It's tablecloth day!

As I look through my Ebay Store full of listings, I can sometimes tell by the photo of an item where I was when I took the picture and listed the thing for sale. Most of the photos over the last couple years have been taken on the hardwood floor of my dining room. The newest pictures are taken in the garage/office. But sometimes I'll see CDs laid on a white shag carpet -- those listings were done over a holiday trip to my brother-in-law's house. Other listings show backdrops of kitchen counters or carpeting from places we crashed while the band was on tour, and in a few extremely old and outdated listings, the gnarled, unpolished hardwood floors of our previous house make an appearance.

Thus it will be, for months to come, that when I look back and see cassettes on a festive striped tablecloth, like the one above, I'll remember this day. I'll recall driving to my mother-in-law's on a beautiful hot day, taking Route 2 to I-90 East with the windows down, cranking King's X and Deep Purple tapes in the deck of a Nissan Maxima I was about to hand over to someone else (thank christ for that). I'll remember sitting on the porch in the afternoon with my daughter listening to the birds chirping as they lined up for their free meal at Grandma's bird feeders.

And I'll remember being wide awake at 2:30am, sneaking back downstairs so as not to wake everyone else up, and being glad I brought along this bin full of old tapes to throw in the Ebay Store while I grumbled about insomnia (and drank coffee, making the problem still worse).

I probably should have moved the tablecloth and taken the photos with the wood of the table as the backdrop, but I didn't, and they look like that. Will it matter? Maybe they'll stand out. Maybe two weeks from now, I'll marvel at how quickly the tapes from "Tablecloth Day" sold -- even that copy of Tommy Conwell and the Young Rumblers' "Rumble" from 1988 (I'll wait while you go YouTube him to figure out what his one hit was, and no, the song you're thinking of is actually Henry Lee Summer).

Will getting twenty more cheap tapes out of the "to do" pile and into the active inventory be worth the ass-dragging I'll be doing tomorrow? At the moment, I don't have a lot of choice. So for now, let's hope that presentation matters, and this picnic of outdated audio technology attracts a few ants.

How Not To Haggle

Don't email a seller with a ten-paragraph manifesto on what a fair price for an item is, what the conditions of the market for that type of item are, why the seller is being a terrible human being for attempting to sell that item for more, and a smug assurance that you, and only you alone on planet Earth, would even consider buying such an item in the first place, so the seller might as well just save everyone a lot of trouble and give in to your demands.

I'm all for haggling and making a deal. If I've had an item sitting in my Ebay Store for a year and you come along and offer me 50% or 60% of the asking price, and it's been a slow day and you're polite, I'm gonna jump on that chance to make a sale. But if you come at me like the person above did, I'm just as likely to RAISE the price of what you're after.

It's rude to come into someone's place of business and lecture them on what they do for a living. There's that old saw about how the customer is always right - but at this point, someone like the example above isn't a customer. They're a nuisance. They're so blinkered by their own perception of a situation that there's no reasoning with them, there's no path to a sensible and mutually fruitful conclusion... and there's no sale. So you're not a customer. So pack up your crazy bag of theories and market predictions and move on. I've fired you as a customer.

Thankfully, people like this are exceedingly rare. Unfortunately, they tend not to go away. The one that inspired this little rant has been emailing me about a $20 CD for the past year, every few months, insisting I sell it for what he deems as a fair price. Obviously, he hasn't found anyone else to sell him one at that price in all this time. At this point I'd rather throw the CD in the trash than sell it to him, even for the full asking price.

I think what irks me the most about a guy like this is how he's so rigid on his principles, he's denied himself the pleasure of the music he's trying to buy for a significant chunk of his life over eight or ten dollars. At that point, it's not about the music at all, it's about a stance.

When I worked retail years ago, a lawyer - a guy who probably pulled down six figures - stopped in every week for months to see if a used copy of the then-new Van Halen best-of had come in yet. A used copy would have run him $7.99, and the new one was (I think) $14.99. Not only did this guy, who wasn't hurting for cash, deprive himself of the songs he wanted for months of his life, but how much time did he waste coming in over and over? How many minutes of his life did he nibble away in worry that he was gonna get "took" by paying seven more dollars for this dumb CD?

I don't know if the guy emailing me now chooses to live like this, or has some sort of compulsion he can't control. But the bottom line is, if someone's price isn't to your liking, go find one that is. If you can't, you might just have to suck it up and be the guy on that end of the supply-and-demand chain for once. And if you DO choose to haggle a little, please, go for it. But it might be a good tactic to not be a pedantic, irritating jerk to the person who owns the thing you want.

6,500 in sight

1972 American Motors Technical Manual on Ebay


I got up to 6,496 listings in my Store tonight. I should knock out a few more just to say I've hit the 6,500 mark for the first time, but the camera battery needs charged, and I need sleep. Pretty much anything I hit now is a new milestone -- I got just over 6,200 before I started acting in those plays this winter, and then dipped down below 5,800 for a while before rebounding.

It's all arbitrary, really, but it's nice to have some kind of signpost that says we're getting the backlog of stuff posted. We're seeing a corresponding rise in sales, and a fair bit of stuff selling more quickly as we constantly improve our listings, our pricing and our overall sense of what's worth selling.

Today was vintage cookbooks and shop manuals. Tomorrow we'll knock out more technical manuals like the one above, and start on a couple boxes of TI 99/4A computer gear. Later in the week, a big bin of old plush toys and board games. It's always interesting as hell, seeing what turns up and who wants it.

Okay, sleep time.

Gettin' Junky Wit It

Bought for a quarter this weekend, listed last night for $2.99 plus shipping, sold before 10am this morning. Three silly dollars at a time, I achieve world domination.

Live From the Garage

Another months-long delay, another weird season or two. I got back into acting, of all things, and while I had a great time in two plays over the winter, it took its toll on what spare time I had and left a lot of business plans in limbo. Once the curtain fell on "Arsenic and Old Lace" (I was Mortimer, if you can believe that - three-piece suit and all), I redoubled my efforts to get back on track with this whole junkman biz.

As of now, my office is in the garage of the house. We're finally cleaning out the third bedroom for my daughter to use (she's nearly four, with special needs, and we've had her in our room to keep an eye on her -- as she's grown, there has been less and less need for the constant monitoring, so she can finally have her own space). This weekend I got some shelving bays up, sorted a lot of accumulated crap, and even found a box of books - my own books, not inventory - that had been buried since we moved into the house 2 1/2 years ago. Amazing!

I've been on a listing tear, too. My new goal is 250 new listings per week in the ebay store. It's been rough some weeks, but I ended last night with 330, and we're at exactly 750 for the month to date. Over 10% of what's in my ebay store right now was listed since May 1. I'm starting to reap the rewards of this listing blitz; sales had tanked but they're creeping back up again, and I'm actually seeing a dent in the stockpiles of stuff both here at the house and at the warehouse. Boxes I haven't peeked into for three years have been opened and sorted, and we're getting old stock up, photographed, listed, and out the door better than we have, well, probably ever.

And after missing lots and lots of the early spring sales, the boy and I finally hit a great day of picking this last weekend. I'm in the midst of listing all of our finds now, and tallying up how much we'll make off that one morning of shopping, and it looks like an awesome kickoff to the season. Once he's out of school, he and I will be hitting the sales every Friday. We'll drop the little one off at daycare, grab some breakfast, and start picking! He'll be 10 this year, and his tolerance for being out, walking up and down streets and wading through tons of junk has never been higher. He's really getting into it now.

(He'll even have his own bit of internet glory to share -- a couple years ago, he started a 'breakfast blog' to write about the various diners where we stopped. Now that he's a little bit older, he wants to relaunch it, and add photos of some of his custom Lego creations to it as well. I'll post a link when that's up and going.)

While sleep has been scarce these last few weeks, it feels good to be renewing my efforts at work, and it's great to see them paying off. Customers are happy, stuff is moving, and we're keeping a roof over head. Looking forward to lots of adventures in the coming months - and, hopefully, a little more regular updating about them here, for anyone who's still checking in.