Ever Wonder Where the Furniture Goes When a Firm Fails?
The thing to watch out for is a nice, clean, carpaccio- red BMW driven by a man who perhaps won’t say why he’s come. If he’s Doug Ray, you’d best see to your resume.
Doug would be there for the furniture.
The Rays--father, son and uncle--are undertakers of sorts, or perhaps cemetery operators, presiding over a series of vast boneyards for businesses. They will buy used office furniture from anyone who wants to sell, which often means companies still so full of life that they merely wish to redecorate.
But now recession is upon us; the industrious landscape of Southern California is littered with the charred remains of thrifts and bankruptcies, downsizings and dissolutions. For all of them, the Rays run a kind of furniture Forest Lawn.
Somebody’s got to do it. From their headquarters in Rosemead, Doug roams forth in his unlikely hearse, making house calls all over the Southland to price office furniture. He covers up to 2,000 miles a week and pays 10 to 20 cents on the dollar. He is awash in goods.
“I can’t get hold of Doug nowadays,” says Ralph Falcon, who buys used furniture for Cut-Rate Office Warehouse, a competitor in Rancho Dominguez. “We used to get together for lunch. We don’t have time anymore. It’s unbelievable. All we do is go around buying furniture.”
If secondhand desks are any indicator, the outlook for most of us is grim. But for the Rays, possibly the region’s biggest used office furniture dealers, bad times are almost a blessing. They can buy cheap, and while they also have to sell cheap, more people turn to used furniture when they need to save money.
Anyway, the Rays aren’t wholly dependent on a downturn. When fire struck the First Interstate Bank tower downtown, the Rays took away 70 truckloads of furniture. They are especially proud to have acquired a bunch of classy furnishings from the late Drexel Burnham Lambert, the felonious securities firm that dominated 1980s finance. And they are eager to unload this stuff as fast as they can.
“I redo my office every week,” says Doug’s father, Bob, the 66-year-old silver-haired, chain-smoking patriarch whose Texas accent and general mien suggest a used-car salesman from central casting. Alistair Cooke missed his chance; the clubby chairs we are sitting in, all red leather and rivets, are already sold.
The Rays, you see, are not poetic. They do not form sentimental attachments to desks and chairs. They do not hold up a decrepit Scotch-tape dispenser and muse, “Alas, poor Drexel, we knew them well.”
The Rays run a boneyard, but they believe in resurrection. The idea, after all, is not to bury the stuff they buy but to resell it. The last thing they want is for their ABE Corp. (Addressing & Business Equipment Co. when Bob started it 30 years ago) to become the final resting place for anything.
Thus, the Rays will not buy any old thing. When Bob went over to the late Herald-Examiner to price the furniture, he could almost feel the ghosts of stories past. But it was such antiquated stuff he wouldn’t even make a bid.
On the other hand, when Gibraltar Savings failed, the Rays mopped up. When Imperial Savings went bust, the Rays were ready with a bid. Bob still nags Doug about getting some stuff from defunct Lincoln S&L.; He feels ABE would derive a certain cachet from the notoriety of former Lincoln owner Charles H. Keating Jr.
To visit any of the Rays’ vast warehouses--they have 125,000 square feet under roof--is to drink deeply of the history of office furniture since the Jetsons. Desks and chairs are stacked to the ceiling and arrayed around the walls. Much of the stuff really is like new, having come from some spendthrift S&L; just yesterday. But there are also lots of molded plastic clamshells upholstered in colors drawn from the Melmac palette--persimmon, avocado, harvest gold--and it’s easy to forget, in this age of black matte and cherry wood, how popular chrome once was.
The Rays tried new furniture but nearly went the way of so many of their own customers, so now they sell mainly used. They hate depreciation and buy everything secondhand. Doug’s BMW, which has 200,000 miles on it now, came in used. So did Bob’s Cadillac. The elder Rays have secondhand stuff at home too.
Used furniture may be in their blood. Bob’s brother, Bill, is a salesman. Doug’s brother, Michael, has a competing firm in Ontario. But they all get along.
Sometimes, Doug says, he’s asked to be discreet, especially near the end of the month. “Some companies are liquidating literally overnight, so they ask me not to reveal who I am,” he explains. If necessary, the Rays will cart the stuff away on Saturdays, Sundays or holidays.
Saddest of all are the companies the Rays hear from twice: once when they’re full of hope and buy some of Bob and Doug’s furniture, and later, when they want the Rays to buy it back.
