Gold Really Was Everywhere

After lunch, Fang Bai took a rickshaw to Yaming Electronics Recycling Company.

This was a fairly large company specializing in recycling and processing electronic products.

Its electronics warehouse alone covered twenty to thirty mu, and quite a few bosses were already picking through goods on-site.

Fang Bai's target was imported scrap televisions. Mountains of old, battered TVs filled his view, though quite a few were still in good condition.

The scavengers mainly collected useful television components or TVs that could be repaired, then pieced them together, refurbished them, and sold the usable ones.

That was exactly what Fang Bai wanted to do.

Most Huaguo people did not understand why foreigners threw these things away. Fang Bai had found it hard to understand before as well.

Did broken televisions really have no value?

Thinking about it carefully, it was easy enough to understand. They were not like machinery, which could still fetch a decent sum even when sold as scrap iron.

TVs were different. Their worthless plastic casings and glass accounted for much of their weight. The valuable parts were the wires and deflection coils, which contained copper wire worth roughly ten times more than iron.

A single television did not contain much copper wire, and dismantling it was troublesome.

In the solid-waste recycling plants of later generations, the wires and deflection coils would be directly recovered. The remaining components, such as glass and casings, would be crushed into granules and sorted for resale through professional separation methods.

Products such as phosphor powder, electron guns, and circuit boards would undergo further refining to obtain rare earths, copper, gold, silver, and other metals.

But solid-waste recycling plants in this era used relatively crude methods. With too few professional repairmen and inspectors and low technical standards, they could not possibly sort things as professionally as later generations. Generally, they simply crushed and refined everything without classification, only picking out television components in relatively good condition for refurbishment customers to choose from.

If they were not solid-waste recycling plants, then ordinary secondhand TV dealers mainly wanted the copper in the deflection coils, wires, and transformers. The other components had little recycling value, or their recovery costs were too high.

Labor costs were high in developed countries. Ordinary families would not dismantle coils and wires that were worthless to them, so useless or outdated TVs were simply thrown away as garbage.

When Huaguo people saw this market, they began specializing in collecting this electronic waste. As long as they paid the shipping costs to transport it to Huaguo, it was practically a business requiring no capital.

Thus, unopened televisions and circuit boards were sold by the ton.

Televisions were hot commodities now and had long service lives. Most families would not replace one for years after buying it, treating it like a family heirloom.

New domestic fourteen-inch black and white TVs from brands such as Panda, Feiyue, and Konka sold for two to three hundred yuan, while imported brands like Toshiba, Sony, and Panasonic cost twice as much.

A few years ago, domestic fourteen-inch black and white TVs had still sold for three to four hundred yuan, but their prices had fallen quickly.

As for new color TVs, an imported twenty-nine-inch Sony could sell for more than ten thousand yuan, while a twenty-one-inch model cost four to five thousand.

CRT color TVs were currently the mainstream type, using cathode-ray tube technology and concave glass screens.

At this time, there were very few domestic color TVs. Their picture quality was poor and their screens were small, yet demand still far exceeded supply.

Families in this era had no mortgages or car loans, and there were few categories of goods they could buy. Most of a household's income went toward improving their lives. A TV costing several thousand yuan or a motorcycle costing over ten thousand could be bought just like that.

People from later generations might struggle to understand why a Ten Thousand Yuan Household would spend several thousand yuan on a color TV. Wouldn't it have been better to use the money to start a business or buy a house?

But if they did not know future housing prices, did not know electronics would become cheap, did not know currency would depreciate so quickly, did not know... then it was easy to understand.

If you saved money and had nowhere to spend it, what else could you do?

Right?

Later generations had a dazzling array of goods: spicy crayfish, KTV girls you could hold for a few hundred yuan, cars, houses, endless online shopping, and the infuriating bride price. There were plenty of ways to spend money.

For instance, if Fang Bai wanted to have some fun now, even finding a ride was troublesome. Transportation was inconvenient, there was no internet, and the best entertainment was staying home to watch television.

Every evening, villagers carried flashlights to visit other homes and watch television. This was common in the countryside.

Therefore, watching TV was an indispensable part of people's lives and one of their main sources of information about the outside world.

Fang Bai pulled back his thoughts and entered the television sorting area. Like the other customers, he could browse freely. Some bosses had workers move their chosen TVs into an empty area, where everything would be weighed and paid for at the end.

Black and white TVs in relatively good condition cost seven to nine hundred yuan per ton regardless of size or brand. A fourteen-inch black and white TV weighed ten to twelve kilograms, so one thousand yuan could buy around a hundred sets.

Color TVs were more expensive. Those in relatively good condition cost 2,500 yuan per ton, mainly twenty-one-inch models, with a small number of fourteen-inch and twenty-nine-inch sets. Larger sizes were rare, and the largest currently on the market was thirty-four inches.

These better-condition sets were too expensive for most refurbishment bosses. They also needed a great deal of time to determine what was wrong with them, which demanded too much technical skill, so they generally did not choose them.

The TVs in poor condition were much cheaper, along with intact components removed from them. Those were the real targets of the scavengers.

If people from later generations saw these used TVs, they would definitely find it unbelievable: couldn't these TVs just be repaired?

Why had no one else noticed this?

Were they simply waiting for Fang Bai to get rich?

Were there really so many fools watching gold lying on the ground without picking it up?

It was not that easy!

First, there was the information gap. Probably very few people even knew about imported electronic waste.

Not to mention this era—without mobile phones and media, how many people would know about imported electronic waste? How many would know that T City had this stuff?

Even if they knew, it was sold by the ton. You needed capital to buy it, since they would not sell it in small quantities.

How much savings could private individuals have in this era?

Second, it looked simple, but repairs were actually difficult. You had to find where the fault was.

The good used TVs had naturally been picked out by Yaming Company or sold at high prices to those refurbishment companies.

The ones left here were naturally difficult to repair, which was why Fang Bai could find bargains.

This was not something an ordinary electrician could handle.

An electrician from later generations, with broad knowledge and experience, might be able to repair them.

In this era, capable people all worked in government units or state-owned organizations. Not many thought of imported electronic waste, and there were not that many skilled technicians either.

That was why people said gold was everywhere in this era. Relatively speaking, it was easier to make money.

Also, if a TV had been made specifically for the Island Nation, its voltage would be 110V and it would need a voltage converter. Export models were generally 220V, though, and could be used directly in Huaguo.

Fang Bai placed his hand on a twenty-one-inch Toshiba color TV made in 1988 and discovered that the picture tube, screen, and other parts were fine. The damaged parts were two swollen, burnt capacitors on the circuit board, a broken speaker, and a severed section of the degaussing coil.

If you knew what was broken, repairing it was not difficult.

Fang Bai only needed to hire people with a basic understanding of circuitry, mark the faulty parts for them to repair, and the TVs could be fixed without spending too much time. Then they could be refurbished.

Would imported color TVs that had originally sold for around four thousand yuan really find no buyers if sold for one thousand, or even a few hundred?

As for the cost?

At roughly twenty kilograms each, the purchase price was around fifty yuan.

Including transportation, repair labor, new replacement parts, refurbishment, sales expenses, and other costs, it would probably come to around one hundred yuan.

Several times the profit!

Holy shit, that was insanely profitable!

Of course, the goods were sitting right here, but you needed the skills to work in this business.

If you had the ability, it was like picking up money. In this era, there were simply that many opportunities to get rich.

However, most people did not have that ability and did not know this information.

So it would not be wrong to call it a monopoly business.

"Gold really is everywhere. It just depends on whether you have what it takes to scoop it up."

Fang Bai thought to himself, delighted again and again. Finding a TV that was easy to refurbish was simply too easy.

Others could not do it, but he could handle it effortlessly!

He had read plenty of fantasy novels where everyone discovered a treasure map, only for the protagonist to claim all the most important treasures.

Now, Fang Bai was just like the protagonist of a novel. This imported TV waste yard seemed like a treasure map created specifically for him!

He was not afraid of others taking too much, and these treasures were continuously shipped into the country from abroad.

The domestic TV market was enormous, and demand far outstripped supply!

This was fucking awesome!

This thrill was different from the usual thrill of making a lot of money.

It was easy, free, and without overly fierce competition.

This was fun!