Shop Your Way to a Greener World

Environmentally-friendly practices usually coincide with sensible economics. Curio City reuses every possible shipping carton primarily because a virgin box costs $0.50 or more. I reuse 90% of the packing material that comes my way, and I wad up the Braintree Forum when I need more. Most of the little trash that I do generate goes to curbside recycling, so virtually nothing ever reaches the SEMASS trash-to-energy plant. I use USPS carrier pickup not just to save me a trip, but also to avoid standing in line with international shipments. Two of the three light bulbs in my “warehouse” are CFLs. (I keep whacking my head and breaking the third one, so I went back to a cheaper incandescent there.) I turn off the lights and my computer at night not out of altruism, but to cut the electric bill. It’s sensible and easy for a tiny home business to be “green”.

Mega-conglomerates have a tougher row to hoe in their quest to appear green.

My bank, RBS Citizens, has the Greensense program. In exchange for accepting electronic statements instead of paper, I get a debit card with a picture of a tree on it. The core of the card is made from cornstarch instead of plastic (the skin is obviously still plastic, and corn is an environmentally destructive crop, but let’s not dig too far beneath that nice tree). They pay me 10 cents every time I use my debit card if I make the minimum 10 monthly transactions (I usually don’t). I don’t understand how swiping my debit card is “greener” than using cash money or my credit card, but I suppose I must be spending my way to a better world. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a tree on my card, would there?

Now UPS is “Introducing a greener way to ship!”. Well, that’s nice. UPS's enormous fleet of trucks and airplanes is probably among the biggest carbon emitters on the planet. They must be using alternative fuels or electric vehicles, right?

Uh, no. They are voluntarily buying carbon offsets before cap-and-trade legislation compels them do to so, because “shipping your packages produces emissions that many believe contribute to global climate change.” (Notice the care not to offend global warming deniers). Cap’n Trade is the dubious practice of paying companies that don’t pollute for the right to do so yourself, on the theory that the overall cap will reduce aggregate emissions. To be fair, UPS didn’t invent that questionable scheme. Arguably, they deserve congratulations for doing it before they’re legally compelled.

Here’s the fun part: For “as little as” 5 cents per package, anyone can “ship carbon-neutral”. That’s right: They’re asking their customers to pick up the cost of the carbon offsets. If I tick a box to pay their premium, UPS will add a logo to my customers’ tracking emails showing them what swell companies we are. And, for a limited time only, UPS will match the first $1 million in contributions that their shippers make. That’s right: They will graciously chip in toward their own offsets. Gosh, what a great company!

What’s really sad is that I’m actually tempted to pay for their emblem. Consumers are easily hoodwinked into thinking that they can shop their way to a brighter future. And so we have this week’s new reason to hate UPS. Here’s their page if you want to see their side of the story, complete with hummingbirds and rainbows.


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Remember a few weeks ago I said that all of my medical bills are paid in full and the bill collectors have all been caged? It started with a colonoscopy in November 2008. Before I scheduled the procedure Blue Cross assured us that as long as I’m over 50 and my doc recommended it, it’s 100% covered. Unfortunately, the clinic entered my insurance number wrong. Just as a paperwork mishap in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil led Mr Archibald Buttle to suffer for the sins of arch-terrorist Archibald Tuttle, we’ve been fighting the system ever since.

To date, I’ve paid $489.36 to four separate companies for assorted deductibles and copays. Today I got a new bill for $105 for “unpaid copays”. None of these bills ever come with itemized explanations, of course, so each new bill requires another call to Blue Cross – an ordeal in itself. I wonder if they can explain how our supposed $20 copay got to $105.

So the insurance struggle resumes. I swear two things: First, I will die before I ever consent to another diagnostic procedure of any kind. And second, the conservatives who oppose health care reform are gibbering idiots. I want to see the insurance companies dissolved and all their executives hanged.

The Halloween Ball

It’s funny, how products sometimes blow up out of nowhere. I’ve carried novelty golf balls since the beginning. A few months back somebody bought enough Halloween balls to propel that style onto the bestseller list (they do sell year-round). This week a blogger in Italy picked up on them (see the 29 Ottobre 2009 post). I can’t read Italian, but I do know that her link works. Links are good. Creating product links is part of this blog's reason for existing. Even if none of her readers buy anything from me, that link will raise the page’s stature in the all-seeing eyes of Google. Halloween is over, so that should be the end of it…but who knows where it will really go from there?

I’ve explained that I don’t particularly like international sales. I lose money on the currency conversion, the charge processing cost is higher, the shipments take considerable time to prepare, and I am supposed to hand the parcels to a postal employee, which means either scheduling a carrier pickup or (shudder) standing in line. Last week I stood in line with a package to Denmark and one to Canada among my domestic shipments. One clerk was working the counter while three others bustled around officiously. The working clerk was tied up with an old woman who apparently had set aside her whole afternoon for the post office. Eventually a manager-type came out and started trying to steer people toward the automated postal center. He couldn't take my international packages, though – those had to be handed to a counter clerk, he said, and he couldn’t hand them off for me. :rolleyes: OK, whatever. Finally I made it to the front. The clerk took my packages, and then told me that he couldn’t scan in labels purchased online because those are already “accepted”, technically. From now on, I’m going with carrier pickup, even though it adds an extra day.

Which brings up a new reason to hate both Canada and UPS – a twofer! A customer paid $39.98 for two sets of Whisky Stones – which is to say, rocks. Postage to Canada was $16.15, bringing it to $56.13. Converting to Canadian funds made that $60.76. And then Canadian Customs hit him for $36.49 in import duties. Bottom line: $97.25 for 18 pieces of rock. They’re nice rocks, but wow.

I strengthened my international shipping wording. Truth is that this seems to happen to everyone who chooses UPS Standard to Canada. USPS shipments are less likely to be intercepted. I don’t know whether that’s Canada’s fault or UPS’s, and so I shall hate them equally this week.

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I went back to manual click bids after seeing some weird money allocations from Google’s conversion optimizer. I only had the nerve to stick with it for four days. My daily spend rose by about $4 per day. On three of those days I got the usual 50-75 clicks. On the last day I got 83 – a little better than average. I did make three international sales during the period, which is also more than average…but that’s hardly desirable. I think I’d have to run this for at least a month to draw any conclusions, and that’s a more expensive experiment than I care to perform. Maybe I’ll try it again during the slow season. Or maybe not. I don’t really like surrendering control.

October was a phenomenal month. I wish that the changeover from 2-LED to 3-LED lighted caps could go on forever. Sadly, the old ones are selling out, and that’s going to take some wind out of November’s sails.

Of course it all comes down to November and December, but here’s what it looks like going in. Remember, this year’s plan is +25% growth (reduced from 33% when the economy collapsed).

For October:

Total income: +58.0%
Total COGS: +61.2%
Payroll: +232.5%
Net Income (Profit): -50.1%

The YTD numbers:

Total income: +24.2%
Total COGS: +21%
Payroll: +44.2%
Net Income (Profit): -37.4%

I continue to steer more money into my paycheck at the expense of my year-end profit -- not the optimal tax strategy, but I need every penny while Anne is unemployed. COGS is rising more slowly than income. And income is very near my 25% growth target. Pretty good numbers all around.

The next two months will decide next year’s plan. Tentatively, I’ve set it at 30% growth, but I might lower that if Christmas is a bust.

Paper Poverty

I first looked into the Medical Security Program (see last week’s post) right after Anne was laid off. Our income during their six-month lookback was too high then. Now it’s eight months later. Our COBRA subsidy is expiring, I’ve ruled out Commonwealth Care as a lifeline, and Anne’s January employment income no longer counts. The MSP is nearly out of money; I need to try for a piece of it before it dries up.

It’s going to be tight, but we’re pretty close to the state’s income cap (4x the poverty line). That's the sweet spot that everyone wants in this economy: Poor enough to tap some of the vast pools of government money sloshing around, but not so poor as to be seriously deprived. As soon as Anne fills in a couple of blanks and exhumes some documentation, I can mail in the application. I’m nervous about showing them exactly how much freelance income she’s earned, but we have honestly reported it and forfeited unemployment checks every time she bills a client. I do not intend to deceive or cheat anyone.

While I was researching all of this I learned that only businesses with six or more employees are subject to the unemployment tax that funds the MSP. Kraken Enterprises will be spared next year’s 40% increase in that tax, so I can afford to raise my payroll percentage from 18.75 to 19% (incidentally paying a smidgeon more in employment taxes, too). That’s right: effectively immediately, I’m giving myself another tiny raise! It diverts roughly $150 a year from my profits to my paychecks -- three bucks a week, woohoo!. It also takes me a small step closer to my long-time goal of devoting 20% of sales to payroll (I started at 15%, IIRC).

In semi-related personal news, Anne finally straightened out a medical billing error from last November. Everybody’s paid off, all of our copays and deductibles are met, and the bill collectors have stopped harassing us. Remember the story I told you about Blue Cross paying 85 cents of a $270.85 bill? Well, Anne shamed them into waiving the deductible even though we really did owe it. That’s right; she appealed for mercy on humanitarian grounds and won! How astonishing is that?

Curio City’s sales drooped early this week. As an experiment, I’m letting Google’s automatic “conversion optimizer” override my manual keyword bids. Their algorithm sets per-click bids based on my historical cost per conversion and each keyword’s conversion percentage -- basically replacing my intuition with their formula. Of course it’s designed to maximize Google’s revenue, so I’m watching costs closely. My daily spend has indeed risen. The jury is out on whether sales will go up commensurately. I'll reserve judgment for a week.

Now it's time to violate my open-to-buy budget for Christmas inventory. I’m already $350 in the red. I have three big new-product orders that I'd like to place ASAP and another huge one coming up in mid November; this is beyond routine reorders. I’ve said before that I’m more of a manager than an entrepreneur -- I’m most comfortable following budgets and keeping numbers in the black. But to succeed I need to break out of my comfort zone. It’s time to place bets on holiday hits, use the credit card float, and hope that new products start selling before the bills potentially expose me to usurious credit card interest rates. This high-stakes juggling would be fun if my own money weren’t on the line.