Scavenger Life Episode 454: Being Frugal During A Global Pandemic

3/8/20 – 3/14/20

Total Items In Store: 3296
Items Sold: 10
Cost of Items Sold: $ 35
Total Sales: $ 339.98
Highest Price Sold: $ 85 (Vintage Skates)
Average Price Sold: $ 34.00
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 99.46
Number of items listed: 32

Gut Sales Report for the week: Sales this week were about half of what they usually are. They were less than half of the sales last week.

Challenge of the week: Need to starting listing a lot of items to get my store built back up.

Scavenge of the week: Found a nice Sony VCR for cheap.

Mark S

FYI… If you still have magazines, catelogues, user manuals, comic books, hard and soft cover books, YOU ARE NOT OUT of TOILET PAPER!! Duh! LMAO 🙂 🙂 🙂

mike @ mdcgfa

I forgot to mention that my favorite thrift store closed down for I think the rest of the month due to the Pandemic.

Now I am really going to have to hit my “To be listed” items. I call them “To be listed” items and not death piles because they are already in containers or “garment bags” with a spreadsheet that says what is in them and ready to be listed when pictures get taken for them.

If the items were just in a big pile (which I have had), then I would call that death piles. I do have clothes that are close to that state – but they are hanging on a clothes rack. They are not inventoried in a spreadsheet so I guess you could say that is a death rack.

Mark

March 8 – 14
Total Items in Store: 3,768
Items Sold: 42
Total Sales : $1,301
* Above yearly average of $941
Highest Price: $200 (Six Tiki Mugs made by Mendez Ruiz Ceramica)
Average Price: $31
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $96
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 92

I did a lot better this week than I thought I did. On one day, I sold a $5 spoon and that was it. The rest of the week felt kinda sluggish so imagine my surprise to find out that I surpassed $1K.

I’m also having some issues with GoDaddy Bookkeeping. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that my Sales category wasn’t correct, that it was incorrectly including the shipping income. I haven’t heard back from support since when they told me that they’re escalating it to “tier three”, whatever that means. But I did some investigating and it seems to be pulling incorrect numbers only on the items that eBay is collecting sales tax from. The sales from states that don’t have the internet sales tax laws yet are showing up just fine. I’m sure that GoDaddy is aware of this already, but I went ahead and emailed them my findings anyway.

Not much else has been going on. Just hunkering down amidst the pandemic and being thankful that I no longer have to deal with hundreds of people face to face on a weekly basis anymore.

Jay and Ryanne… Go check out Quicken for Home-Business and Rental Property. I think they have newly added web – mobile and Mac to its capabilities. Also, in the Business version it handles real estate rentals. Go to the highest version and dig into all the details and go through all the tabs and comparisons. The Business version runs us $99 per year BUT I think they have a 40% off for a certain period running right now.

This was my best bet short of going back to QuickBooks which was just to over blown for our level and costs $369 per year.

Quicken handles investments, has charts for cash flows, by day, week, month or any time period. Will handle equipment purchases, asset allocations, constant net worth, keep mortgage payments all auto downloaded, HELOC payments, all credit cards auto download, all bank accounts. Has a whole lot.

Yes, comes with a bit more of a learning to navigate curve but easier than QuickBooks which I used for years.

And if Quicken won’t give you everything, then QuickBooks is probably how you are going to have to go.

I never did buy into the GoDaddy thing after hearing about it here on SL and then checking it out. Never provide the in depth and thoroughness I was used to from QuickBooks.

There are not a lot of choices out there for higher level accounting software for the small business at a low cost. Some packages we used to use were in the thousands per year. Great Plains being one of them, then we went with a custom system. We tied into our whole company. time clocks, payroll, etc.

While Quicken does NOT have built in payroll, you do what I think you have been doing by keeping those funds in a separate account and create an account in Quicken. Keep using your payroll service as a standalone, etc.

I am not an accountant-bookkeeper by trade but some of the SL members are and they can maybe jump in. If your own personal CPA can’t advise you, give Mark Tews a call. Maybe it would be a good time to schedule him for another pod cast, but it is tax time for him. Most CPA’s prefer QuickBooks because Intuit makes a CPA Master Version and all they need to do is keep their Master updated each year and they can remote into any of their client’s books and make General Ledger entries or handle digital files. But again, I didn’t see the need for QuickBooks.

I think your big hurdle has been cloud-web based and for the Mac which I think, correct me if I am wrong, but it has a Mac version and Mobile is set-up and so is the cloud.

I just did a Synch a few minutes ago. Took about 60 seconds. Quicken pulled in 7 accounts, personal check, per. credit cards, business credit cards, PayPal updates, heloc data, petty cash data, rental history, up dated my business equipment assets & depreciation, investment update [ugghhh], our home inventory [belongings not Ebay inventory]. The eBay account comes in through PayPal and Etsy goes directly into the business checking account.

All of these have the expense or income accounts already assigned to them. That is an upfront teaching [set-up] you do just like you did in GDB, but once learned, you don’t have to do it again except for new accounts or vendors. Also pulled in my outstanding Invoices I have billed to a couple of vendors I do business with.

Does a lot, but as compared to GDB I think it does a whole lot more than GDB did, but I never went much past a few months with GDB.

So after all that downloading in about 60 to 90 seconds, I clicked to exit and it says one moment please, synching your Quicken data to the cloud, wait 10 seconds at most, Then said exit now, then I click exit. Done!

Just check it out and see if it is really the web-cloud thing you want and if it is now for a Mac and if so, maybe try it out. You must go somewhere now that GDB has fallen out of the picture.

Catch you guys later….

Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
SmartParts Equipment Parts

• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by MDC Galleries & Fine Art.

It was very nice to hear from you two in this troubling time.

Your attitude of calm sounds a lot like the common sentiment was up here in the NJ/NY area, exactly one week ago. We were telling one another to remain calm, and were mostly worried about the economic consequences the collapsing stock market was suggesting. By the end of this week, it has turned into a different world. The first deaths, and the first escalation of cases in our own towns has brought a panic that no one of most generations has ever seen. Virginia just had its first death; things will change drastically once cases start regularly popping up in your surrounding towns.

Jay, you are wrong that you two are basically safe from life-threatening symptoms. We thought this too, one week ago. My girlfriend’s hospital is currently preparing to be overrun in the coming week or two. A major hospital at the Jersey Shore just stopped accepting new patients altogether after doctors got infected by a patient. Here is a statement from a physician working at one of the already affected hospitals near me:

Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck has 11 cases, 6 of them critically ill, ALL BETWEEN THE AGES OF 28 and 48 YEARS.
If you think this can’t/won’t happen to you please think again. ISOLATE NOW
While the highest risk of severe illness is in those over age 60, it can happen to anyone and current evidence suggests most spread is coming from ASYMPTOMATIC individuals who have the infection and don’t yet know it. COVID-19 is spreading quickly through all local communities whether you are seeing positive test results or not. TAKE IT VERY SERIOUSLY.

https://www.roi-nj.com/2020/03/14/opinion/life-at-the-epicenter-of-n-j-s-coronavirus-outbreak/?fbclid=IwAR28ajpBiwtdq2GiU9LjCJ0lQ08XNqrkZMevt0e11rHWGrPgjRarAi610wQ

I beg that everyone immediately isolates, even if isn’t immediately clear that this necessary. No more thrift stores or flea markets. The pathogen is already everywhere.

Sales were slightly lower than normal, but stuff is still selling.

I’m in a weird position right now. A bulk of my sales each week are from items listed in the last 14 to 30 days. Not being able to source with definitely affect my numbers, so I’m rusing out tomorrow morning and doing as much as I can. I have a few items laying around from last week that I didn’t have time to list, but my true death piles are mostly electronics that need repair, or items that are too cheap to bother listing (<$15.)

I’m also getting offers, which is good, since I’m taking most of them to make up for lower numbers. I just got one a few minutes ago for $50 on a $180 item, and when I went to check the person’s store, I found they had sold a bunch of sanitizing wipes at 4x markup just yesterday. I immediately countered at $170 and got a sob story in return with the same $50 offer. Felt good to slam that DECLINE.

I use managed payments along with quickbooks online. It works totally great!! BUT I pay $75 per month for the QuickBooks. It quickly upgraded to “advanced”. I do run other business ventures and send invoices.

Bank accounts are linked along with PayPal. Use the newer PayPal “Connect to PayPal” app. (Don’t use the PayPal Sync app. Sync is old and does not include all transactions.) Apps are something you install into your online account from the apps link. Seeing you use a Mac, I highly recommend installing the QuickBooks desktop application which makes having it on your desktop all the time a breeze.

I set up an “ebay sales” income category and the pattern of the name sent to the bank account makes it select the accounting category.

QuickBooks Online also has phone app. And now does automatic milage. You might think milage for an ebay store is not important but this feature alone pays for the $75 per month for quickbooks online advanced.

One tip: Quickbooks allows photos and PDF’s to be attached to transactions. The PayPal transactions include a HTML link to the page of the transaction with lots of information. Like the package ID’s for ebay labels etc. On a Mac, I print to PDF files and attach them to the QuickBooks transaction. This way if the info goes away in PayPal you still have it in QuickBooks.

Another Tip: Pay ebay shipping through PayPal. You can choose to have ebay take the payment for labels out of the payout money but then it won’t get to quickbooks.

So QuickBooks basically runs the office. Its not just a spreadsheet record, it now handles sales tax calculations by state (ebay does this, but what about outside ebay?) Then I see the accountant I just bring my laptop.

I no longer get customer data for every sale on ebay imported into QuickBooks after moving away from the PayPal Sync App. I don’t need customer data in QuickBooks anyway. I let ebay handle customer support info.

Quickbooks now reminds you when your state sales tax is due and what to pay.

And the number one reason to use QuickBooks over the other guys? They are very actively updating the software all the time and making it better. Its worth the extra money to have an IT support staff always working on it and making sure stuff works.

On COVED-19… As stated by NY Governor Cuomo. (Not that he says anything useful very often.) We are not going to stop the virus and many will get it. But slowing down the spread to gain time to learn and prepare. To also not have the medical support system slammed and overwhelmed.

So we are having the 20-30 something age group party on and travel around, that happens to be the age group of our first 3 cases in western NY. The bars having virus parties selling shirts etc. Friends being sent home to self quarantine are going on ski trips like its just a few days off on vacation. But those are the people who can get you killed.

Sunday is usually my “regular” sourcing day and grocery shopping day: WalMart, SubWay for lunch, and the little local antique mall and the nearest Goodwill. For the first time in ages, I didn’t go. Better Half did send me for some groceries, which I got at a local grocery store, instead of WalMart. So far, we’ve had no reported cases in my Pennsylvania county, but I assume it’s just a matter of time and testing, so we’re cutting back on going places. I don’t need to source, we have plenty of unlisted inventory. We can probably order groceries if it comes to that. We’re both old enough to be “at risk”, but both are relatively healthy, so that’s a plus.

Hope everyone stays well….

Items in Store 1470
Items Sold 16
Total Sales $433.00
COGS $48.00
Total Profit $385.00
Average profit $11.00
Average sales price $27.06
New Listings 0

Been on vacation for a week and a half. I was initially thinking all this reaction is massively overblown, but then I saw a report this weekend of an assessment of the hospital capacity of our country. There are LESS THAN a Million hospital beds in the United States! How is that possible???

I also saw a “tale of two cities” when I traveled back home yesterday. I had seen all the reports about supermarkets being gutted. I had seen the photos of my local stores…it was sad. I stopped by a Trader Joes in Charlotte and it was fully stocked and orderly – noone acting like a fool.
When I got home (coincidentally in the last state without a confirmed case), my local grocery store had multiple departments completely gutted. I talked with the butcher and he said it has been that way for 4 days.

It never ceases to amaze me how ill prepared most people are. If you keep a minimum stock on most items, there is no need for panic buying! My assumption is that the folks stockpiling TP also don’t have a 401K.

Bad week on account of the plague, real good week on ebay.

Sales c/w shipping: CAD$6,413, 24 sales, COGS: $684, Fees: ~$880, Postage: $730 –> Gross profit: $4119
Expenditures: $306 –> Cashflow: $5227
Notable sales: the lot of 200 widgets from last week, bought for $5.99, has paid off. I sold 10 of the widgets for $2500. I think this is now my best ever pick. Was a local ebay buy.
Trying to control my spend now in preparation for needing a lot of cash on hand.
Unusual number of sales this week probably due to my slashing prices on lots of old inventory. It’s starting to work in clearing storage space.

Also got a zebra printer, waiting for the labels in order to try it out. Very promptly last night my laserjet (for which I paid $20) ran out of toner… the replacement toner being $300 I’ll probably just buy another surplus printer.

It was really eerie bringing mail in today – all the streets in my neighborhood that are usually packed full of students/commuters/residents were empty. The local park was empty, the commuter lots had spaces. It was easy to cross the streets for once with no traffic! Even on weekends it’s more crowded.

I looked at the data on TomTom for traffic and it’s so quiet compared to normal:

New York traffic

Normally on a Monday, I would just bring in the mail via Uber. Since I don’t know the cleanliness levels of drivers and how often they’re cleaning their vehicles, I am skipping taking Ubers completely until this all blows over. I did turn on the app this morning during rush hour to see how impacted Uber is by all of this – there were at least 5 cars available within a few blocks from me. On a normal commuting day, I would sometimes have to wait 10-15 minutes to get an Uber. So weird.

We had a little over 40 packages to bring in this morning. Sales were only “that good” because I combined three days worth of packages into the ship-out. Normal ship-outs consist of 1 or 2 days worth of sales on Mondays. I currently don’t feel comfortable going into the post office on weekends when there will be more people using it. So, for now, I am just going in daily M-F. Dollar value is way down due to running a large sale and sending generous offers out on all items that offers are available for.

I really don’t know at this point if it’s worth it to continue listing. I have a deep backlog and am continuing to get stock in, but I also don’t want to list a bunch of stuff and then have to go on vacation for a few weeks or months for it. I’m currently near 13,700 active listings on my main Ebay store alone. I still have the second Ebay store which is a premium store, as well as my Etsy store to deal with for fees. Currently up to 200 listings on the Etsy store. Plus Amazon, plus other sites. I am looking at $600 in listing fees for all of my stores before I sell a single item. I might lose a minimum of $600-$1,200 if I am forced to put my stores on vacation for a month or two, depending on how serious the lockdown gets.

$39.99 for unlimited Amazon listing fees is fine. Etsy fees are minimal stretched out over 4 months. Even a premium Ebay store is fine. Having an anchor store with additional items listed over the 10,000 “free” allocated limit is really going to be painful. That’s $485 for 13,7000 items listed. I really feel like Ebay needs to do more than they are doing to help sellers who might be out for awhile through no fault of their own. They need to provide relief for their larger sellers. I really don’t believe that the USPS will remain completely open throughout this crisis.

I found the following COVID-19 status alert page for the USPS that I’ve been checking daily:

Service Alerts

3/8/20 – 3/14/20

Total Items In Store: 1000
Items Sold: 44
Total Sales: $ 1943.00
Cost of Goods Sold: $ 861.41
Highest Price Sold: $ 100 (Poshmark)
Average Price Sold: $ 44.16
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 135
Number of items listed: 117

Gut Sales Report for the week: Sales were normal, which is more disconcerting than if I had seen a sales drop like everyone else who I have talked to. We hit 1,000 active listings for the first time and we did it on the anniversary of our first ever sale, so feeling cautiously optimistic.

Challenge of the week: Still killing that death pile since there is a virus out there that we want to avoid as much as we can. We have a couple hundred items we want to get caught up on, and to make a real effort to getting our Ebay store up and running properly.

Scavenge of the week: Nothing of note, lot of bread and butter shoes.

I didn’t do my usual Sunday sourcing this weekend, a tough decision to make, but looks like it just got easier, since the governor here in PA has ordered the shut down of all “non-essential” businesses. I’m guessing the governor defines antique malls and thrift stores as “non essential”, even if some of us would argue they are essential to our well being LOL

So, with pretty much no where to source (except online), it’ll be even easier to work on the “Social distancing” piles.

Thanks J&R for another excellent podcast.

Week of March 8 – 14

Total items in store: 507
Items sold: 12
Total gross sales: $362
COGS: $10
Highest Price Sold: $85 (lot of 6 oil filters for trucks)
Average price sold: $30
Money spend on new inventory: 0
Number of items listed: 10

Gut Sales Report for the Week: March sales are definitely up from February, which were dreadful. My wife and I were on a 2-week road trip to New Mexico and Arizona, just got back this Monday. We were of course aware of the COVID-19 news, but it definitely wasn’t a worry to us. We’re both retired in our early 60s. Everywhere we went, everything was totally normal. After we got home (Newport KY) all that changed beginning Wednesday. By Friday we were in full freakout mode and have stayed there since. We’re not worried so much for ourselves, but my parents are in their 80s and my dad is in a ‘respite home’ recovering from surgery a week ago. I can hardly think about the risk. My wife keeps trying to minimize the seriousness of the situation, and I keep telling her, no, this is incredibly dangerous. Look at Italy, etc. So, except for trips to the supermarket we’re sheltering in place. We take long walks, but I’m not going to source until things settle down. As Ryanne and Jay say, it’s just junk. Not worth risking your health or anyone’s else over. On the bright side, I’m slowly working through my death pile. And if I get through that I can always work on cleaning up my storage area. Be smart. Stay safe everyone!

I’m totally out of my normal routine because my high school aged son started doing classwork online today, and I had to help him get started. I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, and I’m not sure when I will be able to get to it.

To add to the craziness, I start a new job on Thursday! I’ve kept in touch with some of my colleagues including a lunch I set up each month. Towards the end of last year, someone mentioned work available at his company, so I responded. I’ll start very part-time at first. Online selling will now be my so-called “side hustle” instead of my main thing.

I felt that the week was slow, but, looking at other people’s numbers so far, I don’t think I did all that badly. I had to add up my sales by hand since GoDaddy is still adding shipping to the cost of the item (already mentioned by DoublyThumbs above).

Week of March 8 – 14
* Total Items in Store: 1458 eBay, 34 Etsy
* Items Sold: 13 eBay
* Cost of Items Sold: $54.85 + $16.60 Commission
* Total Sales: $425.62 eBay
* Highest Price Sold: $106 hand knitted wool prayer rug
* Average Price Sold: $32.74
* Returns: 0
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
* Number of items listed this week: 31

Thanks for the podcast

Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3683
Items Sold: 31
Total Sales: $601.67
Cost of Items Sold: $70
Average Price Sold: $19.41
Average Cost of Item: $2.27
Highest Price Item Sold: $39.95 Wusthof Gourmet 8″ Cook’s Chef’s Knife
Number of items listed this week: 72 worth approx. $1416
YTD Sales: $10562
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +10%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 455
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 315
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 181
Sell-through rate (for the week): 0.84%
Hats sold this week: 23 (74% of sales) worth $405.06 (67% of sales $)

Things seemed pretty normal till about mid-week and then there was an obvious slow down for me. For the past month or two I’ve been sending out lots of offers to watchers on Thursday and that has typically really kick-started sales each week. That didn’t happen last week. My offers only generated a few sales. I had no high-value sales either so that dampened my sales numbers too.

I had to cancel an overseas trip that was due to happen next week. It was going to a family reunion in Vietnam with my siblings coming from Australia. We haven’t been together as a group since 2007 so it was pretty disappointing.

Sell trash, stay healthy.