Let me start this blog off by sharing with the world that I hate shopping. With a lovely wife and three pre-teen daughters, it seems like I spend more than my fare share of time hanging out at malls and shopping centers, despite my protestations, whining, and general desire to avoid any place of business that sells socks, underwear, or $5 cups of coffee.
The one small drop of joy that I have generally been able to squeeze out of these regular trips to the mall has been the small fact that when the time came to spend three hours wandering around the Old Navy store—I always knew that there would be an old truck parked somewhere near the back of the store that I could sit near and imagine that I wasn't actually stuck spending yet another Saturday hanging out at the mall.
While in the back of my mind I always knew that these trucks had been gelded (the powertrain has been snipped out of them leaving them basically useless) it still felt good to simply sit on the edge of a rack holding 37 identical yellow t-shirts (2 for only $19.95) and imagine what projects I'd like to start on my own 50s-era International pickup truck. This is fairly easy to imagine since my own truck just happens to have the same crappy blue paint job as the truck in the store.
Anyway, to make a long story short, these trucks hold a special place in my heart since we have spent many hours together. However, when I was surfing the Internet late last night stealing music videos from the Web of some of my favorite auto-related songs to share on this site, I ran across an interesting sale on eBay.
Holy-Crap! there was the truck I'd spent so much quality time with...and 41-other sentimental dads who had spent hours staring at these rigs while their women wandered aimlessly around the mall were bidding for a chance to take this Old Navy store trucks home.
What really amazed me was the fact that these guys had bid the truck up to nearly $4,000!
Now remember, this truck doesn't have a motor or tranny. It is just a shell of its former self.
While this seems kind of steep to me, I felt better knowing that maybe I'd have an opportunity to afford one of these pieces of rolling art since I recently read an article stating that the stores were phasing the trucks out over the next few years. In fact, the seller states in his listing that he will be selling roughly 30 more former-store trucks in the coming weeks.
Now my only dilemma is: Where will I sit, stare and dream away the time that my wife and daughters spend shopping?....Oh well, I guess there is always Victoria's Secrets.
