Many years back myself and my business partner at the time quite often went to auctions and tender sales after a few years we became well known to a few of the auctioneers and got invites to private treaty sales these could be the entire contents of small wholesalers and electrical contractors, we were buying the stuff at around 10% of what it would cost us through normal outlets and in some cases selling stock that we didn't normally use to other wholesalers to recoup some of the outlay. Over time we acquired a lot of stock that wasn't that fast moving but was useful stock, wholesalers quite often suggested customers contact us if they had a breakdown and needed obscure fuses and other kit, some of the fuses we had in our stock had list prices of £1000+ although at the time there was generally a 40 - 50% discount on list price, quite a few times I would end up going back the office before I got home because we had a sale of £1500 + vat for a few fuses. I dread to think how much we could have made had Ebay existed back then as we had cartons of those Reyrolle fuses