Collections

We’ve all seen the pictures of the homes of the hoarders, the out of control individuals swallowed by the mountains of garbage that they have accumulated, but were unable to dispose of, teetering piles of rubbish concealing walls that have not seen the light of day in years.  We all agree that no, that’s not us, no way, unh uh; just keep your nose out of my garage.

Some people are compulsive sorters, labelers and shelvers in their attempts to bring their hoarding under control. My father was one such, and I have inherited those tendencies, but I like to think they are under control.  When he passed on, I looked in his garage and found shelves full of labeled compartmented trays for nuts, bolts, screws, springs, washers, set screws, cotter pins, you name it.  As a small boy I remember going to McLendon’s with him every Saturday, and every time he needed one, he bought two, just in case. I still regret sending the pop rivets off to auction.

Half the battle of collecting stuff is being able to lay your hands on it when you need it, a battle that is lost when you spend hours or days digging through your pile looking for something you knew you had, but don’t quite remember where you put it.  With tools, it’s who you loaned them to.

Half the reward you get when you sell or give away some little gubbin you’ve been sitting on all these years, like those clear yellowed Lucite Stanley replacement plastic mallet tips in the original box that have lived in my toolbox for twenty years or so, comes from the justification that you were right, see?  Let the significant others of the world roll their eyes as they will, one successful placement of a part back in the tool to which it belongs, or one new home found for the odd Harley part, even if it means transportation from one pile to another, means all the rest of them could do the same, right?  It’s even better when you make a profit on the deal!

Beyond that, though, we also benefit society when we scoop up others’ discards and preserve them for the moment they regain their value.  Each finished part represents a certain amount of labor on someone’s part, which takes energy, which can neither be lost nor destroyed as long as the part avoids the landfill or the smelter.  The trick is in knowing where to draw the line.

Every swap meet I ever attended as a seller always winds up with the pack-up-and-head-for-the-barn load, and there is always a small pile of stuff there that just doesn’t deserve to go back in my pile; I’m tired of looking at it, and nobody is ever going to want that anyway, so where’s the nearest garbage can?  One of my favorite tricks was to go to one of the other sellers and say, “Hey, I gotta go, but I want to leave this pile here in my booth as freebies that anyone who wants can take.  Would you do me a favor and toss the remainders in that garbage can over there for me when you leave?”  They’d always say, “Sure, no problem!”, but they’d also have that look on their face that said, “Yeah, sure, after I dig through it first and see how much I want!”  Either way, the stuff would be gone and I’d be happy.

But the thing to remember is that everything you keep in your house or garage has a story, and everything has a hook that latches on and drags you down.  Some things, like your favorite motorcycle, have big hooks in deep while others, like the spare part for a tool you no longer own, have small ones that are easily dislodged.  When you pick up  a thing and consider it, and can’t remember where you got it and why you kept it, that’s a sign that you kept it too long, or never needed it in the first place, and an invitation to send it on down the road.  The beauty of Ebay and Craigslist and all their competitors is that they give people ways to get rid of stuff the best way, by turning them into cash.  The problem is when you can’t quite figure out how to do that. 

It is also true that, even if you give stuff away or send a load to the scrap metal yard, it feels almost as good as if you had sold it, because the hooks pulling out of your shoulders lighten your load an infinitesimal but noticeable amount.  Giving something to a friend who needs it returns double the pleasure to you as you do good and feel good about it.  That’s better than money.

We are marked by the things we collect as we become known by them.  Just let one Singing Bass show up on your wall, and the avalanche of beer bongs, fishing plaquards, NASCAR posters and cutesy country sayings on softwood is inevitable.  It’s like clickbait on Facebook.

And then there’s the problem of what happens to your collection after you die.  That old saw about “I want to live long enough to become a problem for my kids” takes its meaning posthumously.  The real difference, I suspect, is that one departed person’s pile is dealt with by use of an auctioneer, while another one requires a dumpster.  It could be considered a measure of success in your accumulation, an affirmation, if you will, of your judgement and discriminating taste if the auction catalog is larger than the dump load.

So the wisdom nuggeted here, if any, is that collections are nice, when they bring you pleasure and increase in value (hah!), but it is also nice to thin them from time to time.  There was a guy, who made a good living hauling garbage in Portland for many years and accumulated a collection of motorcycles, mostly Harleys, that he rode for around 500 miles each before stashing them in his collection in original unmolested condition.  As you can imagine, the auction when he died drew a lot of attention and brought many high prices for the bikes when they sold.  You could also imagine the costs associated with storage of that many bikes in a way to preserve them, and how that alone would force the heirs to dispose of the collection, let alone the buildings that housed them.  You can imagine what will happen to Jay Leno’s Garage when he passes on.
There’s a collection of cars down in Punta Gorda, Florida, on display in a museum euphemistically called the Muscle Car Museum, even though it’s mostly GM cars, few Fords or Mopars.  It’s one man’s collection that outlived him by becoming large enough to draw a crowd in its own right, like the LeMay Collection in South Tacoma.

But it’s probably safe to say that most of our collections are not going to wind up in a museum.  It’s also probably safe to say that most of our collections are too large, and could stand to be thinned a bit.  I tell my kids that, if they’re lucky, I’ll get the dump run done in advance.  The rest is up to them.  He who dies with the most toys wins, right?

Feel Good when you do good

One of the fun things I like to do on Ebay is give out refunds.  If it seems counter-intuitive to pay money to someone and call that fun, here’s how it works.

When I list an item, such as a parts catalog for a given model Harley, on Ebay I always estimate the weight on the high side a bit.  I've learned to do that because, when it sells to a domestic customer, shipping is free.  Of course, that’s a joke, “free shipping”.  Somebody has to pay.  In this country, thanks to some obscure law, a book ships via media mail, which is about $3.00 if it weighs less than a pound, so that much comes off the top when it is sold with an ad that says “free shipping”.  In China, the government pays for export shipping, meaning the taxpayers of China subsidize it, which partly explains why stuff is so cheap at Harbor Freight, and MOR, and Amazon, and so many other companies.  I find the cost of shipping in advance by using the weight and size, and two zip codes from opposite corners of the country, like 98058 and 33301, on the “Calculate a Price” option on the Postal Service website.

But foreign sales, on the other hand, are always done with calculated shipping, because the cost can vary so much from country to country.  I’ve repatriated Norton owner’s manuals to Britain, sold Harley parts to many folks in Australia, and camera equipment all over Europe, and I’ve taken a bath on the shipping enough times to not even bother to offer free shipping outside our borders.  Puerto Rico, Alaska and Hawaii will even cost you money if you’re not careful, so that’s why the shipping weight is a bit high and foreign shipments are calculated on every item, to provide that wiggle room.

I don’t mention it in the ads, but any time I sell something with calculated shipping, and the extra weight brings in a bit of extra cash, I always shoot the buyer a small refund of the difference between that and what it would have cost me to send it domestically, out of the blue.  I get some amusing replies when that happens, and great feedback, of course, enough to make it clear that refunds like these don’t normally happen on Ebay.  When you buy a ten dollar item for five bucks, but see he wants seven more for shipping, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to add up them numbers.

I’ve been doing this for years now, every so often, and I’m just now starting to pick up on a pattern of behavior followed by reward that is self-reinforcing and accumulative.  It goes like this:

I sell a book for $20, with free shipping.  The cover price is $52, so the buyer sees that and feels good about getting it for $20, even if he’s in New Zealand and Ebay tells him that $20 book is going to cost him $36.95 with shipping.  So he sends me the $36.95, but, much to his surprise, he gets a message back saying, “Hey, the shipping was a bit less than estimated, so you get a $5 refund.  Thanks!”  That’s known in the business as a Pleasant Surprise, also known as a Positive Memorable Customer Experience in the lingo of college trained experts whose job it is to complicate things.  So the buyer gets a smile on his or her face.  Often, I get immediate feedback in the form of a message saying, “Hey, thanks for the refund!  You’re all right!” which puts a smile on my face, too.  So the good feeling bounces from Renton, Washington to Aukland, New Zealand and back in a few electronic seconds, and puts smiles on two faces at once.  And what I realized was that, in my case, the anticipation of the good feeling preceded the actual refund.  I got that warm glow inside and a smile on my face just thinking about what a surprise it is going to be for this buyer when he sees that refund.  It’s like chopping mental firewood:  You get a warm glow thinking about it, then again when you actually do it, and yet again when the buyer responds!  That is well worth the $5 in my mind.

I guess that’s what the whole “Pay it Forward” thing is all about.  Unexpected good deeds reward the giver as well as the receiver of those deeds.  And if you accept that thoughts as well as deeds are energy that cannot be lost or destroyed then all our good thoughts and deeds become karma or grace or whatever you want to call it, and float out there to join all the others to help fight off all the negative crap that’s out there, too.

So get out there and do good deeds, and feel good about yourself.  What’s not to like about that idea?  :-{)}

Five Things you should never say in a For Sale Ad

I’ve written a few ads that sold a few things over the years, and I’m getting a feel for what works and what doesn’t.  It occurred to me to write some of these things down to share with others, and save you the time and trouble of learning the hard way.

First, a bit of philosophy:  We sell things for many reasons.  Maybe we don’t like that thing anymore, or it doesn’t fit, or we bought a newer, better one or we stole it or whatever.  Once the decision has been made to sell something, we are immediately faced with two questions:  How fast do we want it to sell, and how much do we think it is worth?  Most of the time, the answer is, “I’m in no hurry, and I want to get the most I can out of this thing.”  That’s the best position for you to be in as a seller.

How much it’s worth is a whole nother essay that I’m not going to try to slip in here.  Two things, though:  Forget NADA or Kelley blue book for car values, check the WA DOL website for access to the official state valuation service, called Price Digest.  The numbers you will get from them are lower than NADA or Kelly because they are based on sales reports from every sale reported to the state, both private and dealership, where the NADA guys are just reporting dealer sales.  Kelly’s Private Party values are estimates, I believe.  The other thing is that Craigslist will only tell you the asking price for a thing, but EBay, if you have an account, will tell you actual sale prices in most cases.  The difference between asking prices on Craigslist for cars and bikes and actual sale prices on EBay are dramatic.

Then you have to ask, “Am I willing and able to ship this thing to a buyer, or do I want them to come lay cash in my hand and take it away?”  A related question is, “how much does it weigh, and who gets to pay for shipping?”  The answer to these questions defines your sales approach, as in EBay vs Craigslist, or some other venue.  It’s a given in this day and age that print advertising is pretty much reduced to little old men and women browsing the back pages of the Little Nickel with their reading glasses on, and not worth your time or money as a sales outlet, generally.  The various Auto Trader magazines are better, because people pay for them, meaning they are more likely to be a serious buyer, but even they have driven their cost up and dropped the run-till-it-sells approach that facilitates my favored reverse auction pricing strategy.  Even if print ads are your chosen method, though, good wording is still, if not even more, critical, since you’re paying by the word and each one must work for your money.

So, now you’re ready to sell, and you have the item all cleaned up and presentable, because you know that good pictures are everything in online advertising. Clean cars sell for more than dirty cars.  Craigslist used to allow hosted pictures in their ads, the ones that filled the screen with nice full color pics of whatever it is, but they got tired of sending customers to Photobucket or one of the other hosting services and cut that out.  Now most pictures on Craigslist and EBay look pretty much the same.  I used to think that cell phone pictures were a bad way to go, but even those have been getting better and better as camera quality improves with each new generation of phone.

So you have to clean things up to sell them, and you need a good clear picture set that is taken against a neutral background so your pictures have no competing images to distract the buyer or confuse the outline of the thing.  The last thing you want is someone trying to figure out what part of town you’re in based on the territorial view behind your car for sale.  I like to use the closed garage door or a hedge or something that is uniform in color.  For indoor pictures I use a pastel bedsheet hanging on the wall, or a sheet of tissue paper on a table to blank the background as much as possible.

Ok, now it’s all cleaned up, you’ve taken your pictures, and now you have to sit down and write the ad.  So here’s what not to say:

1.  Price is firm. – This is a dangerous thing to say, unless you are absolutely sure your asking price is low enough to attract a buyer.  Typically, in a barter transaction, which a private sale most resembles, even though the thing being bartered is cash, you have to leave your buyer some wiggle room, and you need to reward them for taking the time to actually show up and look at your thing.  When you say the price is firm the message becomes, “Don’t even bother me if you are willing to pay $50 less than the $9000 I’m asking, because I’m telling you in advance I’m not willing to take it, so don’t waste your time.”  Variations on this theme are, “I’m in no hurry to sell, or I don’t have to sell”, all of which may be true, but the buyer doesn’t need to know that.  So that’s the first principle of ad writing:

Only tell the buyer what they need to know to make a decision to buy your thing, and no more than that.  I take that one step further and try with each ad to tell the whole story of the thing for sale, but that can lead to verbosity and an overload of superfluous detail, as in this sentence, so observe restraint as much as possible.

For example, the following, while true, could actually reduce your chances of selling the thing, in this case a motorcycle:  “…Owned by an 1%er motorcycle club member who only rode it back and forth to his lawyers office, and to and from the clubhouse on meeting nights, and the drags on weekends.”  The foregoing sentence can be entirely replaced with the words, “low mileage”, and that’s all the buyers really need to hear, isn’t it?

2.  Another thing that’s the kiss of death in ad copy is, in the case of a vehicle, “No title”.  No title on a motorcycle means you’re trying to sell a pile of parts and call it a bike.  The state patrol is going to want to inspect the bike before they will allow you to get a title, and they won’t do that until you’ve spent the time and money making it road-worthy, and why would you do that only to take a chance that it was stolen, and you lose it?  If it’s a car or truck, without a title it is a liability to you that you can’t even donate to charity or scrap it out legally without a bunch of effort.  So get the title before you try to sell anything that needs one, or be ready to accept bottom dollar, rather than top.

3. “…or trade for whatever.”  Now the message is, “I want to buy a whatever-it-is , but I don’t have the money, so I gotta sell my whatever-it-ain’t to buy my new whatever, which tells you something about my general approach to life, which is, always look for the easy way out, so rather than sell my whatever-it-is for as much cash as possible, then searching for the best deal on a new whatever-it-ain’t, now I’m gonna restrict my potential buyer list to only those who might have one of the whatever I want, and they also want whatever I’m selling, and their whatever is worth way less than my whatever, otherwise why bother, so now I need someone who fills all my conditions, plus wants to give me a helluva deal.”  Yeah, right, you can count the potential customers for that deal on the smaller toes of one foot, probably.

It is always, always better to sell your thing outright and use the proceeds to buy a new thing.  Trades and swaps always devalue the item, unless one of the traders is a fool, and cash talks better than any line of patter.  This is especially true when trading in a vehicle at the dealership.  By the way, did you know that the average markup on a used vehicle sold off a car lot is $2500.00?

4. “… must sell, or desperate, or getting divorced, or married, or having a baby, or all three at the same time…”  All bad wording choices, for sure.  “Must sell” is code for “I’m ready to give away this piece of junk, sock it to me, daddy”.  If you’re really up against it, just drop the price, and say nothing.  Drop it a little bit every day or every week, and you’ll quickly find out what the bottom dollar is.  Any personal information included in the ad is too much information, especially the getting divorced one.  That scares people off because they’re afraid they’ll say the wrong thing and set you off on a tantrum about your ex, or go postal all over them, and who needs the drama?  Keep it about the car, or the T-shirt, or whatever you are actually trying to sell.

5. “I know what it’s worth, don’t bother to lowball me, Blue Book says it’s worth x amount…”  Here’s a great recent example from Craigslist:   “I have this beautiful bike, it's in great condition but the clutch handle needs to be replaced, not the clutch itself, the handle needs replaced because i fell on it in my garage. It's a total of like 15 or 20 dollars and 5 minutes of work, all you need is a wrench. Anyways I'm selling/trading because I don't have the time for it anymore and it's just sitting in my yard rotting away. never laid down or wrecked and she's a beast. Call or text anytime, im down for a trade or just straight sell. This bike books for over 2 grand in the condition it's in. Just want it gone. $800.”

Heh, heh, looking at the picture on Craigslist, it’s a thoroughly thrashed twenty plus year old Kawasaki Concours of indeterminate mileage (he doesn’t say) with all the fairings and saddlebags removed, making it into a very strange looking naked bike, and he knocked it over in his garage but now it’s rotting away in the back yard, probably for the last several years, but it’s worth 2 grand because the book says so.  “All you need is 20 dollars and five minutes of work” is the most obvious bit of disingenuous mendacity you would expect, and the natural reaction is to turn the page.  Not a good way to sell anything.

Even if the whatever-it-is is really nice, and the price is good, and all is well, save all discussion of price till you have a buyer standing in front of you with cash in their hands.  That’s when you lay it on, whatever it takes to close the deal, but that's another story...  :-{)}