The scrap dealer in the Yankton, S.D., area knew GameStop stock was one of the top news stories of the week. Thousands of small-dollar online buyers had driven the game store’s stock up to atmospheric prices last week, all to stick it to billion-dollar hedge funds that had bet against the stock’s rise.
It was a 2021 version of an old story: The little guy beating the big guy at his own game. Schnabel wanted in on the hype. So he listed the 18-foot long GameStop store signs for sale online for $1,500 apiece. That was Friday, Jan. 29.
Little did he know that over the next couple of days his listing would go viral and he’d be offered thousands of dollars more — but he’d be forced to destroy the signs, reducing them to a pile of scrap metal and plastic in his yard.
“It’s been a crazy ordeal,” Schnabel said Monday morning, Feb. 1.
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Schnabel routinely works with companies to pick up old appliances and other potentially recyclable junk, including old signs of all sizes. Some business signs come with stipulations, rules he has to follow for their sale. The GameStop signs didn’t, he initially understood, so he was free and clear to sell them.
Old signs can bring in decent money. Some people jump at a chance for an old business sign. Others are looking to buy individual letters to hang in their homes — Schnabel often sells the metal letters for $5 a piece.
A screenshot of Frank Schnabel’s now-deleted Facebook listing of two, large GameStop signs for sale for $1,500 each. Screenshot / Facebook
The online offers came at Schnabel fast, first from potential South Dakota buyers, then from states far and wide as news of his sale was posted to the Wall Street Bets page on the online forum site Reddit, whose users were largely responsible for the GameStop price surge.
“They said grab this thing and put it in front of the New York Stock Exchange to show that the little guy can outsmart the big guy every once in a while,” he said.
On Saturday night, Jan. 30, a buyer from Colorado offered Schnabel $20,000 for the signs. But by then, it was too late. There was a problem.
Schnabel had gotten a call from the company from which he’d gotten the signs in the first place. A third-party company was advising that under no circumstances could Schnabel sell the GameStop signs.
The signs needed to be destroyed.
“When I heard that, my heart sank,” Schnabel said. “I said, ‘Man, that’s a hell of a sale, and the deal can’t go down because the signs have to be destroyed.'”
A TV news crew had arrived Saturday to record the signs’ sale. Instead, they caught video of Schnabel taking an axe to the signs. No chance now of small-time GameStop stock buyers using his signs to mock big hedge funds.
A busted-up GameStop sign sits in Frank Schnabel’s scrapyard in Aten, Neb., on Monday, Feb. 1. Schnabel salvaged the signs from a former GameStop store and received lucrative offers for the signage from across the country following the company’s mercurial stock spike. Christopher Vondracek / FNS
Schnabel felt some kinship.
“I’m a little guy in a sense, getting squashed by the big guy,” he said.
But all was not lost. The company he works with cut him a check for destroying the signs. And they’re still worth some money.
“I can still scrap the aluminum out of them, and that’s what I do,” he said. “But they don’t look nothing like the signs I had posted for sale. It’s a sad, sad thing I couldn’t take ‘em and sell ‘em.”