Buell Closeout Sale
Buell Closeout Sale
LEANINGS
PETER EGAN
GRAY DAY, MIDWINTER, THE PHONE rings and it's my friend Jeff Underwood.
"Rob Himmelman and I are driving to East Troy tomorrow to the Buell factory for the liquidation sale. You wanna go?"
I'd seen the ads on the Internet—"Everything Must Go!"—with color photos of huge, bright red and blue tool boxes, work benches, office equipment, air tools, etc. I didn't need anything; I'm all tooled up, so to speak, but it never hurts to look. And then there's the curiosity factor, the natural human tendency to immerse oneself in ele giac events as a reminder that nothing lasts-as if any reminder were needed these days. I'd visited Buell several times when the place was hunmiingpicked up one of the first new Ulysses there for a trip to the Appalachians-so what would it be like now?
Jeff and Rob picked me up in the morning, and we took mostly back roads down to East Troy, which is about 60 miles from my home here in Wisconsin. The liquidation sale had been going on for almost a week, so we didn't expect too much. When we turned into the in dustrial park and pulled into the Buell lot, we didn't find too much, either.
The Buell signs had been pried off the outside factory walls, leaving dark outlines where they'd been, and the liquidators had a table set up near the door. "Take a look around, boys. Everything's for sale. If something's not marked, just ask us about it."
The tool chests and benches were
gone, and the remains were rather ran dom-big bins of office phones and headsets, tables full of computer harddrive units, upholstered rolling office chairs for $65, heavy-duty motorcycle lifts with no wheel chocks ($500 each), a Ford 1-ton van with Buell Racing painted on the side ($7800), boxes of short, pre-calibrated torque wrenches, bins of air ratchets, random tables of old combination wrenches ($3 each) that would cost slightly less at Sears.
Everything was quite expensive, but the liquidators were obviously depend ing on a certain level of typical farmauction feeding frenzy to keep prices high until only unsellable items were left-a brink they were rapidly nearing. What this kind of liquidation sale im
presses upon you is the immense effort and expense of creating a small com pany that produces a complex prod uct. All those telephones and pagers and headsets, desks and file cabinets, probably bought new at full price when things were really rolling. Etched in the cavernous silence of that big, emp
ty factory building was the message, "Human activity and creativity good; lack of same, very bad." Factories have a pulse, and when the heartbeat stops, the muscles and ganglia lose all their meaning and value.
Nevertheless, we bought a few things, just because we were there. Rob bought a Swingline stapler for a few bucks, and I spent $10 on a set of three dealer-display panels showing Buells on the road and in action. I'll probably put one of them up in my workshop.
It shows a guy sitting on an orange Ulysses-like the one I rode-stopped on a dry, sunlit ridge Out West, gazing out on a large butte or rock forma tion. Could be the Badlands or may be Monument Valley. Nice picture to look at when you're driving back home through a late afternoon snowstorm.
When I got home, I set the display panel up along the wall on my desk and spent a lot of time gazing at it. Then, as one who has come peril
ously close to buying a Buell Ulysses several times since the introduction of the bike in late 2005, I suddenly found myself going on a Buell-finder website to see how many of these bikes were left at dealerships in Wisconsin. I was particularly interested in the taller, theoretically more off-road-ish model, the XB12X, with its heavier-duty fork and greater steering sweep.
The Internet said there were four left in Wisconsin, so I started calling the dealers. Three of the bikes were "just sold" and the last one, a 2009 blue version, was still available at Racine Harley-Davidson. Barb and I drove over for a look (in yet another blinding snowstorm), she approved of the pillion accommodations and I end ed up buying the bike at a reasonably good, but not jaw-dropping, discount. I also bought their last set of hard bags. Unfortunately, we were in our Jeep, so there was no way to get the bike home. So, last Saturday I drove my Ford
van over to pick it up, and my friend Lew Terpstra went along to help. The Harley dealership was absolutely hop ping, and I watched and drank coffee while three other buyers took delivery on new Harleys before I loaded my bike
up. Good to see-economic hope and spring fever, combined with tax returns.
Strangely, our route to and from the dealership took us right through East Troy on Highway 20 and, as Lew had never seen the old Buell factory, we decided to stop. The liquidation sale was still in progress-if that's the right word-and prices had dropped considerably, but there was very little left. I sat in a nice of fice chair on wheels ($8) and said to Lew, "This is the most comfortable chair I ever sat in. I'm going to buy it for the garage."
"You'd better buy two at that price,"
Lew said. "I'll need a comfortable chair when we get back to your garage to ad mire the Ulysses." So I got two. Near the cashier's table, there was a stack of large gray plastic parts bins with "PROPERTY OF BUELL MOTORCYCLE" stenciled on them, marked $20 each. "Kind of ex pensive," I remarked to the cashier.
"Yes," he said, "but they say `Buell' on them, and it's the souvenir-type stuff that everyone wants."
So of course I bought one, and I had a sudden flashback to a cynical remark that some pundit made when he heard that
Elvis had died: "Good career move?' It really was a strange phenomenon. When it was announced that Buell was closing, anyone who was interested in the bikes (like me) sprang into action and bought one. The parts man at Racine Harley-Davidson told me that buyers immediately swooped down and bought all the Buell memorabilia-hats, jackets, tankbags, etc.-they had in stock. Buell accessories, with two years of shelf dust on them, sold out immediately. We hu mans are a strange bunch, spring-loaded for enthusiasm and waiting for a sign or omen. Or maybe just a lower price. When Lew and I got home, we un
loaded the Ulysses in my driveway, rolled it through the snow into my workshop, turned up the heat, sat in our new/used Buell office chairs to look at the motorcycle and opened up a cou ple bottles of Snowshoe Ale from the nearby New Glarus Brewing Company. Local bike, local beer, all made by highly skilled neighbors and friends.
This is the way life should be, and I'd hoped it would stay that way-or become more so with the passage of time.
