You might be hard pressed to find a better salesman in Montreal than Kyle MacDonald.
The Plateau resident, whose tale of trading a red paper clip for a house became a book that was translated into 16 languages, handed over an old briefcase last Saturday to two buyers who paid $10,000 for it over the Internet.
He describes it as “just a regular briefcase, nothing special about it.”
One of the two Houston women who paid $10,000 for the bag offers a more detailed description.
“It’s a piece of shit; it’s really the crappiest briefcase. It has a plastic handle and if you’re not careful the sides will fall out because they’re not reinforced,” said Tina Berger.
But Berger and her friend Kim Cambron say they’re thrilled with the purchase, in fact they believe the poor condition of the item only improves it. “It makes it more compelling. It makes us laugh because it’s so bad,” Berger said.
The briefcase was made famous on the Internet for its cameo in a video Kyle and four friends made detailing a stunt in which they enter a small New York City store and buy every single item in it.
MacDonald then put everything up on sale on the website storebuyout.com, at highly inflated prices, as art. A can of pop that he bought for about a buck was turned upside-down and put into a case and re-marketed as an art object. Its price? A mere $150.
Other items from the store buyout are more affordable. The W&Ws – a pack of M&Ms upside down in a case – cost only $99.
MacDonald says that people from as far away Turkey, Cyprus, France and Germany have ponied up, allowing him to almost recoup the nearly $19,000 he pumped into the caper.
The idea of purchasing every single item in a store had been brewing since MacDonald hatched it up while inebriated in a hot tub in 2006. When a friend living in the Big Apple recommended the Hercules Fancy Grocery, MacDonald leapt into action.
The elderly Greek-American storeowner, Hercules Dimitratos, had no idea that sales would be so brisk that day back in May 2011. In the video he’s seen overwhelmed with delight at the news that he has found buyers for every last one of his wares.
It took Dimitratos hours to punch 3,000 items into a calculator, making a 57-foot-long bill totalling $18,871.93, which the gang paid in cash, since the store doesn’t take credit.
The bill itself, incidentally, is for sale for that very price, as are several $65 parking tickets MacDonald and his crew received for parking their van out front during the exploit.
Some of the 500,000 who’ve watched the video so far have interpreted the stunt as a critique of consumerism gone wild, while others found the gang had brought a ray of sunlight into the otherwise unrelenting daily struggle faced by the small shopkeeper.
MacDonald describes the whole thing as more of a tribute to the absurd.
“When you walk into a store, some will purchase this and others will purchase that,” he said. “But there’s nothing stopping you from buying everything, except money. Merchandising is done in a way to make you want to buy more and more and we literally listened and bought it all. What came next was a series of cascading events.”
The experiment clicked with a couple of mothers in Houston who work as professional consultants. They found themselves unable to resist the lure of buying the $10,000 briefcase.
“The video just brought us so much crazy happiness and joy that we were kind of just overwhelmed by the coolness of it. We started getting very excited about it, everything we’d read we’d get a little more hyped up and happy with the way it was unfolding,” said Berger.
She and Cambron decided to crack open their retirement savings and split the cost of the $10,000 briefcase.
Part of the deal was that Kyle and his gang would come to Houston to hand-deliver the bag. Soon Cambron and Berger decided they would put on a flashmob on Jan. 14 poking gentle fun at the city’s workaholic attitude.
“People here have a strong work ethic, they work nights, weekends, holidays and don’t take more than three or four days off a year and they’re proud of that. We just wanted to remind people that there’s more than just work, there’s a time for fun and to be deeply creative, collectively and individually,” said Berger.
Participants dressed in business suits and stared fretfully at their watches, only to pop open their briefcases full of party gear.
Berger reports that those who took part in the flash mob last Saturday and the subsequent decentralized dance party– a sort of march through the city in which participants carry boom boxes blasting the same music – have since been pestering her to organize more such events.
MacDonald admits that those who buy items like his buyout goods or the briefcase aren’t necessarily getting great value in terms of functionality.
“It’s like pet rockish,” he concedes. “It’s like anything can be art and this is the anything.”
