Farmers and fishermen

I had a pretty good day today selling lots of little items. Individually, they're the kind of poky, un-sexy $3.99 sales that make people wonder why anyone would waste the effort to do this at all. Collectively, they made a nice pile of cash at great margins, and cleared out some space.

I was plowing through a box of VHS tapes tonight (I know, you hear about all my most glamorous work here). I sorted them by price - $1.99, $3.99 and then a small stack of the good ones, the out-of-print titles that will go for a bit more. As I was putting up the $3.99 stack, it occurred to me that it might take a year and a half for some of these to sell. A lot of the stuff I sold today had sat for months before moving. That's not a problem, necessarily. Though you don't want that shelf time to be TOO long, and Ebay seems hell-bent on getting sellers to jettison stale inventory, the fact is that when selling this kind of stuff, perishability isn't really a factor.

So some other random night of work back in 2008 or 2009 paid the bills today. The movies I list tonight will buy groceries in 2011 or 2012, more than likely. For some reason, the analogy of a farmer planting crops popped into my head, and I liked it. It's not an exact science, of course - I can't say "the work I do today will pay off on August 14, 2011." A few of these will sell in the next week, and a few will never sell at all. But overall the idea seems to hold - a lot of mid-grade stuff gets added to that churning beast we call our live inventory, and a year later, someone's gadding about on Ebay thinking of this old Allan Ladd western they used to watch as a kid, and bingo - four more bucks in pocket.

When Ebay was all finite auctions, my job was more like that of a fisherman. I went out on the water, I cast my bait, and they bit or they didn't. It was a much more immediate thing. I remember literally waking up on Sunday morning with no food in the house, wondering how my auctions were gonna close that night and hoping the winners paid instantly. (Things were a bit different, and a little lower to the ground, in my life then.)

With the fixed price, listed-till-sold format, it's more like farming. You plant it today, and chances are it won't bear fruit for some time -- so you gotta plant EVERY day, and do everything you can to make sure there are no gaps along the way, so that yor future self doesn't miss a meal.

Do I carry analogies too far?

In non-work news, we've had my Nana visiting us this week -- she's my wife's grandma but my family and hers were always close, and Nana was "Nana" to me when I was a kid, too. She's 86 now and pretty out of touch, even when she's lucid, which is becoming a sadly rare state. She keeps asking me what I'm doing with all these books and CDs and things, and I keep trying to tell her. But the whole idea of people buying things on the internet, paying online, and me shipping goods around the world, seems to trip a circuit breaker in her mind. She keeps asking me who's at the warehouse letting customers in to shop when I'm at home with her.

We're having a party this weekend, and then she's going home, and then next week our summer vacation plans -- including babysitting for my newly-minted fourth grader -- kick in. It feels like I haven't had any extended solitude or work time in months, even though it's only been a week. I have so much good new stuff to put up, and I also need to prepare for a sidewalk sale I'm holding with a friend at his record store on the 12th. I'd love to blow out a bunch of the old clearance-bin CDs and stuff there, and walk away with some cash. If it works well, we may make it a monthly thing.

Lastly, I gotta mention the hagglers which seem to be popping up like toadstools all the sudden. The one guy, I kinda get - I put a rare movie up for $100, he offered something like $40, I countered with $75, he counter-countered at $50, I said $56, he split. Seems silly to me to walk away over six bucks, but I'm okay with that, and I do think the movie will sell for $100 or close to it at some point.

But this other guy! I had an out-of-print gospel tape up for $12. He offers me $5, so I counter with $8. In reply, I get this lengthy diatribe about how he won't pay that because cassette tapes are a "dead format" and "no one ever buys them." So at $5, it was a desirable object, and for three dollars more, the entire format makes you angry by its mere existence? Bizarre.

Time to quick yakking and put up more of these videos. And if you were wondering, yes, VHS videos still sell too. Just plant 'em deep and don't expect them to feed you any time real soon.