But after The Associated Press mentioned the item in a story, he was inundated with more than 15,000 hits. The winning bid on the manual was a whopping $1,025. “I felt bad about the price getting so high,” says Mitchell. “So I promised the buyer I would throw in a couple of other Enron trinkets.”
Since the energy giant declared bankruptcy last December, many such “trinkets” have found their way onto Internet auction sites where they can fetch anywhere from a few dollars to few thousand, depending on the item–and the timing. For those who have been laid off, the money may not be enough to compensate for wages lost, but ex-Enron employees say the therapeutic benefits offer reason enough to put the items they’d collected at Enron on the auction block–many of which they’d gotten for free anyway.
“It’s entertaining to do it and cathartic to get it out of my house,” says Chris Atherton, who lost his sales job in the Enron energy services in December. Atherton put 15 items up for bid, including a money clip, an ASK WHY mug, and a 70-page photocopied “Structured Finance” manual that he sold for $81. “I’m trying to make the best of a bad situation,” says the 25-year-old.
He’s not the only one. After learning how much former colleagues made, other ex-Enron workers rushed to put items up for bid. By the end of January, more than 2,000 Enron items were listed on the eBay auction block, according to eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove. He says he saw a similar jump in items associated with other dot-com companies, like Pets.com, after they failed. “But there’s nothing that has equaled what we’ve seen with Enron,” he added.
Part of the reason for that may be the sheer number of items that Enron gave out to employees and clients. In addition to the usual company-logo tote bags, mugs and T shirts, Enron handed out literally dozens of different items with the familiar “crooked E” logo to its employees, including: Christmas bulbs, AM/FM headphone radios, yo-yo’s, Waterford crystal globes, insulated lunch bags, desk clocks, cycling jerseys, even teddy bears. On eBay, a search on the word “Enron” yielded items ranging from a limited-edition Enron employee-issued hard hat (“Be one of less than 100 people to have these in the WHOLE WORLD”) to an original set of termination papers, to the Intenet domain name EnronNews.com (for which someone had already bid $25,000).
But how much will these items be worth a decade, or even a month, from now? “My gut feeling would be that there probably isn’t going to be a long-term market viability for most of these items, which is kind of sad,” says Kyle Husfloen, editor-at-large at Antique Trader Weekly and editor of the publication’s price guides. “I don’t think the personal connection it takes to become a collector’s item is out there. Enron was not really familiar to the American public on a day-to-day basis until now, so there’s not much of an emotional connection.”
That hasn’t kept people across the country from bidding on the items though. A writer from New York who paid $39 for a new Enron T-shirt says she was more interested in the item’s shock value, than the monetary value, anyway. “I got swept up in the ferver. It was a larky thing,” she says, adding that she has already worn it to the gym. “It’s actually very good quality.”
Ex-Enron employees are hanging onto some of their items too–for nostalgic, as well as financial, reasons. Mitchell says he found “quite a few” Enron items when he was digging through his boxes that he has no intention of selling. “They’re kind of sentimental to me now,” he adds. “I’m even glad I kept my old box of business cards.”
