We need a bigger truck

Vintage Foley long-handled measuring spoons on eBay - ends Sunday


When I was a kid, my dad told me a joke about two Polacks (don't shoot the messenger, that's how jokes came in the 70's) who hauled coal in their truck. They bought it for $100 a truckload, drove it to their customer, and sold it for $100 a truckload. After busting their asses for a year, they were flat broke. "I don't get it," the first Polack cries. "We're working so hard. Why aren't we making money?"

"I got it!" says the other one. "We need a bigger truck!"

I've run, and closed, two record stores, bought out a bookstore, and occasionally have been "gifted" with fifteen or sixteen boxes of crappy paperbacks at a time, at the close of a yard sale when it's starting to rain. I got a lot of stuff. Sure, there are nuggets in even the worst box of crap, but there are a LOT of books, CDs, albums, cassettes, and videos in my warehouse, garage, and basement that are worth a buck, if that much.

Sometimes I'll take an evening, like I did tonight, and I'll grab a couple boxes of the cheap stuff, blowing the warehouse dust off the top and marveling at the crap that settled to the bottom of the record store clearance bin like sediment. Tonight I put up forty or so CDs at $1.25 each. Assuming I actually would eventually sell them all, that nets me $50.00 in income. Keep in mind, I sometimes sell one rare video game cartridge - one - for more than that, and it takes me a helluva lot less time to list one game than 40 CDs, even bunk ones.

So would I be better off just pitching 75% of the inventory in my warehouse into a dumpster?

Part of me rejects that idea out of hand. Call it environmentalism or call it hoarding, but I can't throw away something that still has life in it, even if it's not a rare or expensive commodity. I'm always happy to find an object a new home, even if it's an old paperback or a once-popular CD.

On a more pragmatic level, I know that those $2 and $3 sales can add up. And I've streamlined my listing process to the point where a big pile of cheap stuff can be up in an hour or two, photos, descriptions and all. There's also the fact that my cost on these items is either free, or so close to free as not to matter. If I paid 10 cents each for 100 books, and list them for $1.99 each in a short time, I've (theoretically, at least) turned $10 into $200.

But am I actually costing myself money by leaving better, hotter inventory on the shelf while I list the crap? It could be. I try to list a diverse mix of both, to keep the flow of stuff moving, however sluggishly, out of my warehouse. I do envision a day when ALL of it's listed, there's no backlog, and we get stuff up online within a day or two of it arriving.

Whether that ever happens or not, it keeps my life interesting, digging through such different stuff - a pile of books on Native American culture tonight, a stack of dollar CDs from the dregs of 2001's top 40 tomorrow, a pile of common video games the next night. The real trick, I think, is to keep all this flotsam organized, so that it doesn't cost me 25 minutes in time to search for a $2 item once it's been sold and needs shipped.

The whole thing is always a work in progress. I'm pretty happy with where it is right now, but that's always subject to change every five minutes. For now, though, it's time to shut 'er down for the day, with visions of hardcover first editions dancing in my head. Tomorrow it's more Commodore 64 stuff, and a few more square inches of basement reclaimed.