountain Road in Cross Lanes.
- 14:16But you know, with with this trend of people using more holistic medicine
- 14:20or you know, non prescription health remedies, cannabis has been become very popular
- 14:30with that and it's it's safe, it's legal. You know it's not the
- 14:33it's not the you know, the marijuana version of the cannabis plant, right
- 14:37right, So I I think we have five of those available. I would
- 14:41I would certainly think if you are if you are a person who has to
- 14:46use this for pain or for for anxiety, you know you could you could
- 14:50get a pretty good value either a five hundred dollars certificate for two hundred or
- 14:54two hundred and fifty dollars value for one hundred, one hundred dollars. That's
- 14:58a good deal. Yeah, that's there's so many ways that you can piece
- 15:01together things like that. One here to help you with your gift buying.
- 15:05Wedding seasons coming up, and so there's all kinds of different things that you
- 15:07might need for your wedding, including if you're looking to get in shape for
- 15:11the if you're part of the wedding party, or if you're getting married yourself
- 15:13and you need to fit into that tux or that wedding dress or something.
- 15:16There's there's a YMCA membership so that you that you can get into gym memberships.
- 15:22You can do if you want to go swimming and you want to use
- 15:26that sort of thing, you can get a pass to the wavepool and get
- 15:28your exercise in that way. There's tons of things one here that as an
- 15:31individual you can look into, as a family you can look into, or
- 15:35as a gift giver you can look into. There's all kinds of different ways
- 15:37to approach, you know, and you mentioned weddings, and you know,
- 15:41we can kind of get you down the road and we can start. We
- 15:43can start you down the road. We can there's a Rose design engagement ring
- 15:46on there, you know, to kind of get the party started, you
- 15:50know, find first, find yourself a girlfriend who might want to get married,
- 15:56buy the engagement ring, and then if you move fast because the auction
- 16:00ends on Friday, there's a justin Alexander wedding dress, you know, a
- 16:04two thousand dollars item for eight hundred dollars. You can kind of do start
- 16:07and finish. But you got to move fast on that. But if you
- 16:11were already planning to get married, and like I said, this is a
- 16:14five day auction, it's only good until Friday. They I think the auction
- 16:19start different items in at different times, but this Justin Alexander wedding dress,
- 16:25if you want to google it, I think the model number is eight eight
- 16:29seven five. It's a very attractive looking dress for someone who's planning on getting
- 16:37married anytime soon. And and I looked at that earlier, and I was
- 16:44pretty surprised. That's a pretty attractive looking dress. I mean, if that's
- 16:47something that that is that's in it to you, it's a really attractive looking
- 16:51dress, something to look into. There's an engagement ring on there as well,
- 16:52so you know, yeah, design engagement ring. You have the ring
- 16:56the dress, you know, like, we can get you started. It's
- 17:00from Mars Jewelry over a nitron. I know you're PreCure. I wouldn't be
- 17:03surprised if you could marry somebody. Can you marry somebody? All I have
- 17:07to do is just take the certificate over to the courthouse. I haven't done
- 17:10it yet, but but I can. That's what I figure. So we
- 17:11could do the whole thing for a minute. I'm not a pastor or anything,
- 17:15but I've joined one of those you know, universal things. Yeah,
- 17:18sure, right, so you could be an efficient I just I got married
- 17:22by a Supreme Court judge here in West Virginia, by Justice Benjamin Back.
- 17:26When I got married to my wife at the Capitol Rotunda. It was really
- 17:29cool. You don't have to be a pastor to do those things. So
- 17:30we can get you the ring when you get to the dress and then run
- 17:33to marry you. Yeah, if I could, if I take I got
- 17:36to hurry up and take that certificate and I got in the mail over to
- 17:40the courthouse, and I can marry people. But seriously, though, if
- 17:44you're looking, if you're a bride parent out there, you never know,
- 17:48you know, I mean, I know, you know. Brides are are
- 17:49going to pick their own dress and it may not be the exact fit that
- 17:52you're looking for, but why not take a look. It might be the
- 17:55perfect thing. The same thing with the engagement ring. If you're a man
- 17:56looking for one, you know it's already pre selected, but it might be
- 18:00the perfect one. I met a lady last night in the neighborhood, a
- 18:03neighbor of ours who just moved in. Her name was Rose. Maybe you
- 18:07had some sort of connection with your significant other where something like that would work
- 18:11out. We have you covered from all ends of your family because then after
- 18:14you get married and a few years down the road and you have kids.
- 18:17One of the things that I was excited to see on here were the various
- 18:19packages from kidder Ruse. That's one of my daughters. Probably once a month,
- 18:25and we've gone to Kidderous several times, but probably once a month she'll
- 18:30be like, Daddy, can we go to Kitterrus this weekend. It's just
- 18:32like one of her favorite places in the world to go. She absolutely loves
- 18:34it. They're giving away or not giving away, but one of the things
- 18:37you can bid on there are their party packages, and I was taking a
- 18:41look at that because you know, these days are pretty big deals and from
- 18:44what I can tell, for example, the Ultimate Party Package, which I
- 18:48think is the Super Pump Party package that they're selling online, one of the
- 18:51ones they have different, different ones, but the maximumment that they have the
- 18:55buy it now price is one hundred and ninety two dollars. The price if
- 18:57you were to go there and get it for two twenty five kids, it's
- 19:00three hundred and seventy five dollars. So even if the buy it now price,
- 19:03you're saving one hundred and eighty bucks right now. And that's a party
- 19:06for twenty five kids, with the pizzas already there, with the drinks already
- 19:08there. I mean, your party's ready to go, and then you have,
- 19:11you know, the giant room full of slides and jungle gyms and everything
- 19:15else that I say from the play. I mean, that's a great way
- 19:18to put together your kid's birthday party and very little effort. Frankly, right,
- 19:22it's kind of like a like the package that takes care of all of
- 19:26it for you. You got to bring the kids in the presence, right,
- 19:29That's pretty much. But I know my daughter and Charlotte does enough birthday
- 19:33parties at these type of places that you know, they're scheduled sometimes a year
- 19:38in advance, of course because of the population down there and the huge growth.
- 19:44But here you can have that same experience with an event locale that kids
- 19:52really are excited to go to, and your kid will build memories from it
- 19:56as well. And then you know the thing about you know, the advantage
- 20:00for kid rouse is people come in and try it when they come back,
- 20:03and you know, pay regular price for it. Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
- 20:07And then the kids parents are the kids friends parents see it, see
- 20:11how great it is. They come in and they want to they want to
- 20:12take part in it. Also. I think we'll take a quick break here
- 20:15and when we come back, we'll explain a little bit how this is beneficial
- 20:19to all parties involved. You know this, this is a service that we're
- 20:22offering, and there might be skeptical people that's out there, like h something
- 20:26it can't be that it can't be as good as it sounds, but it
- 20:29is because of the way that we cover it is. Everyone benefits from this.
- 20:32The listener benefits when they get the dis kound of goods. We benefit
- 20:36as a media company that offers advertising, and then businesses out there benefit because
- 20:40they're getting people in their doors and getting and getting advertising on the radio.
- 20:44It's it's a full circle of help here that really does benefit each each person
- 20:48in the chain. And any kind of promotion like this generates excitement. And
- 20:52if you're an advertiser tying your advertising dollars to a program or a promotion that
- 20:57that we're humping up all the time on all of our radio stations, you're
- 21:03you're going to benefit because it's something bigger than yourself. It's bigger than us,
- 21:07you know quick because it involves all of our listeners in the nine counties
- 21:11or plus that we that we service. Let's go into this. Let's go
- 21:15ahead and take a break, and when we come back. Ron Hughes and
- 21:17I will still have plenty to talk about. We have more items to talk
- 21:19about, a little bit more of the history of what used to be called
- 21:22Turtle Bids. It's now called West Virginia Bargains. You can go to WV
- 21:25bargains dot com WV bargains dot com and you can find all this that we're
- 21:27talking about, or like Ron said, you just search for WV Bargains,
- 21:30or even you can still search for turtle bids if that's what you're used to
- 21:33doing, or a longtime radio listener, you can still do that search and
- 21:37it'll take you to the correct place. But for now, let's go ahead
- 21:40and take a break. We'll come back and talk about plenty of these.
- 21:41If you have any comments, you're welcome to text over a comment to three
- 21:44zero four non three five five zero zero eight. We'll take a break and
- 21:47be back right after this. You're listening to ask the Expert with Ron Hughes
- 21:51from the sales department. Here we're talking about West Virginia Bargains this morning at
- 21:55WV bargains dot com. I'm del Cooper. Will take a break and be
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- 23:32that the warm weather monster here, you know where you need to be your
- 23:34local Parmer store, heading to the lake, the ball field, or your
- 23:37favorite picnic sider just working around your place. Parmer has everything you'll need from
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- 23:48sign up for the Parmar rewards, car Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky,
- 23:52Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. If there's not a parm Oar store near you
- 23:56now, there will be soon. You're listening to us the expert WCCHS,
- 24:03the voice of Charles and the expert today is Ron Hughes. He's from our
- 24:07sales department. Here we're talking about w B bargains. Wb Bargains dot Com
- 24:11used to be called turtle bids. If you've been a listener to the radio
- 24:14for any amount of time and you've heard those turtle bids ads for the moms
- 24:18bed where those are at least twenty twenty five year Yeah, for for a
- 24:22quarter of a century. These things had been on. But we've been doing
- 24:25auctions in radio since the early eighties, mid eighties before all of us radio
- 24:30station all of the radio stations came under one roof. You know, we
- 24:34all had different owners. So in this building we had CHS Radio and ninety
- 24:38six point one, which had different call letters back then, and it played
- 24:42easy listening across the river. Our six' eighty was known as WCAW and then
- 24:48in the same building with V one hundred this we had one seven three and
- 24:53fourteen ninety that a different owner had and I think somewhere along the line in
- 24:59the late nine these early two thousands, we picked up ninety eight seven as
- 25:03well. So the FCC rules was you could own one FM, one AM,
- 25:07and one TV station in the market. So in the eighties I was
- 25:11working initially hired by Paul Howard, who was the Hall of Fame broadcaster that
- 25:18was in the market from the early nineteen sixties until he died a few years
- 25:22ago. I think it was twenty nineteen or in that range. So Paul
- 25:29Howard was general manager over our six eighty radio station, known then as WCAW.
- 25:36It was a country station. At one time it was a number one
- 25:37station in the market. Guy comes to Paul in nineteen eighty five in the
- 25:41summer and says, paraphrasing, says to Paul, you know, the summertime
- 25:48is kind of dead, and you know there's a lot of doldrooms. You've
- 25:51already finished your your big book promotion. You've already given away a car or
- 25:55a house. And we actually had given away a house that year on V.
- 26:00One hundred, so you don't and football season hadn't started yet. We
- 26:03haven't done any You know, you haven't dived into your fall promotions, so
- 26:07summer is kind of dead. You need something to perk things up. So
- 26:12this gentleman had represented an entity called Action Auction, where we salespeople would go
- 26:21talk to our advertisers like we do now and ask them to trade us for
- 26:25items to get advertising dollars. So it may be a specific couch. Back
- 26:30then, we didn't do a whole lot of gift certificates. It would be
- 26:33like a specific couch, specific car and appliance. I remember buying a microwave
- 26:40there that didn't get sold, you know, so I bet on it,
- 26:42you know. But they would be cross stitch items, water tanks, whatever.
- 26:48So we set up a bullpen in the conference room where all of us
- 26:52would be on the phone in the in the conference room, an auctioneer would
- 26:57be live on the radio announcing these items, describing them. And the people
- 27:03knew about the items because we had been promoting them on the air for about
- 27:07two or three weeks. So it would culminate on a Saturday, I believe
- 27:11in first of August. We would have these phone banks set up and all
- 27:15of us salespeople would answer the phones as the auctioneer is describing each item,
- 27:22and he would do it as a live auction. Then you would wait for
- 27:26your item that you wanted to bid on. You'd call in, you know,
- 27:30I might answer the phone and say Action auction, you know, what
- 27:33would you like to bid on? And they would say the item and the
- 27:36price. I would hand that to the auctioneer, and then maybe guys sitting
- 27:41next to me would take a bid on another item, hand that to the
- 27:44auctioneer. So who had to keep those straight? But he did them in
- 27:45lots of like five or ten so he could keep up with the item.
- 27:51Once in a while he just surprised people and offer like a five hundred dollars
- 27:53item for ten bucks and just keep you listening to keep you, you know,
- 27:57from going away. So it took all day Saturday to list all of
- 28:02the items that we had at that time. And I think we might have
- 28:04had a car at that time. I know we had furniture, sofas and
- 28:10cross I remember getting like a cross stitch package which sold every time, you
- 28:14know, had all of the special cloths and the and the threads and the
- 28:18ratles and so forth, and then picture framing also and also prints. If
- 28:25you can sell picture frame, I mean, prince in a picture frame on
- 28:29the radio. You were you were a really good auction here. True,
- 28:33you're basically describing this item a visual medium to selling it in the audio medium.
- 28:37That's that's that's doing a pretty good job. So we left that a
- 28:41we We did that the first year and it was very very popular. The
- 28:45second year, Paul said, Paul Howard said, hey, we can do
- 28:48this on our own. We don't need somebody else. So we did that
- 28:53is the radio spirit if I've ever heard it before. Hey, that was
- 28:56a great idea. Thanks for passing it on. We're going to do it
- 28:59ourselves. And we did it again the next year. It was even more
- 29:02popular. So all of the little small businesses that were in the area,
- 29:07a lot of them got to participate. And that's kind of what I wanted
- 29:10to when I went to the break and we talked about how everybody kind of
- 29:12benefits from that. It really is true because you mentioned about the advertising dollars
- 29:17and all cards on the table. Here. What we're doing is is companies
- 29:21are allowed and a lot of and most of the times these are smaller companies
- 29:22are placing these items with us and we give them basically credit for those items
- 29:27that they're allowed to turn into advertising in our station. And then so we're
- 29:32getting new or existing clients who are using our services to see the power of
- 29:37radio. We're getting items that we can offer our listeners for a discount of
- 29:41price, and then our listeners are buying those items at a discount of price.
- 29:42It truly is This isn't like you know, where you're chasing the billet
- 29:45trying to find where the mark is. There's no mark here. It truly
- 29:48is a self beneficial relationship all the way around, from our clients to our
- 29:56listeners, and then our listeners purchasing from those clients. It helps everybody.
- 30:00It creates a relationship that didn't exist before with with our listeners and with the
- 30:04and with the items. Now, for example, there's a fireworks package,
- 30:08and I know it's coming up on fourth of July, but Nitro Fireworks has
- 30:12something called the Max Firework Package, which has about seven hundred and eighty two
- 30:17shots in it. You know, something called you know, it's got this
- 30:19big box about five feet tall with items in it. It's got something called
- 30:26the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, you know, the Magnificent Festival.
- 30:30I mean, but people that collect you know that like fireworks, know you
- 30:34know what these do. So you can go to you can go to the
- 30:38auction site, bids for bargain or WV bargains in any number of ways that
- 30:45you can get to that by googling. But this max fireworks package has seven
- 30:49hundred and eighty two shots. You know, I'm sure you don't have to
- 30:52use them all at one time if you want to be a hero for your
- 30:55kids, right, and you know your kids are bothered. Now. It's
- 30:59different messaging and now than when I was growing up. But when I was
- 31:00growing up, like we would, you know, on our way back from
- 31:03Myrtle Beach, we would stop and get like some fireworks that we weren't technically
- 31:07allowed to have here, and then you sneak out into you know, the
- 31:11woods or the alley or whatever and like fireworks at night, right, And
- 31:14you know we don't have to do that anymore, generally speaking, fireworks are
- 31:17legal here. However, you know, everybody wants to put off the good
- 31:19show. And if you're able to go and get your good show for a
- 31:22pretty decent price, I've never had anything like that before to set off.
- 31:25I mean, that's awesome. This is about thirty close to thirty eight hundred
- 31:29dollars worth of fireworks. The starting bed is about thirteen hundred messality could use
- 31:34that for their fireworks, right if you were you know, the town of
- 31:37small town like Chesapeake or whatever, you could you could use that. Or
- 31:42if you have a party coming up, a cookout barbecue, you certainly would
- 31:48be able to entertain your folks for you know, quite a while. All
- 31:52evening break it down or your next ten Fourth of July is are prepaid for.
- 31:59You just get it, your break it into like ten different years and
- 32:00you're like, hey, we're good, FRIGHTXT decade seven hundred and eighty two
- 32:05shots. Yeah, yeah, you're in pretty good shape there as far as
- 32:07that goes. You could probably do that. And there's also things like everybody,
- 32:10I think everybody has a storage unit. I know I have one,
- 32:15and that's something that I don't think we've offered before. But there's like ten
- 32:19by ten that's new. Right, Yeah, it's a ten by ten or
- 32:22a ten by twenty, a thirty foot boat or RV storage. You know,
- 32:28it's a twelve month rental worth about one thousand dollars on one of these
- 32:32items fifteen hundred on the ten by twenty so you could get them for four
- 32:37hundred or six hundred dollars and that's good for twelve months. Ten by twenty
- 32:44is, you know, is a pretty large room. It's probably bigger than
- 32:46this ru yeah square feet right, that's I mean, it is very large
- 32:50to be able to keep your stuff in, right, and you know,
- 32:52you pay one price, you've got it for a year. Because you know,
- 32:55they're building more storage units all the time. People are finding that they
- 33:00don't want to stuff all this in there. One of the fastest growing businesses
- 33:04in the country right now, absolutely is just look around the street. Just
- 33:07look around. You'll see all the all of the construction. There's also party
- 33:10rentals, you know, the the inflatable quantum party jumping jumping houses, or
- 33:20the item bouncy houses or like the big giant slicky slide type thing. We've
- 33:25done some things with quantum at events at Laidley Field, for example, like
- 33:31on the Eastern Weekend where you know, you pay one price and you come
- 33:35in and you bounce all over in these different different bouncy houses, all these
- 33:39different designs. So you can get a you can get one at your house
- 33:44two thousand dollars value for about eight hundred dollars. It's a great deal man,
- 33:46and you can have then you bring the party to your house and you
- 33:50are you are a hero to your kids and the family and the neighbor neighborhoods
- 33:54and everything else. Yeah. Absolutely, you pair that up with something and
- 33:58there's just so many different things you can doing here. Whether it's the high
- 34:00end items that you're getting at a good crist whether it's something that you can
- 34:04get for your family that's going to last year for the rest of the year,
- 34:06whatever it might be. There's so many good things you can check out
- 34:07on there. It's w WV bargains dot com. Wv bargains dot com.
- 34:12You can check the Charleston area specifically, or any of our areas to look
- 34:15for things that were offering. There may be something. Yeah, you can
- 34:17go and look by category. If it's something you want that's not here in
- 34:20Charleston, you might be able to get it out of Clarksburg or Morgantown.
- 34:22Right. I want to mention you know, woodstoves were like one of the
- 34:25original items we had in the first auctions. So there is a Pacific Energy
- 34:30woodstove with door a thirty eight hundred dollars value and its starting bid as thirteen
- 34:36thirty eight basically, or an electric log set for only two hundred and fifty
- 34:40six dollars. There's also a propane fireplace, you know, for those of
- 34:45you that don't have natural gas. A lot of people live in Tays Valley
- 34:49have that problem. So that's very true. That's very true. All these
- 34:52great bargains and more at wv bargains dot com. If you can't remember that,
- 34:55you can search it on Google or search for Turtle bids and they'll still
- 34:59get you there. I found all these items, Ron, Thank you so
- 35:00much. You can have a lot of all right, Dave, thatland's up
- 35:04next. Have a great day. Everyone. You're listening to w c HS
- 35:06the Voice of Charleston, w c H s A W two four three d
- 35:30r F M Charlestown W two A three A Q Cross Lanes at w v
- 35:32r C Media Station. We're proud to live here too.