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News flash: I did not win the lottery jackpot.
Update to which we all can relate: Neither have I ever found a cpu that qualifies for the Test and buy program.
Now why do you suppose that happens. Could it be that I only scrap older lower end units?

I get maybe 50 or so mixed gen i5 and i7 every month via surplus auctions. I mainly sell the CPUs on eBay but if I get enough I may drive down to alliance and try the test and buy

I was contemplating throwing my hat in the ring for auctions. I never did one and was a little intimidated to be honest.

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Learning to grade or grading to learn.

Flashback to preCovid auction days.
before 2020 hindsight occured, I could buy a pallet of ten or so towers with the hard drives removed at a local monthly auction, when the county'cirty/police/schools were disposing of older electronics for a buck or two per unit, $10 to $20 per pallet lot/ I then scrapped them out recovering from 8 to 15 dollars profit per unit, depending on how much gold fingered RAM and how many sticks of GFC. plust the usual goldpin CPUs. The Covid tightened up the supply chain so there was a shortage of new machines in even Walmart, and suddenly, those one and a two were singing a different tune of a ten and a twenty, from buyers with enough knowledge to install a new harddrive in an old Windows Vista or Windows 7 and sell it for a couple hundred. Me, I just kept on junkin. but days when cheap towers had a run like shredded lettuce are over. I haven't been able to buy anything except monitors and laptop charging stations and the like for over a year. I now get most of my material from a friend who does estate sales and house cleanouts for real estate companies.
My rulw od rhumb is never bid more than you can sell it for hauling it straight across the junkyard scales without any dismountling, unless I have inspected it and know it has value above the net weight. I still occasionally err, when I bid ten dollars on a metal machine which according to the auction photo looks like a home basement drill press or something, and it turns out to be a ten foot tall cast iron contraption weigning 3000 pounds. Sometimes a fellow buys is lessons cheap.

I just bought a tower unit at an estate sale to see if I made money, lost money, or broke even.

Sort of a fun game for me since I end up winning in the end. Experience is, for me, learned through life lessons.

I still have to figure out what I bought and where to categorize the unit.

I paid 18 dollars for the tower, mouse, keyboard, ethernet wire, and 2 DVDs (original tron from the 1980s and the time machine from early 2000s).

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Learning to grade or grading to learn.

News flash, I did not win the lottery either! I guess I should buy a ticket so I have a better chance. :)

I wish I had time to wipe and reset PCs because I get several from work that would be OK for normal web and email usage. At this point I have a hard time pulling them apart and boxing up the components.