Ten Thousand Chairs Can't Be Wrong

 

A WISE INVESTMENT!

Business owners! Do they ever shut the fuck up?

If Salt Lake City’s Scott Evans, owner of Euro Treasure Antiques, is any indication, then no they do not. It’s not just Evans, mind you; nor is it only Utah business owners like InfoWars asylum escapee Patrick Michael  Byrne, founder of Overstock, “deep state” nut, and fuckbuddy of Russian agent Marina Butina. Utah has a long, storied history of charlatans, frauds, treasonous liars, cheats, thieves, and other varieties of parasite eager to exploit the deep social ties which are a supposed benefit of devout Mormon culture.

Today though, beloved, we are gathered to pour scorn upon the brow of local old-stuff tycoon Scott Evans. Evans is the type of businesshuman who is willing to blame any and everything but himself for the impending (or is it?) failure of his shop. Let’s turn the clocks back a bit, and see what “outside factors” have prevented Evans from enjoying the success he thinks he deserves.

Scott Evans (L) and Bill Dauterive (R)

Evans has received an inexplicable number of plaudits, peans, and passes from Utah’s local press. For example, there was this Deseret News hagiography from 2007 when Evans purchased a hubristic quantity of antique furniture from an ailing, elderly hoarder in Britain. According to the Deseret News, “he says it’s the largest collection ever sold at one time, and he figures he now owns the biggest antique store in the United States.” He SAYS, Deseret News? He FIGURES? I know fact-checking isn’t a service your paper provides anymore, D-News, but god damn. Both of those superlatives seem super easy to check with either a company like Sotheby’s or, in a pinch, the Internet. Taking a profiteer’s word for those claims demonstrates an alarming (but typically Utahn) level of credulousness.

However, soon after that story, Evans faced challenges while trying to dispense his chair hoard. Had Evans cited difficulties in the domain of brick-and-mortar retail, the vicissitudes of the world economy, or other factors in his business going through hard times, I wouldn’t bother with this post. However, Evans’ specifics whines about his store have the fetid whiff of a distinct political agenda to them.

Everyone loves a marlin!

For example! In 2020, Evans began shrieking like a hungry baby about the impact to his business from COVID-19 pandemic restrictions (few as they were in Utah; and, weirdly, he was blaming other factors three years before it was COVID ruining his fun). Had he expressed his thoughts in a nuanced, balanced way, I also wouldn’t bother with this post. COVID restrictions (which, again, were nigh-nonexistent in Utah in 2020) did pose challenges to certain businesses. A businessperson with their head not firmly up their ass may have balanced the economic impact of those restrictions against the potential democide of immunosuppressed persons (full disclosure: such as myself). Evans’ response was to post a series of crude, premature “going out of business” signs, including this one:

Charming. Also, not at all complete bullshit, given that Euro Treasure Antiques has survived COVID just fine so far. How do I know?

I know because now Scott Evans says that it’s Utah’s unhoused population who are ruining his business. This time around, Evans was sure to walk reporters through the sort of unsightly debris that fascist and other right wing commentators use to describe cities ranging from San Francisco to Denver as “urban hellscapes.” The same poverty porn visuals which, it just so happens, local news stations love. Could Evans be taking advantage of Utahns’ (even many Salt Lake “liberals”) prejudices against homeless persons the same way he, let’s say, made use of public sentiment against COVID restrictions to whine and beg for cash in 2020? I’m not a mind reader, but golly! It sure seems so!

Grifters gonna grift, and local small-business tyrants gonna tyrant. That’s no surprise, and were Evans the only guilty party here, he’d have to take a number to merit my opprobrium. But this is a criminal level of right wing down-punching from the Utah news media, who have – predictably but disgustingly – acted as Evans’ private press-agency-cum-conservative-opinion-page. Furthermore, it’s genuinely bizarre how often local media flock to this dipshit to desperately check the health of his business as though it were some bellwether for the local economy (take, for example, Salt Lake City’s 2020 earthquake – guess who got an interview out of it!).

It’s a real shame that Scott Evans, owner of Euro Treasure Antiques, did such an admirable job of convincing me he’s a mountebank (or, as KSL called him in his earthquake interview, “mercurial”). I just happen to be in the market for 25,000 antique chairs and a freighter’s worth of armoires. His loss!