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I had a moment of reflection sitting in my hotel room in Chicago Sunday night, with a suitcase full of my purchases from the first day of the library sale and a hotel luggage cart’s worth of more stuff from the half price day of the sale. Six or seven massive box sets (a couple of them over 15 pounds) and a few boxes worth of smaller sets, plus some books and DVD’s. I had come to the city for the National card show, which had finished earlier that day. I hadn’t been there. I accomplished almost everything I wanted to at the card show in about four hours spread over Friday and Saturday. I spent a lot more time and money at the library sale. Now it was time to figure out how I was going to get all this stuff (and myself) home and somehow, maybe, eventually, get the stuff I bought listed and sold. Was I really going to make money on this? How long would it take? How much more of my tiny apartment was going to be lost to this random crap? I was impressed with myself. I went for it, no doubt about that. But I was also questioning all my life’s decisions. I got out the pen and paper (how I always do my best thinking) and hatched a plan for how I was going to handle all of this on Monday. Then I headed out to a jazz club to celebrate and soak in the city a little bit more on my next to last night. Wonderful city. Very walkable and great food and culture. I’m sure the wind is horrific in winter though.
I woke up early enough Monday morning that I was back in the hotel room by about noon with everything I thought I would need. I’m not a morning person but the shift from eastern time to central helped me multiple times on this trip. My first stop that morning was to a CVS to grab a soft measuring tape and a bathroom scale. I pay for the CVS care pass membership monthly ($5.33) which gives you a $10 reward and 20% off CVS brand items plus they are always offering 30 or 40 percent off full priced item coupons. I guess the math works out for CVS somehow, but I paid just $7.88 for my bathroom scale and soft measuring tape which felt like robbery.
I dumped that stuff in the room and went to grab a healthy lunch and some less healthy snacks. I needed some pastry. I was going to have a long day packing and packing is always better with pastry. There was a Staples a short walk from the hotel and I measured the biggest box sets then headed over there. I always have a few bucks in Staples rewards in my account since you can recycle ink cartridges at $2 a pop as long you spend a small amount on ink every few months. Rewards have paid for my shipping supplies for years and I use all the good stuff — Dymo shipping labels, Duck shipping tape, Scotch magic tape. This time my rewards paid for the majority of the cost of two 16 x 16 x 16 boxes, a roll of shipping tape with a nice dispenser and two rolls of bubble wrap. I paid in cash for some reason (don’t usually carry cash, so I guess I was just trying to get rid of it) and I believe I spent about $8 after all the rewards. I got a good laugh from of the hotel doorman when I walked into the hotel lobby with two huge boxes and Staples bags.
But once I was back in my room, I realized I was going to need way more bubble wrap and the kind with the bigger bubbles. Unfortunately all Staples had in large bubble wrap was a $30 125 foot roll. I hated paying that with a passion, but I didn’t want to waste time price shopping or finding another store, and I was in too deep at this point to change my plan. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m wondering if I could have done pack and ship at UPS and what that might have cost me.
But we’ll never know and I’m okay with it because I love the whole process of packing and shipping so much. It feels like putting in the work more than any other element of selling on eBay (which rarely feels like work to me) and I had a blast figuring out how to flip and twist and turn and shove all these box sets to make them fit within my two big shipping boxes. In the first box I started with the largest box sets — Bach 333 (17″ x 12″ x 11″), Yo-Yo Ma 30 Years Outside The Box (12 x 12 x 7) and Georges Szell Columbia (11 x 9 x 6). In the second box I started with a few fat ones (Menuhin Century and Nikolaus Harnoncourt each 13 x 13 x 4) and put carefully wrapped small sets and Notable Trials Libraries books on top. Small is probably the wrong word to describe those sets, a lot of them had 10 or 15 or 20 CDs. I started adding layers of bubble wrap as I went along. It took me a good amount of snacks and a lot of sweat, but after an hour or two, everything was in the boxes and I had even freed up some space in my suitcase by tossing in dirty clothes and whatever other extra stuff I could find. My handy bathroom scale informed me that each box weighed about 80 pounds and by the end of all this, I was definitely feeling all that weight as I wiggled boxes around my hotel room like a professional shipping demon. Put together, both boxes weighmore than one craig rex! Only one small problem. There was a ton of empty space in the top of each box. I didn’t think to measure how much space, but whatever the amount, it was too much. Maybe a third of the way down? All empty space. I had visions of what would happen with all that empty space as my boxes made their way back to New Jersey, and it was going to get ugly.
But somehow I knew exactly what to do. I walked to Target and bought a few cheap pillows (3x $4 each). The hotel doorman (still the same guy) started howling laughing as soon as I walked in the door with an armful of pillows and he said “Whatever you’re doing, I don’t need to know.” After I ran through every one-liner about burying a body, I fessed up to what was going on. I figured he knew the area better than me, so making friends couldn’t hurt, and he was bored enough or friendly enough to pretend he cared about all this as he worked another long doorman shift. I went back to my room and stuffed pillows into boxes like I had done it a million times before when this was my very first time. Of course everything fit perfectly because of the magic of cheap pillows. I had to learn this from the podcast, right?
I taped both boxes up and logged into Pirateship. I neglected to realize how expensive shipping was going to be. Almost $100 a box! Stupid dimensional overcharges! But I wasn’t going to let a couple surcharges faze me. What was $200 in the grand scheme of all this, anyway? All I had to do was print the labels, get to a UPS store and make the drop off and I was done in plenty of time to enjoy another night out in the city.
Unexpected problem #2 was no business center in the hotel, but this wasn’t a surprise. I had learned about this the night before as I hatched my crazy plan and thought about it the whole time I was out enjoying live jazz. What kind of hotel doesn’t have one of those old school business centers with a boxy inkjet printer? Is it really a hotel without a business center? Are there hotels without swimming pools and room service? But at the Cambria in the West Loop, they make do without a business center. I’d call them crooks, but the hotel was really nice and the location was a few hundred feet from a few different L stops. The hotel may not have had a business center or a scale (something else I found out I was scheming Sunday night, which is what led to my first stop at CVS, where I also thought to get the measuring tape) but the employees were happy to print out my shipping labels for me. It took a few minutes since nothing is ever easy when you’re doing bizarre things under the guise of “working” or “taking a vacation”, but I got my labels. A few snips of paper with a sad front desk scissor, a quick trip to the lobby to grab the luggage cart from my door pal (even though it was prime check-in time), a few strips of tape to put dumb paper labels onto my boxes back in the room, and I was golden. I dragged and tilted my boxes until they were on the luggage cart and dragged my boxes down the hallway to the elevator. The elevator worked and didn’t get stuck either. This was really happening!
My doorman friend did me a solid at this point. The closest UPS location by distance had closed a few months ago, but the internet was a huge liar and I wouldn’t have known this. Except I mentioned the address to my doorman buddy, who somehow knew that UPS store was closed. I have no idea why he knew this, but because he did, I changed my destination to the UPS store he recommended instead, which was only about a mile away (it is a city after all) and open a few more hours so there was no rush at all. My Lyft XL was the least eventful part of this whole sage. I had never requested one before and didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t that expensive and it was just a guy in a minivan. The driver wasn’t at all interested in my whole deal and didn’t offer to help me lift 90 and 80 pound boxes, not that I really expected that but it would have been nice. Didn’t matter because I was all adrenaline by this point. I tipped one box on its side and put one straight in. The driver swore the trunk wasn’t going to close, and I had a brief moment where I thought “what if the box rips when he closes the trunk?” but it closed with room to spare and I remembered to breathe again and got in the car. Me and my packages were on our way. The Uber driver earned their $5 tip on my $10 fare by rerouting the last few turns of our trip so I was able to unload at the corner of the UPS store. I wiggled the boxes onto the sidewalk, lurched inside with the first box and then went back to the sidewalk where box number two was…
Still there. Of course it was still there, that would be a difficult theft for a very muscular thief who would have also been very disappointed unless they also sell books and media. But wouldn’t that have been a twist to this story! I stumbled back into the UPS store with box #2, got my receipt from the clerks who could not have cared less about me or my boxes (granting that their day is full of boxes) and walked on air through the streets of Chicago back to my hotel, where I strutted in with a thumbs up for my doorman friend (still there!) and finally introduced myself to him by name and gave him a heavy $10 handshake for good measure. First time I ever tipped a doorman and maybe it wasn’t enough (or too much, or necessary) but we did it, dag nab it, and it felt like the perfect way to end the story.
My train was scheduled to leave around 5 pm on Tuesday and I decided I would make one last trip to the library before I went to Union Station. One of the volunteers at the sale had told me that the Library had a bookshop open during the week and while I was at the sale, they had showed me a few pictures of other classical box sets only available to purchase in the bookshop, which was closed during the sale. After all the money I had spent the last few days (almost $1000!), I didn’t really want or need to buy anything else, but I felt like it was important to do the work and do this one last thing. Plus, I thought maybe the bookshop might cut me a deal since I had bought so much at the library sale. Or maybe they would have leftovers that didn’t even make it out for half price day. It felt like the best way to end such a unique trip. It had to be better than checking the UPS tracking on my boxes another 437 times, at least.
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What a fun story! Very resourceful and a great experience to improve your business. If you ever had to do this again you now have the confidence to make it happen.
The closest I’ve ever come to something like this was when I was doing Amazon FBA. On vacation I found a walmart with a really good clearance section. I bought like 20 Bratz dolls and the shipping materials needed to pack them. I did the amazon FBA shipments right in my hotel room and made the labels in the business center.
J&R did an interview many years ago with a guy who went by resale rabbit. In the heyday of Amazon FBA he drove his minivan all over the country buying stuff for FBA. He ran his whole business out of his van and hotel rooms just doing big FBA shipments in every town before moving on. It was a great interview!
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Part of the fun of scavenging for us is the adventure. Having new experiences, solving problems, visiting new places. I guess its why we have more in common with the old time scavenger who sells at the flea markets out of their cars versus the new kind of scavenger who has a perfect system selling commodity items on Amazon.
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