Sounds like a scam by the auctioneers: put out a bunch of garbage pallets first, then put out good pallets which only their buddies know are good.
Could have been in a few cases, but it was becoming an overall trend over time. I kept at it for awhile and it just got worse and worse. It was no longer usable “surplus”, it was truly unusable “garbage” that should have been disposed of in the landfill. And you can’t really look at it properly, they have it all banded up on a pallet tight in boxes.
For example my last purchase doing this I bought a pallet of what were claimed to be “new hydraulic valves in the boxes”. And a pallet of “new hydraulic lines in the boxes”. When I got home and popped the bands there was a layer of new ones on top as representative but all the others under these were new boxes with the “old part” they replaced in them instead of the new valve. Same with the pallet of lines.
This was the last straw, I realized they were purposely lying about what was actually on the pallets and using the auctions to dispose of their garbage. And there is not a thing you can do about it. Now if they had described the condition as “New AND used” valves and lines it would have been on me, but it was becoming a trend to mislabel and misrepresent what was supposed to be in the lots like this so I was done.