Cheap tubes in "The Good Old Days"

Some magazine dealers back in the 50's to the 70's  sold 'Seconds or set tested" tubes dirt cheap. They bought up used tubes and plugged them into TV sets that, from the sellers addresses, were in downtown NYC or Brooklyn. The TV stations were within just a few blocks, so if a tube had a good filament at all, generally it would carry the signal, hence "Set Tested".  Then they would rebrand the tube with their own brand name.
  If you lived away from the city often the RF and IF tubes were so weak as to be useless. 
 
The "Seconds" were often tubes rejected by the mfgr and had lopsided glass, poorly set on bases etc. Interestingly enough, I never found any of those bad electrically, just cosmetically rejected. They also tested perfectly good within the parameters of a new tube.

There was a movement to have all defective tubes returned to the manufacturer to have them destroyed back in the early 70's.
 The reason is the rebranders would take the weak tubes and give them a "Hot Shot" by raising the filament voltage up enough that the tube would show good emission. Then they would put their brand name on them and sell them cheap through mail order.
 The tubes might last a minute or a long time, depending on how tired the tube was when it got "boosted'.

 Sometimes they would even remark the tubes with the wrong number on them. Sound familiar to what some of the Asian companies selling tubes online have done? 

  They even did this to tubes being sold by other companies here in the U.S. who thought they were getting correctly marked tubes. I ran into this myself. Some 12AU7's, AY7's, AZ7's marked as 12AX7's, etc. Sometimes you could actually see the original number still faintly on the glass! What a scam!!!
 Close examination would show that the insides of the tubes did not even look the same as the tube they had deliberately mis- marked.

 One big online seller has a 'Hall of Shame" showing many that were deliberately mis-marked in their website. Kudos to them for showing the truth.