A Tale of Two Vacuum Cleaners

Most people don’t know that right before my professional cartooning career took off, I was a Filter Queen vacuum cleaner salesman … for about a month. I’m a horrible salesman, so the only thing I took away from that “job” was a renewed love for Filter Queen vacuum cleaners. BTW I grew up with one in the house and my parents still have that unit! And it still works!

Anyway, Marcia and I got married 2 years after my sales career tanked and our first vacuum cleaner was a Filter Queen! However, it was a much cheaper model called the Princess. I wanted the Majestic which was the model I tried to sell, but they were EXPENSIVE!!! $1500 - $2000 or as much as the salesperson could squeeze out of you. That was probably the top reason I was no good at the sales game. There was NO way we could afford a Majestic so we got the best FQ unit we could fit into our income.

Our old Princess

Flash forward 23 years later and the powerhead motor burned out on our much used FQ Princess. Marcia encouraged me to get it fixed so I found online (isn't the internet handy?!) that the motor would cost $40 - $50. Not bad. But I decided to look around to see if I could replace our now dear old unit with an older Majestic for reasonably close to the price of fixing our unit. I did find a few on Craigslist, most of which were $120 and up. I was surprised to see how many generations of the FQ Majestic there were since I had tried to sell them back in 1991. I kept looking. 

This ad had been posted for 12 days

!

A few weeks later while we were in Wisconsin visiting family on vacation, I found a FQ Majestic on Craigslist in the Duluth, Minnesota area that had to be TOO GOOD to be true!!! It was only one generation older than the newest model (it's about 8 years old) AND it was being sold for only $35!!! Deals like this are usually some sort of scam, but the older gentleman that I spoke to on the phone seemed sincere and genuine. He said it was only used for part of the year as they spent half of their year away in Las Vegas. And the unit had only light use plus it came from a non-smoking home with no pets! I said I'll take it! The next day we met them and I bought it... for only $35. WOW! This was no scam.

Our NEW beautiful Filter Queen Majestic!

Our new Filter Queen Majestic works and looks like almost new, except for some light wear marks on the powerhead. I’m still stunned. When this unit was new it would have sold for over $1500 at least! And the Lord blessed us with it for only $35. WOW! I love it! Praise the Lord!

Yes, you really read a blog post about a guy that loves a vacuum cleaner. :-)  And I use it too! True story!