by Fred Seely
Editorial Director
Raymond Solomon has golf shoes in your size. Nice selection, too — about 3,000 pair.
Over the years, the Solomons have been the unchallenged kings of scroungers. An international network feeds information back to Jacksonville of goods elsewhere that can’t be sold for one reason or another, perhaps because of a warehouse fire or a train wreck.
The Solomons can sell them.
“This shipment was in a warehouse in California,” said Solomon, standing amid the shelves in Solomon Ventures, the store off Beach Boulevard that he and son Kelly operate. “The guy couldn’t pay his bill. I bought ‘em all, sight unseen.”
That almost was a disaster. Solomon doesn’t play golf. To him, golf shoes are golf shoes. There are lots of golfers, so he’ll eventually sell 3,000 pair of shoes.
“I told a friend about it and he asked me, ‘Do they have metal spikes?’ said Solomon. “Metal spikes? What’s the difference?”
He found out and spent a sweaty afternoon finding someone in California who could tell him what he had bought. The good news finally came: all spikeless.
Most of the 3,000 pair are in a trailer behind his building (geographic locator: Solomon’s is behind Beach Road Chicken Dinners) and a few dozen are inside. The name isn’t familiar — Cubila — but the country of origin is: China. Some pair are traditional, some aren’t — the kind that look like tennis shoes or sandals.
Such a deal: $19.95 a pair. No returns.
Solomon says he’ll sell them all. You’ll recall a story here 3-4 years ago on the thousand black — black! — golf balls he bought and put on sale for a quarter each. A visitor said, “You won’t sell any” and Solomon replied, “They’ll be gone in two weeks.” They were.
The 12,000 square-foot store a bit more than half the size of his original store nearby (it’s now demolished) and much smaller than the Beach Boulevard store his brothers recently closed. It’s a little more orderly than the others but it’s still full of the odd and what appears overstocked.
There was a 15-foot stuffed alligator which was in residence for a while before someone bought it for $1,500. There’s a four-foot leather gorilla unsold, a popcorn machine, 400 cases on lemon wine ($2 a bottle) and 5,000 gizmos that stick on a license plate . . . pick your favorite college logo.
In a back room are 3,000 signed prints from a now-defunct Miami art gallery (“Can’t figure out how to display these, and don’t know who’ll buy ‘em, but I will and they’ll sell,” he said.)
The golf shoes came in several weeks ago. Hurry . . . won’t last long.