Scavenger Life Episode 455: Serious Times Worldwide

3/15/20 – 3/21/20

Total Items In Store: 3303
Items Sold: 20
Cost of Items Sold: $ 35
Total Sales: $ 524.76
Highest Price Sold: $ 85 (Skates)
Average Price Sold: $ 26.24
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 0
Number of items listed: 27

Gut Sales Report for the week: Sales felt really bad this week. As we discussed on the blog, good sales at the beginning of the week, then they died out. But, I was pleasantly surprised when I ran the weekly report that I sold $524.76. I sold a lot on Saturday, so that helped.

Challenge of the week: I keep getting a message from my brother printer that I should replace the drum. I think this is just some sort of counter that counts how many sheets of paper you have printed and they know how many a drum should last. Anyway, I didn’t want to risk my drum going bad, so I bought a new one. I bought a generic one because the Brother brand one was nearly $90 – more than I paid for my Brother printed I bought brand new at Staples on a Black Friday (I think I paid under $50). I replaced the drum and that was easy. But resetting the counter on my printer was another issue – the manual they sent was wrong. I looked it up on the web and got it to work right away. So my new drum is in and the counter has been reset. All set to go another 12,000 pages or so.

Scavenge of the week: This week it was items I found in my own back inventory. I have been going through what I have. I have about 500 items that are “To be Listed” – meaning they are in containers\garment bags and in a spreadsheet with all the details, they just need pictures and then to be listed. I probably have another 500 items that are in “death containers” (like death piles, but organized into containers). I like to call them “surprise containers” because I really don’t know what I will find. I also have items on “death racks” – clothes that are hanging up on a clothes rack. I guess it is good to have a back log in times like these. I could go to estate sales, but don’t want to do that right now. Besides, there are really are not any good ones right now.

Movie of the week: Well, other than watching “Outbreak” again, I watched a movie called “The Monuments Men”. This was the ultimate scavenger hunt, but they didn’t get to keep what they found. Here is a synopsis of the movie, “During World War II, the Nazis steal countless pieces of art and hide them away. Some over-the-hill art scholars, historians, architects and other experts form a unit to retrieve as many of the stolen masterpieces as possible. The mission becomes even more urgent when the team learns about Hitler’s “Nero Decree,” which orders destruction of the artworks if the Third Reich falls. Caught in a race against time, the men risk their lives to protect some of mankind’s greatest achievements.” The movie was a bit confusing at the beginning (I new what was happening in the big picture, but the details were not very clear as to exactly what was happening). It ended up really good and some big names in the movie. The director was George Clooney.

Mark S

It was announced today that the first case has been confirmed in my home county, and the first case in a neighboring county. Hoping that for those around me who still aren’t taking this seriously….well, hoping knowing its in their backyard will hopefully wake them up.

So far, it does seem most people ARE taking this pretty seriously around here.

Stay well, everyone!

March 15 – 21
Total Items in Store: 3,861
Items Sold: 39
Total Sales : $874
* Below yearly average of $952
Highest Price: $85 (Cleveland Twist Drill Company Bit Index Holder)
Average Price: $22
Returns: 1
Cost of Goods Sold: $79
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 137

Sales this week were pretty good. Not great, but not bad either. I really can’t complain though seeing how the rest of the world is doing lately. Every day, the news just keeps getting worse for a lot of people. We have a friend who had two jobs, one as a bartender and one as a barista. She got laid off of both of them because of the mandatory shutdowns. So at least Steph and I can keep working and pulling in an income.

Not much new to report. All of the auctions that I planned on going to have been canceled. The good news is that I’ve got a whole room full of stuff to list so I won’t be without for a while. And we’ve got our nest egg to fall back on in case things get really bad. Things could always be much worse.

Good to hear from you guys. This is a weird dreamtime for me. I have 2 weeks of work left in my current job. I am in the office MWF but basically we are running a skeleton crew and I am encouraging everybody else to stay home. One of my favourite sources has totally shut down. So I’m down to sourcing on ebay… which is going pretty well anyway.

You weren’t too far off base regarding the Canadian market. I sell almost exactly 50% US, 50% domestically. The cross-border USPS shipping may be halted for individuals, but services like Chit Chats and DYK Post that I use are still doing it. And yes, Canada Post is much more expensive, particularly for light items – it’s more competitive for bigger (3kg+) stuff.

I had another good week… the shutdowns are not hitting me yet, but maybe that’s to come.

Sales c/w shipping: CAD$2722, 16 sales, COGS: $262, Fees: ~$363, Postage: $320 –> Gross profit: $1777
Expenditures: $854 –> Cashflow: $1505

I am also reinventorying and I do find some “ghost inventory”. However, it’s almost always due the same scenario: a buyer bought, then cancelled, and the item failed to relist. ESPECIALLY for items with quantity, where the quantity didn’t update upon cancellation.

Storage is now full. I was going to get another unit, now I am uncertain if I want to make that kind of investment right now. Might let the units get a little messy instead, stack stuff on the floors. Don’t think adding $200/mo to my bills makes sense.

Keep trying to think through the post COVID future. I think a big thing is that Amazon is going to, for better or worse, eat another huge piece of the economy. Between people wanting things shipped to their homes, and using AWS versus a company having its own physical servers… they are going to gobble everything up. Not sure what that means for all of us.

Items in Store 1484
Items Sold 18
Total Sales $490.00
COGS $38.00
Total Profit $452.00
Average profit $25.11
Average sales price $27.22
New Listings 32

Not bad sales all things considered! I’m working from home most days now, which is nice. I only have to go into the office 1-2 times a week. I fully expect our governor to shut down our state at some point this week. I don’t know how that will affect me yet. I’m operating on the expectation that at some point in the next 2 weeks I may not have a paycheck anymore.

1st day of the shutdown in NYC. Even though a lot of stores have been closed prior to the shutdown, it was still weird to walk around and see most stores gated. A lot of restaurants and fast food places have also closed, which really surprised me.

On top of the shutdown, it was raining, cloudy and windy on the walk to & from the post office. It sucked. Thankfully, the post office was still open and no one was in it. As long as I can keep sending mail in, I will continue to run. It scares me to leave the house, but it also scares me to not have any income coming in at all for several months. If it gets really bad (it IS really bad here, but really really terrifyingly bad) I’ll look into postal pick-up, but I fear that people will yank my packages no matter what. As for now, I go out in a mask with filter & gloves, and make sure to clean myself and everything when I get back like I am decontaminating from life.

I didn’t know what to expect during the 1st day of the shutdown, but I saw no one walking outside to “enforce” any social distancing rules or anything. I don’t know if it was due to the weather or what, but okay. I was sort of afraid that someone would hassle me for walking around, but it wasn’t like that at all.

I had my worst week ever on Amazon – sales are down 80% from normal. This is normally the time of year I source heavily for Amazon, so oops. I’ll just continue to put my efforts into Ebay, which is thankfully starting to pick up from the slack of Ebay. I’m also adding more to Etsy because I have been getting a lot of likes and people adding my store to their favorites. I’ll probably put it on sale soon to in order to encourage more sales.

I’m going to start running perpetual sales on Ebay for the rest of the year. I think they will go 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%. 25% if it’s really dire. 5% will be the majority of the sales for the year, with a duration of 1 week apiece so I get the sale countdown thing at the end each week.

I’ve also been getting grocery delivery for years since I don’t have a car. Now that everyone has discovered it and is getting grocery delivery, delivery slots are no longer available. All the slots through April 5th have been taken for my main grocery delivery company. Not one is for me. Amazon Whole Foods only gives a 2 day set of slots, always all taken. Another expensive delivery company is completely booked up 5 days out, so those are all taken. I could try instacart, but I don’t know if they’re also all taken or if the food I need will be available for the shoppers to pick up?

I could go to the grocery store, but I can’t take an Uber back with my food so I can’t buy that much at one time and the closest one to me is tiny and expensive with cramped aisles. If I went the grocery route, I would have to make more frequent trips on foot and put myself more at risk by being around others more frequently. As for not taking Uber, it is not a good idea to get into a stranger’s car at this time because you don’t know how often they sanitize. I can go to bodegas, but they’re expensive and risky and you can’t keep a 6 ft apart rule. I have also stopped getting food delivered (that used to be twice a week), so what I have at home is all I have to eat. I’ve been supplementing grocery delivery with Walmart, but a lot of food is running out on there as well. I have food, but I have to start planning NOW to have maybe a month from now that doesn’t put myself at great risk.

I could try venturing to other boroughs of the city, but a lot of the major grocery stores have lines outside the door with bouncers waiting outside to let you in. I don’t know how much food is available, and once again, how would I get the food back if I have to walk across bridges to avoid taking the subway? Ugh.

Thanks for the Podcast R&J. I heard that in LA County, people are going out of the city to visit vacation rentals – like in the desert. The locals aren’t happy because of the potential strain on limited health resources there. The ski resorts shut down here before the state’s lock down for that reason. Hopefully you will continue to rent and be safe while cleaning up. I would imagine that it must be somewhat hard to set rates and minimum stays.

Ebay is quiet for me but my day job may be quiet for a time so I plan to list from all of my piles. I loaded up on groceries and bubble wrap at Uhaul before the shut down. I ended some larger item listings and changed Mercari items to the post office to avoid using Fed Ex. Extended my handling time to two days to allow for scheduled pick up. As long as the post office is still running, it seems like Ebay has an advantage with its army of individual sellers.

I’m hawking Mercari for underpriced personal buys with make offer but not to flip. I’m very surprised not to see non-essential retailers offering good sales right now. I would think now would be a good time for them to sell merchandise before things gets worse.

Last week was head spinning and felt like a month. Since my husband is on the hospital care planning team and I read a lot last week, we’ve become informed and have done our best to get ahead of the virus. We have been shut in alone longer than most. We are allowing no contact with older relatives, no play dates. My husband moved downstairs to the guest bed and bath after local confirmed cases appeared Friday. They are still not testing here except in a few cases so we knew before that it was out in the community. There just aren’t enough tests yet. Stay safe trash elves.

The world is certainly crazy, and it changes by the day. My high school aged son is in the second week of online school, and my college aged daughter just started today. NJ announced the closure of non-essential businesses this Saturday.

So, with just the weirdest timing ever, I will be starting a new job at the end of this week or beginning of next. Granted the whole process started in November last year (or was it October?), but I feel strange starting something when others are hurting. On the other hand, we’ve been hurting since 2014 when I lost my job. It’s really a good position, so I’m excited to get back and keep eBay on the side. I’ll be part time in the beginning.

eBay slowed down drastically for me, and I sold all lower value items, but it has picked up a bit since the weekend. On Saturday, I sold several partially full spools of elastic to a lady who is planning to make masks for a hospital. She is also in NJ, a little over an hour drive from me.

Week of March 15 – 21
* Total Items in Store: 1480 eBay, 37 Etsy
* Items Sold: 12 eBay
* Cost of Items Sold: $9.50 + $20.50 Commission
* Total Sales: $199.35 eBay
* Highest Price Sold: $29 Lot partial spools of elastic
* Average Price Sold: $16.61
* Returns: 0
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
* Number of items listed this week: 34

March 15 – 21

Total Items in Store: 501
Items Sold: 9
Total Sales : $550
Highest Price: $220 (KimTech A5 Cleanroom Sterile Integrated Hood & Mask – 2x 75-pack)
Average Price: $61
Returns: 1
Cost of Goods Sold: $80
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 10

A strange week sales-wise. Monday through Thursday I didn’t have a single sale. Can’t recall last time that happened. Then Friday and Saturday were great and saved the week. So the week was one of best of this still-young year. I’m glad I put a lot of effort in sourcing auctions in January and February. Listed hundreds of items. Just hoping that’s enough to get me through to other side of this crisis. Like many others here I haven’t done any sourcing for the past two weeks. I’m chipping away at my death pile but there’s nothing to get excited about in it. Just smalls.

I’m in Cincinnati and the shopping experience is getting stranger instead of more normal. Kroger is the main supermarket chain – I have two within a mile of me. Paper goods aisles (towels, TP) are continually empty. Same with pasta. This morning in Kroger there were notices throughout the store of items Kroger is limiting purchases of. I was surprised how long the list is. Soaps, cleaning supplies, vitamins, potatoes, TP, towels, etc. I also noticed extra security. I expected by now people would stop with the hoarding.

Thanks as always for the podcast. Appreciate hearing your voices of reason in the midst of the lunacy. Welcomed the discussion of alternatives to GoDaddy as I’m also considering moving. It continues to double import entries and causes a lot of clean up work at tax time.

Business seems slow but steady. Looking back, we’re actually doing better this year than last year. eBay says we’re up 100% over this week last year, and up 60% for the month. Looks like people are still indulging their collecting hobbies and that is the majority of what we are selling.

Having trouble getting much done eBay-wise these past two weeks with Cecile working from home and kids homeschooling. Fortunately, the kids are getting some school work sent to them, but that only keeps them busy for a few hours a day.

Indulged in an online auction this week and braved world to pick up my winnings. The operator was great. Had everything already sorted and sitting outside in crates so didn’t require any close contact. Loaded the stuff in my crates and have it sitting in the boxes for a week to allow potential viruses to die off before sorting through. Got some great deals, I suppose a lot of bidders are holding back for fear of exposure. Not sure we’ll be going out more as Governor Hogan just announced essential business only. I assume auctions won’t be considered essential. We didn’t go, but I was really surprised to see that there were still estate sales going this past weekend.

Scavenge of the week was a fishing lure from the auction. In a batch of lures I purchased for $15, there is a Pflueger lure from 1898. I sold one like it last year for $199, so I’m hoping for a repeat performance.

Posting numbers for the last two weeks as I didn’t have time to get to them last week.

Week Ending 03/14/2020 03/21/2020
Total Items in Store: 1143 1166
Items Sold: 19 19
Gross Sales: $890.38 $764.54
Gross wo Shipping $732.83 $576.30
Cost of Items Sold: $73.03 $42.34
COGS Percent 9.97% 7.35%
Highest Price Sold: $99.95 $75.00
Average Price Sold: $38.57 $30.33
Returns: 0 0
Spent on New Inventory: $0.00 $308.12
Sold via promoted listings: 9 9
Promoted Percentage: 47.37% 47.37%
Average Days Listed: 345.79 388.42
Longest Listed: 1357 1082
New items listed: 9 4

Tried a code generator to create a table to display the information, but WordPress didn’t like it and gave me an illegal operation error message.

I do not post on here very often but wanted to let you know how this is going in my part of Mexico. At the moment there are only 316 cases reported in the whole of Mexico. Many towns have closed themselves off to ALL traffic if you do not live there, literally set up checkpoints on the roads and you will not be allowed in if you are not a resident. This goes for locals and foreigners alike. All those beach towns are taking a terrible pounding tourism wise, basically at zero percent occupancy for them now. A large hotel chain in Playa del Carmen just laid off 250 workers with no pay but was “nice enough” to give them 75 dollars in food stamps per month, which believe me is not enough for the basics. There is no unemployment payments here like the US, it’s fend for yourself.
All bars, cantinas, health clubs and movie theaters are closed by gov order until who knows when. Schools are all closed for the foreseeable future. The hotels and restaurants that are open are reporting that sales are down 90%.
Even though the federal government has not imposed a “stay at home” order yet, people are staying at home and taking precautions. It’s not expected to peak here until like late june or july so it’s going to be a loooooong boring wait until then. I really feel for the folks at home with the kids and they can not take them to either the beach or the movies, people are going to get real antsy before this is over.
On the bright side online sales have picked up a little, kids toys and hobby stuff mostly.
Stay safe everyone, this is going to have HUGE effects to many many people, not just those that get sick.

Jay, our plan? Keep doing the same thing we do, bid on big merchandise lots at auction and sell it online on mercadolibre. We are fine financially, own our house outright, same for the car. Solar panels keep our elec bill very low. I would say we are pretty well suited to actually do well this year, we will just stick to our plan and keep our heads down…

Well, it’s official now. Michigan is now under lock down.

Things won’t change too much more for me, but a lot of business is shut down.

If your state is not on lock down, it may be coming soon.

Mark

Almasty, if it gets real bad I can priority mail you some eggs, cheese etc..in the coming weeks, month. Know that you will be ok. It’s important. As long as the mail is running we all should be ok to some extent. Everyone here should know this. My main business is down, but my wife is still working (she makes the big bucks) If anyone needs stuff to sell, I have plenty of death piles I will share also. Brian

Just got an email from the regional goodwill stores – they are asking that people stop donating since the stores are closed. The email includes a picture of stuff piled high on the side of the building – drenched in the pouring rain.
You have to wonder how people could be that clueless, but this does reinforce the idea mentioned the people are still spring cleaning since they are stuck at home and there will be an absolute glut of donated merchandise once the stores open.
A couple of weeks ago another goodwill message centered around how many programs and people are supported by their services. This thing is hitting everybody.

Same here. I regularly donate newspapers to them, and they use the papers to wrap fragile stuff at checkout. But just took a load of newspapers to the recycling bins yesterday, because GW isn’t taking donations now, and I don’t have unlimited room to be storing stuff.

Gonna be a strange new world for a while….

3/15/20 – 3/21/20

Total Items In Store: 1016
Items Sold: 41
Total Sales: $ 1,822.30
Cost of Goods Sold: $ 863.39
Highest Price Sold: $ 90 (Nike Odyssey Reacts on Ebay)
Average Price Sold: $ 45.25
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 0
Number of items listed: 57

Gut Sales Report for the week: I felt like we were having a terrible week all week. We had a couple days with 2 sales and I thought for sure this was the week where the rug got pulled from under us. But looking at our numbers, it was an average week, which goes to shows that my feelings about the reselling world ending was largely in my head.

Challenge of the week: Our goal is to try and find a reliable source for picking up inventory wholesale in these weird times. We had talked about it for months, but its time to sink or swim because all the local thrift stores that we used to hit have been closed as the cities start locking down.

Scavenge of the week: 0, we picked up no inventory because all our thrift stores are closed. We have always kept a healthy backlog so we should be able to keep listing for a month without any issues.

On the podcast Jay had asked what we are going to do since our regular routine was hitting around 10 thrift stores every week. Honestly we don’t have any answers, but we are reaching out to people, to see if they will ship us inventory, and just try and maintain as long as possible. As someone who graduated from college at the end of 2008, I felt the brunt of the economic meltdown and was always cautious about how we grew this business. I still work fulltime, while my partner handles the business fulltime, and since my job covers a majority of our expenses, and let’s me save some every month, it’s not full on panic mode yet, for us. However that could change depending on how long this lasts.

Most of us on this forum have opportunity piles to list during this time. But with eBay now offering 50,000 listings free to store subscribers, they probably are taking a hit in new listings. I imagine big sellers have interrupted supply chains and also big sellers would have lots of employees and a warehouse so if not considered essential business would need to shut down. And there probably are some sellers who were better at keeping up with listing everything so don’t have piles and now thrift stores, garage sales, auctions etc… are closed. Perhaps this decrease in fresh inventory will hurt or help depending on competition and who knows how buyers will react–more time at home to shop online but more worry about finances probably. My sales have been slow this week but were ok last week.

3/15/20 – 3/21/20

101 orders, many multiples
Gross Sales – $2111.97
# of current listings – 14,844

Been super busy these past few weeks, haven’t had a chance to comment in the threads. Beginning of last week was super slow, I thought it would be the first time in ~6 months where I finally went under 2k gross for the week, but I had a few of my repeat buyers save my ass with a some larger combined sales.

This current week has felt back to normal, around $2,500 so far for this week and still have the rest of the day to make some sales.

I’m super glad that I have a huge back log of items to list, all thrift stores and local auctions around me have been postponed. All the online auctions I usually source from has now been stormed by flippers with no inventory or place to source, causing the bids to increase way past my normal price range.

So for the foreseeable future, I will be doing no sourcing at all and will just tackling my huge backlog of items. I should have enough back stock to last my the better part of a year, so I’m just hoping that everything will be back to normal by then.

New years resolution was that I would not thrift while unlisted stuff was lying around. I am so regretting that now and envy those of you with death piles to work on. I also have consignors but they are nearly all elderly, so can’t source there either. We just sold our rental property in OBX and on Friday 3-19 we managed to beat the border being closed to non resident homeowners with 1 hour to spare so we could get in and get our owner’s closets emptied. Back home in PA now, we’ve been getting some of our meals from Home Chef. I have bought enough that they have gifted me free boxes to give to two friends. If anyone here would like to try it, email me at veranda.estate@gmail.com and I’ll send them your e-mail address – a free box generally gets you 2-3 meals for 2 people. Who doesn’t like free food! And the boxes are great for shipping stuff too.

Thanks for the great podcast!
On Friday I put anything in my store over $30 @ 20% off and sales picked up.
Sold a couple of, “It was a Bear to pack” items. SHOooWEEEEEEE! Frameless Antique Wall Mirror and a Vintage German Poster in Glass. SO GRATEFUL FOR THE SALES.

Making Custom Boxes is always rewarding when…I put the label on….done!

Keeping busy with inventory. Upgraded to an iPhone in the fall and I must say, some of my older listings’ photos look pretty Gnarly…lol, SO I’m re-photographing one or two here and there.

Life is Good today 🙂

Ryanne & Jay, you are much appreciated