Reasons to stretch it out:
I just bought 75 more 9x6x4" boxes at 63 cents apiece. I still have two mostly-full cartons of padded envelopes. I've stashed probably 100 large boxes from my wife's enthusiastic Amazon habit. I rarely need large boxes anymore, but they're an impressive pile, even broken down. Together with the free priority-mail boxes that USPS supplies, I've got many hundreds of empty cartons begging to be filled and shipped. I hate throwing useful things away and it would take months or years to purge them all through weekly curbside recycling.
My Excel accounting file is formatted all the way through 2018. That is not as trivial as it sounds -- I have elaborate spreadsheets to track everything, including a lot of data that I don't use anymore but compulsively keep updated anyway; setting up a new year took a couple of hours. Eleven and a half pristine pages are waiting to absorb daily sales data, and all of my other tabs -- payroll, graphs, planned sales, planned and actual costs, etc. -- are ready for another year. I hate throwing completed work away, even after it's become pointless.
I still have $18,000 worth of inventory (down from $25,000 last January) that's still dribbling out. By itself, that dribble doesn't generate enough money to cover the cost of staying in business. But if kite sales loft as expected from March through October, the other stuff can tag along at no incremental cost. I'd love to convert a few thousand more dollars worth of old stuff back into dollars before writing it all off. I hate throwing "new" merchandise away.
In the end, everything left will be given away or trashed. That will generate losses to offset my Blue Hills income, and it would be nice to stretch that process out for a couple more years, taking just enough write-offs to neutralize my income. Technically, I suppose I don't have to keep my store open to do that. The IRS doesn't distinguish between Kraken Enterprises' operating companies.
A lot of that inventory is seasonal Christmas stuff that sells reliably every November and December. Way too much of the rest is Metal Earth models. Ordinarily, those also sell only during the holiday season, but I've marked them down so far that they're now contributing a little to the daily dribble. If I'm going to keep the store going through kite season, I'm tempted to keep going through another Christmas and capture another thousand or so bucks. Finishing out the year would be tidy from an accounting standpoint, and what's another two or three months in the big scheme of things?
With 13 years of inertia behind me, it's easier in some ways to keep the whole shebang rolling than to dismantle it.
Closing Curio City won't free me from filing quarterly 941 and annual 940 returns, issuing W-2s, reporting wages to the state, or any of the other routine corporate red tape. Unless I fold Kraken Enterprises, too -- which I won't, since Blue Hills is under that aegis -- I'll still have to pay corporate registration and tax preparation fees. I guess I won't have to collect and remit sales tax anymore, so that's at least something.
My laptop is dying. Curio City might be able to build up enough cash to buy me a new one..maybe even a nice one. I don't want another cheap Dell, and the company owes me.
Mostly, I still need Curio City income. Even when it's as little as $50 per week, it pays at least something every other Monday. If last year's Blue Hills clients come through again, I'll make two big writing/editing jackpots with smaller payoffs every six or eight weeks -- Blue Hills paid me $12,000 last year, versus just $4,000 from Curio City. But there's no guarantee that those jobs will actually materialize again this year, and even if they do, there's a whole lot of calendar between paydays. And let's not forget that Curio City chips in $100 a month toward our personal bills for cell phone and internet access -- that's another $1,200 a year it pays me indirectly.
Reasons to get it over with:
As I keep marking things down lower and lower, the stuff that's trickling out brings in less and less money. The first two weeks of January only brought in $900 for stuff that was nominally worth $1,100. As time goes on, I'm increasingly left with things that are unwanted at any price. (Actually, that's not quite accurate. Given enough time and a low enough price, anything will sell eventually...just this week I finally recouped $26 for two things that cost me $34 10 years ago. Ironically, some guy in Canada paid $25 to have them shipped to the Great White North!).
Working in various retail situations for most of my life made Christmas the bane of my existence. I would love to put the world of buying and selling behind me and never dread another Christmas, never have to interact with self-righteous Christians or the orgy of materialism. Christmas 2017 never became all-consuming because I didn't support it, but I still had to block off a month of my life, just in case. I would love to end this before another Thanksgiving weekend.
Ninety-seven out of every 100 customers are fine people. Two of the other three don't meet minimum competency through no fault of their own. The other one gives humanity a bad name. I relish the day when I never again have to be polite to somebody whom I wish would just die in a fire.
I would finally be the master of my phone. Junk calls would drop to nothing and I would never have to listen to another voicemail as long as I live. Like the preceding observation, this isn't an argument for shutting down early, but it's an argument against dragging it out longer.
Technology standards are constantly evolving -- PayPal, especially, perpetually updates its security protocols. I lost interest in keeping up with ever-moving targets a few years ago, although I've grudgingly done so as needed. However, I will shut my site down before I will spend any money complying with some unexpected new requirement.
My laptop is dying. If it finally goes tits-up before I can replace it, and if I can't easily recover my files and reinstall my programs and rebuild my accounts, that might be a good reason to kill Curio City...even though I need the same laptop and most of the same software to run Blue Hills.
Out in left field, the Supreme Court has agreed to revisit the question of taxing internet sales. A broad-based sales tax requirement would shut me down the minute it goes into effect, because who needs that grief? The wheels of government grind slowly, so it's almost surely a couple of years away, and tiny businesses like Curio City could be exempt. But the threat is out there. It could happen.
Mainly, after 13 years I just plain don't want to do this anymore. Whatever enjoyment it used to deliver is long since gone.
Conclusion: If kite sales pick up as expected I'll serve that market into the fall. If the Christmas season starts before that ends, I might drag it through December. OTOH, if I line up a reliable, regular Blue Hills gig, or if kites fail to take off this year, I might shutter Curio City as early as April or May. At this point it's only paying me $10 per day, on average, and while that's still more than $0, it's barely worth the aggravation.
In other words, nothing has changed. Sorry for wasting your time.
