SOMEONE said “There is nothing constant but change”; no industry can stand still. It must move forward or eventually slip into oblivion. This everchanging industrial picture is being readjusted daily by habits, inventions, discoveries, market conditions or “what have you.”
This month we are inaugurating an editorial policy, or theme, for Surplus Record. We are going to point out how and why the business of buying, warehousing, rebuilding and redesigning industrial machinery and equipment is important in our economic structure.
The dealer specializing in this field is doing a job of readjusting. It is primarily one of re-allocating industrial plant equipment to fit into other niches. The used machinery dealer’s job parallels that of the machinery builder, but he must approach it from a somewhat different angle.
For example: a manufacturing concern may have a certain type of machinery in its plant which would give only a limited production. The capital of this concern is insufficient to purchase the latest type of production machinery but by taking advantage of the offerings of the dealer in used equipment it can meet the demands placed upon it. And this same machinery which it purchases might have become “surplus” equipment in a very high speed production plant which had to buy the “last word” in automatic machinery to keep up the pace being set in its industry. Such occurrences as these are making it possible for new businesses to start which might ordinarily never have come into existence because of limited capital. And this is another place where the used machinery business has proven itself.
These and many other demands have made a permanent place for the used equipment business in the economic scheme of things.
There is nothing new about the used machinery business; there probably have been dealers in used machinery ever since the beginning of the Machine Age. There are concerns in business today whose origin dates back forty or fifty years.
After the World War millions of dollars worth of surplus equipment and machinery had to find its way back into regular industrial channels or be relegated to the scrap yard. The dealers in surplus equipment stepped into the breach, taking the majority of it off the hands of the War Department.
This type of service is of greater importance today—at some time or other practically every mill, mine and factory have benefited.
