No pun intended, right?

Last month, you had a coordinated national sale of used equipment. In the past, would you have just auctioned it off?

Some of it would have been auctioned, and some of it would have been justparsed out by branch, by district, by region.

Why have a one-day sale?

Communication. Awareness. To let customers know and come in. Putting a marketing campaign behind it. If you take a look at what makes auctions attractive, they spend a lot of time attracting potential buyers to the market. So, we basically opened up all of our doors and were prepared for our customers to come into our facilities and take a look at the products that we wanted to sell. And it gave them an opportunity to spend some money, buy what they needed. By the way, they may have come in for one thought and ended up with another thought on the way out.

You had some 20,000 pieces of equipment for sale. How did it go?

We haven't given the specifics, but it's safe to say that we thought it was very successful.

I imagine you would have saved some money by not taking it to auction?

There are fees associated with it, you are right—consignment fees. There also are no transportation fees, since it was at our facilities.

Is this something that you will build on for the future?

We want to drive as much as we can to retail. Auctions are always a viable channel for us, but it's also at a lower margin. Keep in mind that there's nothing wrong with bringing customers in because if they are buying something, that's another potential rental customer. They see demand somewhere. They are buying something, but they can't buy 100% of what they need.