The Liquidator, Outdoor Life Network, Thursdays at 6 p.m. Season 3 starts June 27.
SHARKS swim, lions roar, and Jeff Schwarz makes deals.
Even after a brief conversation with Schwarz it's difficult to imagine the West Vancouver resident taking a vow of silence or even getting through a movie without trying to swap his half-bag of Skittles for a full box of Raisinets.
Schwarz talks. His speech has the cajoling humour of a carnival barker luring rubes into the tent and the frenetic rhythm of a football announcer narrating a sudden-death touchdown drive.
Growing up on Fraser Street and 50th Avenue in Vancouver, Schwarz got his first sense of the value of a dollar from his grandparents.
Recent immigrants from Poland and Germany, his grandparents tended to suss out deals in second hand stores. "I guess that's where I started, really," he says.
Schwarz is now the star of The Liquidator on the Outdoor Life Network. The reality TV show follows him through mismatched merchandise, odd deals and encounters with bizarre characters.
But way before he became the toughest negotiator on OLN, Schwarz was just a clumsy guy scouring garage sales for lava lamps.
"At that time lava lamps were coming back," he recalls. "I dropped the guy's lava lamp and the guy, he was just choked."
As the waxy glob rolled across the ground from the shattered casing, Schwarz glimpsed a camera. "I said: 'What do you want for this camera?'"
The seller asked for $20 and Schwarz picked it up for $15, throwing in another $10 for the busted lamp. The seller tossed in another camera free of charge and Schwarz's heart rate sped up.
"I thought 'Wow, that's gotta be worth a lot of money,'" he says.
The free camera was worth exactly what he paid for it. The $15 Nikon Rangefinder was worth a little more.
"When I showed it to this guy, this guy lifted up the camera and about 30 guys from Hong Kong that happened to be there went absolutely insane," he says, recalling the Kerrisdale camera swap meet. "These guys went crazy, nearly knocked me over and I'm a pretty big guy."
He sold the camera for $3,100 while his son rested in a carrier on his lap. He'd been broke before that deal, relying on his wife's part-time to job to support their young family.
Today he's the president of the Direct Liquidation warehouse in Burnaby. He's bought movie props, mattresses and dildos, always relying on the instincts he's cultivated in countless flea markets.
There have bad deals along the way, he allows, like when he picked up more than $50,000 worth of suits.
"I took a s@#*kicking on these things and I think we probably lost about $15 to $20,000."
The show seems to be part of the wave of reality TV spawned by the global recession.
"It seems like that's what's sort of in right now is these buying and selling shows," he says. "In tough economic times everybody's trying to make a buck and trying to figure out a buck."
What makes The Liquidator different for Schwarz is the characters he encounters.
"Some of the people that I deal with, they're like crazy people. I don't mean crazy, but they're just unique, and capturing some of these guys on camera is quite funny," he says. "People like me and them, we seem to find each other like glue."
Schwarz lives his life on-call, always on guard for the next big thing. "It is really stressful, man," he says. "Just yesterday we got a guy call up, he's got 20 bedroom sets. I go, 'Buddy, I got no room.' He says, 'You don't get it, I got no room,' and he goes 'You can have 'em.'. . .
You've got to take advantage of the opportunity when it arises. A lot of times it means getting the stuff out today."
Schwarz recalls being on the sidelines of his child's soccer game, surrounded by parents with nine to five jobs.
"Here I am at the soccer field watching my kids play in West Van and I get a call, this guy wants to liquidate a warehouse full of blah, blah, blah. You never know when the deal comes," he says.
Asked if he was looking to move out of the business, Schwarz was noncommittal.
"It's hard to say where it goes. I've had a lot of fun with it. I've got to meet a lot of cool people. There's people that come to my warehouse that are worth literally two-, three-hundred million, and there's people that are coming that worth next to nothing. And at the end of the day, the same principles apply no matter what you're buying and selling, and everybody's got a story, and that's what's kind of cool about this business."
