I Continue to Astound Myself by Not Going Broke

I Continue to Astound Myself by Not Going Broke
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More Angry Stupid People


Please refer to Angry Stupid People if you haven't read it already before going on.


I continue to astound myself by not going broke. I find this very impressive and I'm not quite certain how I continue to manage it. I say this because I work part-time for minimum wage, pay for rent and utilities and food and internet and entertainment and still haven't yet managed to need to have a serious wake-up call (merely a minor mathematical one). I am scheduled to work between twenty (absolute minimum) and thirty-seven (maximum) hours per week. I usually actually work between twenty-two (minimum) and thirty-nine (absolute maximum) hours per week depending on how many shifts I pick up and how long we end up staying after closing each night to do cash-up. The number of hours I pick up, obviously, goes down in direct correlation to how many I am originally scheduled for. I would say though that I work an average of thirty hours a week. For minimum wage.

I make approximately eight hundred dollars in a month, more than half of which goes toward bills and a further quarter to one third to food and the rest I think maybe gets converted into oxygen through photosynthesis or something but I'm not sure about that last part. It must go somewhere. But like my poor sneakers nightly wanderings what happens to it will remain a mystery until Rick Charette writes a song about it.

At first I managed this discrepancy by sheer denial and slowly leeching away my savings. But late last spring I realized that the denial was no longer cutting it and I faced the prospect that in a few months I would probably be forced to be a sell-out and work for Wal-Mart if I couldn't find another job before then. It so happened that at that time I suggested to my friend that he could try to make money on the internet as many other people seemed to be able to do. I decided to see, just to check, if this were feasible.

I definitely do not go about this the same way as other people. From what I can tell other people mostly buy stuff in the real world and then sell it online. That's fine. Obviously works for certain folks. All the ones who wrote all those promising books, at least. But I figured that if there's a book about it there's probably thousands of dummies trying to replicate the same trick. And I didn't want to be a dummy. No one has ever considered me to be anything of the sort and I wasn't about to start ruining my image now.

So when I realized that I could take the knowledge that I had amassed earning fake money on GaiaOnline and potentially turn it into real money I decided to go for it. I found something on eBay that I figured I should be able to sell on Amazon for a decent profit margin. I bought it, it was shipped to my house, I checked it out and then listed it up on Amazon. It sold within a day or two and I shipped it to the customer and immediately bought another one. And the next time I bought two. And then a different item. And then I started to buy a dozen items at a time and by the end of the summer I had made over a thousand dollars in net profit with not a lot of work or time expended.

I not only had kept myself from needing to get a second job but I also started to build up a little savings somehow. And then my roommate decided to shut off the internet. I bought a laptop so I could use it at the Library. I started looking for another apartment. I got kicked out of my apartment. I was going to up and move to Georgia. I ended up going to Georgia but only for a week. I managed to cover the cost of the trip by cleaning my brother's (the person I was staying with in Georgia) house. I immediately moved into a new apartment (complete with deposit and first-month's rent in advance.) We had to buy stuff for the apartment. I was flat broke and working constantly and we didn't yet have internet.

We finally get internet, just after Thanksgiving. I can start selling things in the small window of online shopping time remaining before Christmas. And I do. Quite quickly. The only problem is is that I need all of that money for bills. I wont have anything left to reinvest. And my company has suddenly decided to go to bi-weekly pay-checks. And I work all of December and more seemingly endlessly with only one day off every seven days. And one night my right palm is itching fiercely at work. My coworker comments that this, according to an old wives tale, means that I'm going to come into some money. K'van calls a couple days later. I've gotten mail at my old apartment. It's a letter from a previous employer claiming that I was owed close to three hundred dollars in past wages. Reinvestment money.

Really I'd love to do even more selling online. I'm contemplating asking my oldest brother for five hundred dollars for a few months just so I can have more money to work with buying things to sell online. I could pay him back with interest like venture capitalism and still end up with more money for myself. Ideally I would like to make enough money that I can live off of it. Maybe even enough to justify writing a book.

But! That was not the whole point of this post. The point was to explain that not only do I work in retail sales in the real world I also sell things online. And everyone is an idiot on the internet. I, admittedly, have done some idiotic things online (over bid on some items on accident and such). But so do other people. I liked to read through the comments of stores I was buying from or who were competing with me in selling. And I noticed that a lot of people were angry about things which were clearly stated in the description or even title of the item as though it were the sellers fault for sending them what they actually ordered instead of what they thought they ordered. These people were angry because they were stupid.

I mention this specific example because I wanted to say that a few days before Christmas I got my first negative feedback on Amazon. The buyer gave me two out of five stars. And I'm going to quote the post they made on Amazon rather than the customer inquiry they sent to my e-mail (though the message is much the same because the initial e-mail made me feel slightly homicidal): "The item listed said it was a BLACK controller and everything, but in the comments the seller put White controller well why would you list it as BLACk if you are going to put in comments that it is actually not what it is being advertised as. It was a false sale and i feel like i have been tricked into buying something i didnt really want."
To which I responded: "For the same reason other sellers list differently-colored products: because Amazon does not have a heading for every color of product. It was not my intention to mislead anyone. I sent an item exactly the same as the heading except that it was white in color, as noted in the description. I would be more than happy to exchange the white bundle for a black one if that is the customer's desire."

Allow me to explain if it was a little convoluted. I sell both black and white of this particular controller except Amazon doesn't actually have a place specifically for the white one so I list it under the description that matches the closest. And since I also sell black ones I will put up two listings, one that specifically states that it's actually the same controller in white. She bought the listing that stated it was white so I sent her what she ordered- a white controller. This was not, however, what she thought she ordered and so she became angry.

So I responded to the feedback to set her straight (albeit in a rather cramped manner as there was a severe character limit). I almost wish I hadn't. Almost. Because two days after her feedback I got feedback from another person who had ordered from me in early december. Their comment was concise down to three words. I couldn't have stated it so elegantly myself without a great-deal of thought. They gave me five out of five stars and their words were: "Met expectations exactly."

And I think I'll end on that note: "Met expectations exactly."