CONVENTION CRASHING: ASSOCIATED SURPLUS DEALERS / ASSOCIATED MERCHANDISE DEALERS

By Brendan Buhler (contact)

Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007 | 6:59 a.m.

The Associated Surplus Dealers and Associated Merchandise Dealers convention, at least the bit of it at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Tuesday, is, basically, a stuff convention.

It's a convention that stores can go to to buy stuff that for whatever reason - someone made too much of it, someone bought too much of it, it's been discontinued, the military is junking it, it's a Chinese knockoff, it's a hideously ugly porcelain something or other - is cheap, often from middlemen. Walking through it is like being in the world's largest combined dollar store, Mexican farmacia, dress for less and Army/Navy store.

The foodlike items range from knockoffs such as Roundy crackers and Fruit Twists cereal to stuff that fills your stomach with live squid just to think about, such as no-refrigeration-required-prior-to-opening bottles of EZ Squeeze Cheese. The religious icons look as if they were discovered by the dozens in the reliquary of St. Shoddy. Coloring books for last year's animated movies. Tinted wineglasses. Four-foot-tall plaster roosters. Strange things or assortments of things wrapped in cellophane. And clothes that look like, well, clothes. Who knows?

But among all this junk, there was one booth that really embraced junk, old junk.

Ax-Man Surplus Stores of the greater St. Paul-Minneapolis area sells everything, or at least pieces of it. Perfectly good stuff, too, if by perfectly good you mean the noise-making bits of motorized music boxes, balloon molds that look like alien marital aids, child-size gas masks, bedpans, plastic pina colada cups from the Sturgis Rally, a stuffed doll called "Huggy Jesus" and a pile of chubby, baby-powder-scented doll legs. Left legs, only. (The heads and other bits have already been sold.)

"We consider ourselves an above-ground landfill," says Bill Stecker, Ax-Man's general manager, a title he created on the spot, job titles not being something the company is big on.

Stecker buys junk, although he'll take it for free. His favorite thing to do at the convention is ask the other exhibitors what their three worst selling-items are. Then he buys them.

"People won't try to sell their crap, but to us it's good merchandise," he says.

One of the tricks is to strip things into their parts, which sell faster. The company never, ever sells whole things. Well, OK, once it sold complete remote-control race cars that people could strip down on their own. Didn't work out.

"We guaranteed they were defective," Stecker says. "We had one returned because it worked."

Who buys this stuff? Electronics hobbyists get a lot of it, so do artists . And teachers are quite fond of the cast-off medical supplies and stickers.

Speaking of teachers, Ax-Man shares its booth with American Science Supplies ("Est. About 1937"), which also sells junk, but more scientifically minded stuff , such as 42-inch plastic Fresnel lenses salvaged from old projection-screen televisions. They're wonderful devices for capturing and focusing, say, sunlight.

"We've been liquefying pennies with it," owner Philip Cable says. "It takes about three seconds."

A lot of what companies such as American Science Supplies sell won't be used for its original purpose. Sometimes it sells better under a different name, just to get people thinking. For instance, Cable once had a supply of luggage-tag straps that he sold as "hamster collars." It's a way to make people think about how else they might use something that's headed for the trash.

"A lot of this stuff has one foot in the landfill already," Cable says. "We're giving it a last chance and it's good for the environment to boot."

And some of it melts pennies.

For heavily armed hipsters

There was one part of the show that was definitely not full of junk. No, it was full Confederate flag bikinis, camouflage everything, spiked brass knuckles, lock-pick kits, those gleaming fantasy-style swords for people who watch "Conan the Barbarian" for interior decorating hints and replica machine guns that fire air soft BBs and would probably look very handsome on a desk. Yes, this was the military tactical outdoor part of the show.

The air there is electric, probably because so many people are testing stun guns that go sckrick, bzzzzt and snick-snick-snick.

Then there is the booth for a clothing company called Ranger Up. The salesman introduces himself and his booth by gesturing to a pneumatic woman in hot pants and a halter top.

"This is Grace," Brad Beaumont says. "She's about to have a full-page spread in Maxim magazine."

Grace's top says, "I HIPPIES."

It's just one of the several shirts sold by Ranger Up, a clothing company run by current and former military guys. All the shirts have the sort of line drawings and 1970s colors you see on hipster T-shirts, only instead of expressing an ironic love of "Sesame Street," these shirts say things like, "My Ops Are Blacker Than Your Ops," "sadr city," "You Stay Classy, Iraq," and "Iran, so far away..." with that last one showing an outline of Iran and, yes, a flock of seagulls.

Beaumont, a Ranger Up vice president and a lieutenant in the North Carolina National Guard, said he and his buddies started the company because they were sick of cheesy pro-military clothes.

"Other things out there are kind of NASCAR-ish and over the top," Beaumont says. "We take a more humorous approach."

He says the "I HIPPIES" shirt is very popular in gun shops.

Product:

The Black Cat, a personal protection key chain and attack and rape resistor. An America-made black nylon resin key chain in the shape of a cat's head, with finger holes where the eyes should be and two very pointy ears. Motto: "Because you don't have 9 lives."

Inventor and Clear water, Neb., resident Lanny Billings and his wife, Sharon, drove 21 hours straight with only three restroom breaks to make the show. They say the Black Cat has been a big hit and they plan to add different colors , such as white, pink, blue, red and green, as well as an ice-scraper-shaped model that men can clip to their belts.

"What we're hoping is it provides just enough ouch to get that person to let you go," Sharon Billings says.

$4.95, From Koala-T Products Inc. Available at www.blackcatusa.com

Overheard:

"Oh, he's got a kill gun."

- one stun-gun saleswoman to another