My experience with abandoned containers and clearance stock
Abandoned containers have always proved to be quite interesting especially when you have been dealing with unwanted and clearance stock for as long as I have. Channel 4 are still trying to chase me down to see if I would be willing to help supply them with an ongoing supply of random stock within containers for a TV show that they are trying to put together.
This show seems to be a bit of a spin off from a similar show in the US but with their own twist. The show involves contestants bidding blind on a selection of abandoned containers on the docks, one by one the doors to the containers are opened and each contestant is allowed to make a bid on the stock contained within. After a round of bidding the winner is allowed to take the stock to a storage facility and then attempt to sell it on for a profit, or loss.

They go about selling the stock by setting up various market stalls, boot sales and using online medias like eBay & Amazon to do so. If done right then a show in the UK could be quite entertaining and the guy who makes the most money each week might get an offer from me for employment, ha! Whether it’s a case of the contestant picking the right container or just a bit of luck I don’t know but it will be interesting nonetheless.
I would like to see if Self Trading could play a part in the show and if assisting in this project could prove a mutually beneficial route to go down.
It could certainly prove a good bit of publicity for us; they may even want some of my staff to take part as this all sounds good. This got me thinking about the reality behind REAL blind bidding on abandoned stock.
On one occasion an opportunity arose to bid on an abandoned container in Liverpool that had been sat at the docks for over 4 years. It turned out the original owner had died some time ago and their relatives had not attempted to claim the stock of which there was no inventory for, which was quite odd. After some digging around my team and I realised that the container belonged to a close member to one of the original owners of the Rolls Royce family! Which got me thinking that maybe, just maybe there could be something of extreme value hidden away within this container and I quickly made my bid.
To my surprise my bid was accepted and I was eager to see what I had bought, however the very night before I was due to travel up to view the contents of the container it turned out miraculously that the relatives had now claimed the contents of the container and my bid was declined… seems to be that there definitely was something of value contained within and maybe a pre world war 2 Rolls Royce was inside and the docking manager fancied it to himself to span me the lie to make a higher bid on the contents himself…. who knows, I should have followed it up.
Most recently I had been offered an abandoned container of stock from a Russian who had recently immigrated to Australia. For the life of me I can’t understand why he would want to take all of this crap with him as it would cost 3 times more to do so than what seems to be the visual value of the contents.

It’s quite a fun thing dealing with all these abandoned containers and we have bought many in the past and have done ok from a lot of them profit wise. But if we do end up working with channel 4 in the future we’d be more than happy to do so.