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of kitchen counters or carpeting from places we crashed while the band was on tour, and in a few extremely old and outdated listings, the gnarled, unpolished hardwood floors of our previous house make an appearance.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 So for now, let's hope that presentation matters, and this picnic of outdated audio technology attracts a few ants.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.

Celebrated Summer

Holy crap, it's September!

I thought this blog was going to be chock full of photos of flea market finds and road trip stories from this summer. After all, we had it figured out this year -- the kids had places to be, I had solo work-time built into my days, and business was good. So it was gonna be time to head out and pick!

Well, I did do some grubbing, and hit a few amazing sales -- not nearly as many as I'd planned. Large swaths of my solo time became kid-time, or sleep-in-after-band-practice-ran-late time. Not only has the band I'm in started writing and recording, and playing some shows again, after a long layoff, but I impulsively jumped back into writing and performing standup comedy, something I hadn't done since 2003.

Even more than all that, I think, was a real wake-up call about the amount of unlisted, unsorted crap we already own. I have literally thousands of books and LPs that are in no order whatsoever, all of which need listed. I have CDs, video games, cassettes, clothing... barely-sorted piles of stuff, enough to keep me listing for years. Literally. Years.

I did buy some stuff. At one sale in northeast Ohio, I went back twice and filled the trunk of my wife's car with media stuff, lots of out of print goodies and rarities. (This was also the sale where I bumped up against the limits of my 9-year-old's tolerance for picking -- after 90 minutes in a sweltering former department store, digging through disheveled piles of stuff and dodging throngs of shoppers, he lost it quickly when I tried to add some yard sales to the itinerary. Mental note: he may act 40 most of the time, but he's still nine.)

And I bought a lot online, too, picking up collections of computer stuff to part out, grabbing bulk lots, even buying some piles of records and things from friends of mine who were downsizing or short on cash. There was still a good influx of stuff, and while I'm still not where I'd like to be on my goal of 150 new listings a week, we're getting closer all the time. (This past Saturday, for example, I 'clocked out' from all other responsibilities and got 105 unique items up in one day - lots of them have already moved).

So why I haven't I been writing? Well, for one, there just hasn't been the time. Little things that seem like minor bumps in the road -- my printer dying this week, for example -- seem to become stumbling blocks that get us behind on shipping, then behind on listing, and then frantically trying to catch up basic housework and litter box maintenance.

And then there's the one big truth of this business that sends a lot of otherwise eager Ebayers running for the door after the first few weeks. Right now, concentrating on listing boxes of VHS tapes and old books and the like, I may find some valuable, "holy grail" titles. But none of it is glamorous, or weird, or unique. I don't get the satisfaction of photographing and making a blog entry out of, say, an Ohio Sauerkraut Festival ball cap, like I do when I'm out every weekend finding more odd things. The stuff I've been listing this summer, by and large -- the stuff paying the bills -- has been solid, unsexy inventory. I've kept the kids fed in large part with $4.99 books and nearly-forgotten "new old stock" CDs from long-defunct punk rock bands.

It's the grind of listing dozens of such solid, but unremarkable items that can bore people right out of business. I usually get in a zone with it, where I've got coffee, good music, the windows open, and if I start getting bleary-eyed about it, I stop myself and remind myself that THIS -- this busy work I'm doing in my house, in pajama pants, with Kreator blasting on the stereo -- is my job. This is "going to work" for me. That nearly always gets me over any slump.

Sales are creeping upward and staying there, the warehouse gradually looks more and more organized (the big CD shelves shown in the last update are almost full; I'm hoping to have another identical set built on the opposite wall this month). If I can keep this train rolling, keep up the music and comedy, get a little more writing time shoehorned in to my schedule, and maybe -- just maybe -- get the hell out of the house every couple Saturdays to plunder the countryside -- things will stay awesome. No complaints at all, at the moment.

Rack 'em up

This is what 13 feet by 10 feet of wall space looks like when it's been devoted entirely to CD shelving. I estimate I can get 5,700 CDs on these shelves without crowding them at all. Everything up here so far is alphabetized and sorted by selling platform, but I still have quite a bit to shelve.

This is the first step, hopefully the pivotal moment where we go from a disheveled, disorganized one-man flea circus to a well-honed order-spittin' machine. Even with some of the stock still in boxes, pulling orders today was amazingly fast, and having everything up and on display like this lets me know at a glance what I'm overstocked on and what I could shift to another platform or mark down to clear out.

Very psyched right now. Psyched and exhausted. Two tubs of orders packed, house relatively clean, and a whole lot more of life in the proper place than we've had before. This week should see a lot more get done. I'm looking forward to it.