And the OP gets less value from the tree because he doesn’t get to have it up weeks before Christmas. They’re leftovers! Next thing you know, we’re going to start seeing Pit threads about those dishonest bastards who buy day-old bread.
Honestly, the things that some people get up on their high horses about are really fucking laughable sometimes.
Speaking of which…
They do grow back, you know?
The vendor should care that his client only uses the tree for a couple of days vs. 2 weeks? The tree used for 2 days takes the same amount of time and resources to grow as the one used for 2 weeks.
The trees are only leftovers because the cheap OP won’t buy his tree at the regular price like most of the other people. He is pissed because he waited too long before doing so and the vendor wasn’t hanging around to grasp every last penny like the OP was trying to save.
And guess what you do when there ain’t any day old bread left? You buy fresh bread and don’t cry about it. The OP had to pay for day old bread as if it was fresh bread. I don’t feel sorry for him. Frankly, the vendor is stupid. He should charge double for the last couple of trees left as the people looking for them at that point don’t have much of a choice.
I’ve done this before, but I live in a small town. I needed a nandina bush and nobody was around at the plant nursery, so I left the cash in an envelope and a note with it. I ran into the owner’s daughter a few days later and she told me her dad said I was the most honest person he’s ever met. (Probably not, but it gave me a nice warm feeling anyway.) I’ve been to many farm produce stands that had a box to leave your money when the owner had other business to tend to.
Not to mention that most, if not all, are grown on Christmas tree farms specifically for the purpose of being cut down. Would you deprive these people of their jobs?
Besides, fake trees suck. 
Is it possible that the guy only knows you by face and not by your phone number? Perhaps if you guys had met up, he would have given you the discount because he “knows” you. But because he assumed he didn’t “know” you, he felt he could take advantage of the situation?
Maybe all his trees were marked up this year and you did get a discount, just one that wasn’t quite as impressive?
I’m also wondering if he was kinda pissed that you would just take the tree without paying for it. If he doesn’t have them locked up and he doesn’t keep regular hours, then he has no one to blame but himself, but it’s possible he thinks you taking it upon yourself to take his merchandise means “NO DISCOUNT FOR YOU!”
Nope, it’ll be Pine Mall.
We name developments after whatever used to live there, true. But there are no “Dead Fox Estates” or “Vanished Quail Hollow”.
Depends on whether the seller expects that sort of transaction, I would think.
In my semi-rural/creeping suburbanization area, there are a couple of farmers who sell baled hay and bagged shavings on the honor system (one of them also sells bagged feed for a variety of livestock, large and small). They keep the goods in an unlocked barn, with a cigar box near the entrance for leaving your money, if you want to pay in cash, and a packet of sales forms, also a pen (which sometimes even works) or pencil. You load up your vehicle with what you want to buy, check the prices chalked up on a board above the payment table, fill out the sales form, then stick the form and the payment in the box or leave a note on the form for the farmer to send you a bill.
I suppose they occasionally get ripped off, human beings being what they are, but both of these farmers have operated like that for as long as I’ve been around here (decade plus) and still do despite the city folk seeping in.
The baker should care that his customer ate some bread that was a little bit stale? He used the same amount of dough and put in the same amount of work as all the other loaves.
This is analogous to waiting to buy the day-old bread, finding a loaf, and paying full price for it. In both cases, the seller produced too much, and the value went down with time.
Yeah, I’m thinking the OP probably would have just gone without in such a case. The vendor is smart for trying to get what little he could for something that’s nearly bottomed out in value.
I mean, I see what you’re saying, but on a scale of wrongness, this ranks somewhere below jaywalking. Jesus.
I don’t think the OP had no other choices. Frankly, there are still a number of lots with trees in them today in my part of the Northwest. I passed two coming home from the grocery just now. There’s no such thing as “the last couple of trees” in the OP’s region. I think the question is, had the seller been there, what price would he have charged for the tree? Were the trees discounted?
I have never seen any tree lot in the Northwest that didn’t reduce its prices a few days before Christmas. My tree was $15 less than its tagged price because I bought it a few days before Christmas.
Saving money is not the only reason people buy trees late. Some people keep their trees up through Epiphany; others take them down the day after Christmas. In my case, it was because a family member was too ill to help until then. YMMV.
Go back to the past, do you?
FTR the trees that are left over are not thrown out. At our store we rent out out part of our property every year to someone who runs a tree lot. This year I asked him what he does with the left over trees. They do a few things.
First, they’ve learned that they sell more trees when the lots are full rather then when there are just a few trees, so on the last few days they’ll close some of the barren lots and move all the trees to one lot, they’ll sell more that way. Second, they’ll wholesale them to another company’s tree lot in the area. This way they can recover some of their money and the other lot owner can sell more trees. As for what’s left over at the end, they make mulch out of it.
Oh, at one point the guy at my lot had told me that he already made a deal with another seller in the area and I was instructed to tell people that the trees were no longer for sale. I presume money had already changed hands and it would have been messy had the counts not reconciled when the guys from the other lot came to get their trees.
The lot most likely wasn’t abandoned, especially since you said the trailer was there, the lights were on and the music was on. Was the lot set up on a store’s property. The people running the lot on out parking lot routinely came in to go the bathroom or grab food or warm up a little.
And just to play devil’s advocate here for a second, what if those trees where already sold to someone, or what if they were for HIS family and he got back to find them missing? Besides, you didn’t negotiate a lower price, it’s not fair of you to expect to pay anything less then then what the tag said.
I know someone who came home one day this month to find out that while they were at work someone had cut down one of the pine trees in their yard. One of three in their backyard. In the middle of the city. Who knew you had to chain up trees now?
For what it’s worth, my father yelled at me and called me ‘stupid’ for paying for the tree, since the lot owner had obviously already written it off as a loss.
Sigh.
No, you were better off paying for them. Like I said before, at the very least they would have been sold as mulch. Look at it this way. If you got caught taking them without at least leaving a note and you got caught. You’d be paying full price (restitution) AND a you’d have a theft of movable property ticket to boot.
Yesss. Of course there was no point trying to explain this to dad. He was on a rant. He lives with terrible chronic pain, and had forgotten 2 of his pain pills in a row, so was being harsh about a lot of things. But 1) we had our children along, and we were hardly going to give them the moral example of taking the tree and NOT offering to pay for it (well, I mean we’d have left a note regardless but the moral imperative needed to be emphasized for them) and also, 2) having left a note and given the guy our phone number, if we didn’t follow through and pay, it would have been a trivial matter for him to tell the police of a theft, even though in anybody’s reasonable opinion, the tree was at that point abandoned property.
I do still believe the tree was abandoned property. Again: the trailer was locked up and nobody was there for at LEAST 24 hours. I returned 3 times to try to contact a worker. I checked in the grocery store on whose lot the trees were, to see if anybody had seen him. Nobody had. Nobody could tell me how to get in touch with him. That tree and one other, along with about 3’ of the bottoms of two other trees, were jumbled together flat on the ground at the edge of the parking lot. The wooden uprights used to define the lot and help keep trees standing had all been taken down and piled together. The lot was closed. Presumably it would cost more to keep somebody there and working than they could make with the 2 trees remaining. There was not even a box on the trailer door for people to use for honor-system payments.
Maybe you’re all right. But I still think there’s something fishy.
Next year I think we’re getting a fake tree. The big drawback is, you have to store the darned thing for a year.
Mine disassembles and fits into a two-foot by two-foot cardboard box, which lives in the spare closet very nicely 11 months of the year.