How not to sell something

So, the other day I was working on the booth when the mall got a call from someone looking to sell some stuff.  This happens a lot.  Some folks don't realize that the mall is made up of individual vendors and think that the store is going to buy their stuff.  Others know the drill but figure they'll get more bang for the buck, since there are a lot of vendors that might buy their stuff.

The reality is that these calls get handed off to whoever is in the store working their booth at the time. If no one is there, then sometimes nothing happens.  Sometimes messages get taken and passed on, but  lot of times the call just ends there.  I've gotten a couple of messages, but if it's not stuff I'm particularly known for selling--like the religious stuff--I don't always look into it.

This caller was trying to sell some "old dishes."  Since I was there working (and was up by the register at the time of the call), the staff asked me if I was interested.  I said I might be, depending on what the dishes were.  I was told that it was a "very complete set" of "really old dishes" in "great shape" that were "really valuable" because they had been "looked up" online.  We'll come back to those terms in quotes in a minute.

When I indicated tat I might be interested, before I could qualify anything, the next immediate question was:  "HOW MUCH WILL YOU GIVE ME FOR THEM?'

So, I had to explain some of the basics of selling to this person, namely that I was not committing to a price on anything that I had not seen, handled, and checked out.  "Might be interested." is not the same thing as "I'm going to buy these dishes."  Honestly, no one is ever going to commit to buying something on the phone based solely on a seller's say so.

The caller told me they would be over that afternoon with their "five boxes" of dishes.  That kind of took me by surprise.  I figured they would lose interest when I would not commit to a price right away. I had already decided that I wasn't going to make an appointment for a visit with them to look at the stuff.  The course of the phone call to that point made it pretty clear to me that it probably would not be worth my time.

I went back to work on my booth and in about an hour or so, I got a page that they were here.  I went out to meet with them and got the whole story.

According to them, they had bought the entire contents of a woman's estate for one lump sum out of a family member's garage.  They said it was a lot of stuff that they bought without going through things and now they were trying to sort things out and make some money.  (Sounds to me like someone has been watching too much 'reality' TV.  They even used the term "picking" at one point.)

They also told me they had looked some things up "online" and saw big prices, but they don't have the "savvy" to "do eBay."  Total red flag for me right there.  First, eBay isn't that hard to do, in terms of the tech knowledge involved. Second, Kosh only knows what they were looking up and where they were looking and what they saw.  Third, eBay is a frikking global marketplace!  More on this in part two of this post.  (To come in a few days.)

So I go down to their car, get hit on the head, stuffed in the trunk, and ferried off to work in the salt mines in Utah dressed only in a loincloth and coconut bra for the rest of my life and was never seen again* and take a look at their stuff.  It's time to employ the Eddie's Real Life Junkometer Translator (™) to some of those phrases above.

Old Dishes:  I'll give them this one.  The dishes were vintage, but not necessarily really old.  Certainly not antique treasures, which was what they were implying on the phone.

Complete Set:  There were five boxes of dishes:  A bunch of plates from one set, along with some coffee cups and saucers.  A few bowls of another pattern from another set.  And a whole lot of odds and ends, including some decorative plates that would have hung on the wall.  Not anywhere near a "complete set" of dishes, which could run to over a hundred pieces!

Great Shape:  Of the first ten pieces I pulled out of the box, seven had major chips in them.  Major chips.  I pointed this out to them and was told:  "Well, they aren't all like that."  No, but if you remove these seven pieces from your already incomplete set, it becomes that much more incomplete.  And, do you really want me to keep digging for chipped pieces?

Really Valuable:  Do I really need to spell this one out at this point?

Looked Up:  See a couple of paragraphs up.

They kept pressing me at this point to name a price or else tell them how to sell their stuff (really?).  I suggested an eBay broker to them, if they really wanted to go the online route and did not think they could do it.  I also suggested waiting until they had the whole lot sorted out, the trash cleared away, and then make a plan.  I told them about all the different ways I knew of to get rid of a lot of stuff, including getting their own damn booth.  But I politely declined their offer to buy their chipped unmatched dishes.

So they showed me a bag of dolls and toys that were soaking wet (!) and asked if I wanted to buy them.  When I pointed out that the whole bag was wet, they seemed totally clueless about it.

In the end, I bought three decorative plates and a really cool vintage owl figurine from them.  I took their number to pass onto someone else, who declined it after I told him the whole story.

I did feel kind of sorry for them.  They'd clearly bitten off way more than they could chew.  They had sunk a lot of money into this buy and had no plan and no clue how to monetize it.  I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's not as easy as it looks.


*That would have been way more interesting and way less painful than what actually happened.  Plus, I look good in a coconut bra.  (No need to thank me for that enduring mental image.  It's on the house.)

  

A couple of unsung finds

Here are a couple of recent (past couple of months or so) finds that kind of slipped through the blogging cracks, but are too good not to share.  (I told you I was a bad junking blogger.)  I'm still working on a really large catch up post of my recent finds, so I hope this will tide you over until then.

First up is this awesome offering plate:

 

It needs to be cleaned and hit with something to take care of the tarnish, but it is so way cool!  I love it.  It was at this sale where nothing was priced.  The only thing I found with a price sticker on it was the offering plate, which was marked $5.  I took it to the guy running the sale and he took a beat when he saw the price tag.  The look on his face said:  "Oh shit.  I forgot to take that damn thing off."  I already had the five out and in his hand before he could start backtracking on the price.

There's a local church with a Japanese congregation that's part of it.  Every year, they hold a Japanese yard sale.  I usually go, looking for translated manga.  There wasn't any this year, but I did find these guys:

Cool, huh?

Finally, there's this fun train case that I found at the same church where I got the cheap school desk.  The case was only 50 cents and I nearly lost it moving stuff into the mall that day, which is why it's so late showing up here.  I had stuck it into the book cubby of the school desk and forgot about it, so it went unpriced into my booth.  The desk sold in a day or two, so I was afraid that the case had gone out the door with it.

A couple of weeks later, I saw it in a cart of untagged merchandise.  The cashiers won't ring anything up that doesn't have a price tag, so they collect it in a special room.  Vendors are supposed to check for their stuff every so often.  After 30 days, anything that isn't claimed becomes mall property and they tag it and sell it.  So, I was glad to get it back and not have to buy it back.

When I was buying it at the church, it felt like there was something in it.  I opened it and found a bunch of hair curlers.  The woman taking the money said "Oh, those are included at no extra charge."  I kind of grinned at her and then she said:

"Well, you never know!"

That's kind of my saling motto, I think.  You never do know what you're going to find.

Quandries!

The yard sale post scheduled for today has been delayed due to circumstances which I will now explain.  I need to vent/ponder a bit, so I'm doing it here.  Please feel free to chime in if you have any words of wisdom to offer.

I got an email yesterday from the owner of the store where my second booth is.  He has decided to retire and is closing the store at the end of the month!  As in two weeks from now!  I've got until May 5 to get all my crap out of there, but the last day of business is April 30.  I'm really peeved about the totally unprofessional short notice, but I guess that's junking for you.

Rumors have been circulating for a couple of weeks that this was coming.  Supposedly, he's sold the building.  I don't know.  Junkers are a gossipy bunch.  A lot of things you have to let go in one ear and out the other.  Some of the same folks have been saying that the Peddlers Mall is also closing, and I know that ain't happening.

Already the rush has begun for space in the Peddlers Mall.  The two stores are only a couple of miles apart and have always been rivals.  Ironically, some of the vendors who have dissed PM for years and said they'd never rent there may find themselves in the position of calling for space.  I don't know.  Like I said, junkers are a gossipy bunch.  They're also pretty cantankerous.  I try to stay out of all that.  Still, vendors from the closing store started calling PM as soon as they got the email.  The next few days are going to be really chaotic.

As far as the closing goes, I really have no feelings one way or another, except for the short notice.  I have not done well there and won't be financially impacted that much.  I was giving it until the end of June to turn around and was planning to leave if I couldn't make it work by then.  This just moves my plan up a few weeks.

I do have some thinking to do, and it has to be done quickly.  Since I closed out of another store last fall, I've had too much extra stuff sitting around.  That was the whole point of this second store.  I'm not sure whether to just wait it out and run stuff through my current booth set-up (however long it may take) or grab another space in the Peddlers Mall, even if only for a short time.  I really don't need to sit on this much inventory.

April is a bad time to be expanding.  I could be looking at increased expenses with decreased revenue through the summer.  I don't know what to do.  On the other hand, having more stock out during those slow months may help increase the income.

What would you do?  If I don't put in a claim on some space in the next couple of days, I won't have the chance.

One thing is for sure.  The Peddlers Mall is going to be fuller with vendors than it has been in a while.  Hopefully the existing customer base will transfer too.

Give me your thoughts, please.  I'd appreciate it.

Selling Comics

Of course, if you buy them, then you must sell them.  If you sell them, then there will be stories to share.  Don't worry, these stories are 100% annoying nerd-free!  No, the annoying bits come from customers and other vendors this time.

I've had four long boxes of comics sitting around for a bit, waiting for me to do something with them.  Letting your merch sit for too long is never a good thing, but sometimes I get a little lax.  Stuff in those boxes was mainly runs from different series that I wanted to just bag together and sell in lots.  I kind of have to be inspired to do all that prep work, and that hasn't happened lately.  In other words, I've been lazy.

Nothing worse than a lazy junker, let me tell you.

Anyway, I decided that if  I wasn't going to actually get moving on creating the lots, then I'd take a couple of boxes to the Peddlers Mall outdoor sale and see what happened.  At the spring outdoor sale at YesterNook, I had sold quite a few comics, so it seemed like it was worth a shot.

I placed my Craigslist ad for the sale, making prominent mention of the comics to draw the yard saling nerds and set off.  Now, the day before the sale, I sold a ton of comics out of the booth (all to one person they told me), so I decided to check through my boxes before the outdoor sale really got started to see if there was anything I might want to use to refill the boxes in my booth.

Talk about your luck of the draw!  The box I pulled was half full of Superman and Punisher specials and prestige one shots that I had forgotten were in there.  Those boxes were part of a larger buy that included a box that was pretty much all Superman and Punisher.  I had put most of them out, but held a batch back because I did not want to flood my comics selection with them, because how many Punisher comics does one really need in one booth?

I was able to make up a nice round of stuff to put in the booth and still leave plenty for the sale.  Which, as it turns out, I didn't really need.  I'm guessing the yard saling nerds don't come into the southwest part of the county, because none of them showed.  In fact,  I only made a couple of comic sales at all.

One of those sales, however, made my day. There was a family wandering through--grandparents, mother, and two kids.  The girl was  maybe eight and the boy was about four.  Grandpa saw the comics and pointed them out to the kids.  The kids start going through the boxes and go nuts because the rest of what I've brought is mainly Disney stuff from different eras:  Gold Key/Whitman, Gladstone, Disney's own publishing attempt from the 90's and titles that were licensed to Marvel in the 90's.

Mom tells me that the kids love Disney comics and read every one that the can get their hands on.  She helps them pick out titles.  The girl makes sure that they don't get anything they already have.  Grandpa fronts twenty bucks to buy them.  And I get so wrapped up in the whole thing that I give each of the kids a couple of freebies.  I can't resist comic-reading kids.  Especially girls.  Especially with supportive moms.  We need more of all of that these days.

Although I have to admit, unless they've got another source for back issues, I cannot imagine where these kids are finding Disney comics to read these days.  I know I'm out of touch with current comics, but I didn't think there were any being published right now.  Of course, Disney does own Marvel, so what do I know?  I can't imagine a couple of cute kids like that going into a comics shop, though.  There's only one in town that I would describe as "kid friendly."

My other recent comics selling experiences are not quite so charming.  At the same outdoor sale, a couple of loudmouths declared that the only thing worth buying was super-heroes, not because they liked them, but because "super-heroes are the only comics worth any money."  Thank you blowhards who don't know what you're talking about.

About twenty minutes later, one of them came back over to my set up and made an embarrassingly ridiculous low ball offer for all of the comics.  I totally blew him off without a second thought.  Like I didn't know he'd had just enough time to look up some of what I was selling on eBay?  I'll make four times what he was offering through booth sales.  Go away, dude.

The same kind of thing happened at the YesterNook outdoor sale the next week, where I sold exactly four comics to a couple who obviously knew nothing about them, but managed to tie up my whole table looking everything up on their smart phone.  This wasn't a case of someone confirming a hunch on an issue.  This was a case of people who didn't know how to find exact titles, didn't know how to pronounce titles and didn't know how to distinguish between various series with the same titles.  In other words, they knew jack shit about comics and were counting on their phone to tell them.

I should have tossed them out of the booth, but it was slow, I was bored, and they were amusing me.  It never occurred to them that I might actually know something about the comics they were looking at.

I did actually kind of toss a book scanner out of my booth at about the same time.  I hate book scanners.  Another vendor had already embarrassed the poor guy by shouting "Hey!  Can this guy scan your books to see which ones his phone thinks are worth buying?" to the seller beside me.  When he popped up in my booth, I told him that most of my titles were vintage, meaning that they didn't have bar codes or ISBN's for him to scan.  

He declares that "old books are worth money!"  Then, grabs a book out of a box, flips it over to the back where the bar code should be, lifts up his phone, looks at the book, then at the scanner, then at the book, then at the scanner, and slowly realizes that he doesn't know what to do if he can't scan the book!  So, he puts the book back in the box and slinks out of my area.

Seriously, don't come to a sale put on by a bunch of resellers who work at this week in and week out and make an ass out of yourself.  I'm all about the technology and its uses and benefits, but if it's your only tool, if you have no experience or knowledge base of your own to draw on, if you aren't learning things as you go along, then you're doing it all wrong.  I have a smart phone and a barcode scanner.  I use them to confirm my hunches, not make all my decisions for me.

And this has been your ponitfication moment of the post.  Personally, I'd prefer to talk about cute kids reading comics and the mothers who help them.  Hopefully, I didn't meet the only ones in town the other day.

Checklist!

Lots of change?

Plenty of small bills and quarters!

CHECK!

Sunscreen?

Broad Spectrum!

CHECK!

Floppy Hat?

Should have said "floppy, goofy hat."

CHECK!

Chair?

And a pair of folding tables too!

CHECK!

Stuff to sell?

And this doesn't include what's already at the store!

Please ignore the out of control grass and weeds.

DOUBLE CHECK!

It's time to have a sale!

 

If you're in town or around, please stop by.  I've got a ton of great stuff at greater prices to sell.  I've been talking to some of the other vendors, and they've got a bunch of great stuff, too!  I'm planning on getting both my shop and my sell on! 

I'm going to try and stay out of the sun and seated for as much as I can, but I still expect to be pretty tired after this is all done.  It's worn me out to get my stuff together.  I'll let you know how it goes.  Think happy thoughts of lots of sellers and sunshine!

Belated Rambles

Okay, so how about some belated rambling?  Sound good?  Here we go!

Like I said on Monday, I spent most of last week sick with a bad cold.  My whole routine was: stagger out of bed, take Dayquil, go to work, stagger home, take Nyquil, go to bed, repeat.  If I hadn't planned out those birthday posts weeks ago, then I wouldn't have had anything on the blog at all.  There really wasn't a lot to write about.

Thankfully, I was starting to get better by the time of the birthday celebration.  As usual, the birthday weekend was devoted to my favorite activities:  eating out and second-hand shopping.  In the days before I had a booth, I was looking for stuff for my collections and such.  Nowadays, it's a merch hunt, although I did find a cool stash of old comics for myself.  Since the yard sale season has pretty much died (more on that later), the birthday event is kind of like my really big push to make sure that I'm stocked enough for winter.

As I get older, it's surprising to me how tired I am at the end of the weekend.  Wheeling a cart around a bunch of vendor malls is a lot more tiring than you would think!  It's also surprising to me how the secondhand retail scene has grown in this town.  I used to be able to hit just about every thrift and flea market in town in one weekend.  Now, it's just not possible.  In fact, there are a couple of stores that have been open for a couple of years now that I have not been able to make even one visit to yet!  I keep worrying that we've reached or exceeded our carrying capacity and that there's going to be some contraction in the market, but it doesn't seem to be happening yet.

As usual, it was a lot of fun and I got a lot of cool stuff.  I feel better prepared for the colder months now.  In fact, I might be able to get by for both booths without having to make too many merch runs during the cold months, except possibly for furniture.  Seems like a good deal to me.

We did hit one yard sale (actually a church sale) over the weekend.  There weren't many listed, and most of them seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel.  This particular sale has been one of my favorites, but it usually happens much earlier in the year--February, to be exact.  Going from being one of the first sales of the year to one of the last really hurt it, I think.  This is the kind of church sale that allows a bunch of people to set up, but also has a large area of stuff that the church is selling.  I think the date switch put the sale so late that most church members had already had their own sales, so they only had their leftovers.

I did buy a few things, but nothing really special enough to post about.  A couple of oddball things happened, though, that are worth mentioning.  I asked a lady how much this cubby organizer thing for a kid's room was.  None of her stuff was priced.  She responded with the old "How much will you give me?" b.s.  I said, "Three dollars."  Then she said (and I quote verbatim here):

"How about four dollars? No, make it $3.50, then meet me in the middle at $3.25.  No, let's just go with three, like you said."

In other words, she countered her own counter-offer and did my negotiating for me and came out at my price!  I've never seen anything like it before.  Ever.  I resisted the urge to ask if she had sold much that day.

There was another lady with a bunch of electronic stuff that was not priced.  If someone asked about something, she would look it up on Amazon using her iPad.  Whatever someone had a used one listed for on Amazon was the price she quoted and she refused to negotiate because "I could get more for it on Amazon!"  I wasn't even interested in her stuff, yet I really had to suppress the urge to go over and tell her to put the damn stuff on Amazon, then wait six months or more for it to sell (if ever).  Seriously, you're going to turn down someone standing in front of you with cash in hand for a mythical 20 bucks more you could make on a website where you will never, ever actually list the item?  Someone needs lessons.

I spent the actual birthday day working my booth at the Peddlers Mall.  Last Monday, I had started rearranging to prep for the post-Halloween merch shift, but didn't get done because I wasn't feeling well.  I kind of left everything half done and then had not been back due to my cold.  In other words, I had a lot of work to do to get back on schedule.  Interestingly enough, I sold several more Halloween items in the days after Halloween, including the last of those damn skulls.

I pulled the Halloween stuff, rearranged the booth, tidied, and put out a ton of new stuff, including the start of Christmas.  I made a new Thanksgiving display, since my other one was getting a little tired.  The first round of my holiday gift idea items are out, with more still to come.  It all cleaned up rather well.  I forgot my camera, so you'll just have to take my word for it.  Keith commented on my working on my birthday, but the booth recognizes no such special occasions.  Afterwards, I started making my rounds of Halloween clearance to stock up for next year.  More about that in my sales analysis post.

I'm betting I'm not the only one who stayed up too late last night watching that nail-biter of an election.  Now, it's time to pull together and get things done.  I'm in.  Are you?

Monday Rambles

Happy belated Darwin Day!

I'll be starting a new on-again, off-again series of posts later this week or early next dedicated to some of the ins and outs of re-selling in a vendor's mall.  It's not going to be a definitive "how to" guide.  I think there is enough that is unpredictable about this business that it's hard to really pin down any but some of the most general principles.  So what you'll be getting is me--just one junker's thoughts and opinions about re-selling and how to do it.

Nevertheless, I'm going to be calling this series "This is how we do it."  So take it somewhat tongue in cheek--pretty much like you do whenever I say that I am a blogger.

Yes, I'm cribbing the series title from this:





It looks like post #700 might be coming up this week!  Yahoo!

Pretty dull week last week.  A former teaching client contacted me about some more classes.  One of my teaching gigs will be ending next month, but not before one of my other ones gets started next week.  I'll be doing double duty for a few weeks.  I hope I'm up to it.  Did a brief housesitting gig over the weekend, but it was just for a few days.

Sales have been pretty standard lately.  Holding steady at the Peddler's Mall without anything spectacular.  Very slow at YesterNook.

Went to a book sale over the weekend.  I've been to this one a lot, but never as a reseller. It's always on the pricey side for a used book sale.  Hardbacks are 3.50, for example.  But, if you're looking for something unique or hard-to-find, it's a good one to hit.  The selection is eclectic and pretty deep.  I've always found a few things there that I'd been searching for.  And, as a source for a reader, the prices are not that bad.

For a seller, on the other hand, they're outrageous.  I ended up spending five bucks.  I got a paperback and three kids books and a couple of vintage pamphlets.  An okay, if not spectacular, haul.  The real finds, though, came from the free boxes.

The organizers of this sale are extremely picky about what they'll take to sell.  In the church newsletter asking for donations, they had a list of items they would not accept, including old cookbooks ("the outdated photography makes the food look unappealing"), old textbooks, and old manuals.  Now, the places where I hang out these days love that kind of stuff.

Even at the sale, they were telling customers how picky they were and how they only want to sell "quality" items.  One of them even said "That's why we have so many set out for free."  Well, you don't have to tell me twice!

The porch of the place was covered with boxes of free books.  I ended up grabbing about 20 of them.  If it hadn't been sub-arctic that day, I probably would have walked off with more, but between the temps and the wind, I was losing extremities, so I had to cut it short.

Now, I didn't find any big ticket unknown treasures in the free boxes, but I got some stuff that will be sure sellers in the booths.  What more can you ask for?

What I paid for:

That Crusoe book has illustrations by the great Lynd Ward in it.  I'll be hard-pressed not to keep it.

Here's what I got for FREE:

The red and white checked book is a sweet, vintage German cookbook.  There are even handwritten notes in German next to some of the recipes!

All in all, not a bad catch!