Lowest Common Denominators

A few vendors try to support their retailers and fight the evil discounters with minimum pricing agreements. You have to sign one to do business with them. If you violate it by selling below the minimum, they'll cut you off from future shipments. As someone who's seen way too many good products ruined by discounters' race to the bottom, I approve. 

Even fewer vendors actually enforce their Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) agreements. When one manufacturer's crawler found Curio City in violation on some of their products, I got a polite email reminder. Ordinarily I would grumble and comply, and that would be that. This time, though, I pushed back. I told the sales rep that I'm liquidating my inventory with an eye toward closing my store and retiring next year, so I won't be ordering any new stock. If you're serious about supporting your pricing, I will gladly sell you back your merchandise at the prices I paid for it. Otherwise everything is getting marked down to cost next week. Because I'm online-only, customers can't paw over my stock; it's all in mint condition, and most of it is still in its original shipping packs. And if most of the batteries are somewhere between low and dead, well...I'm sure you guys must get batteries wicked cheap.

After some behind-the-scenes discussion, they agreed to take everything back, dead batteries and all. That was a much better response than I had hoped for; some of those products have even been discontinued. I just paid UPS $80 to ship out three large, overstuffed cartons. I should receive a check for $950 in a couple of weeks. I processed it as a sale so I'll get 15% of that as payroll; the rest will take a healthy bite out of the ol' Amex bill, which has been stuck at $2,500 for two months now. 

This represents the first bridge that I've burned beyond repair. Even if I change my mind and decide to resuscitate Curio City next year, I can't do business with this vendor again. 

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Despite that stubborn debt, I just raised my pay from 10% of net sales to 15%. That's still 50% below what I used to pay myself, and I need more money in my pocket right now -- Blue Hills jobs are too irregular and I never know when the revenue will arrive (one small check is currently 45 days overdue). I also want Kraken Enterprises to show as little profit as possible when tax time rolls around. Sales are so small that the 50% bump makes very little difference to the bottom line anyway. So...abracadabra, bitches! If I ever do get out of debt I'm going to set payroll back up to 20%.