13 Things Veterans Buy At an Army Surplus Store That Civilians IGNORE - A man was standing in the checkout line at an army surplus store outside town a few years back, and his son, maybe fifteen, had two things sitting on the counter. A folding knife with a black rubber handle and a price tag of a hundred and forty dollars, the kind with a picture of a skull stamped into the blade, and a little bin item the cashier had to look up because it did not have a barcode printed on it, ninety cents. The boy wanted the knife. His father picked up the ninety cent item instead, turned it over twice in his hand the way you check a thing you already know, and put the knife back on the rack without a word of argument. I was two people back in that line and I have thought about it more times than I can count, because that scene plays out in some form in every surplus store in this country every single week, and almost nobody in it understands why the father won that argument before it even started.