What's the Big Hurry?

The next time someone asks me if they can get their order overnight, I'm going to have to say No. Or Maybe, if I'm feeling optimistic. I said Yes twice last week, and Priority Mail Express let me down both times. (UPS air is too expensive to compete.)

The first time was arguably my fault for trusting carrier pickup rather than driving the envelope to the post office myself. Acceptance cutoff for same-day delivery was 5 pm, and they scanned it in at 5:48. Never mind that my carrier had picked it up by 3:30; the one-day package became a two-day package in those 48 minutes, and my customer's son's school project was ruined. A full refund did not delight either him or me.

I drove the next Express package to the post office immediately and got a time-stamped receipt for it, but my diligence (and half an hour out of my day) did not pay off. The package disappeared from tracking after it left the Boston sorting facility that night. It should have arrived in LA the next morning. I was still waiting for an update after the delivery deadline passed that afternoon. It finally arrived a day later, but the tracking never did get updated. Fortunately, that customer was okay with it taking an extra day.

You know who gets blamed when USPS drops the ball? The guy who collected their $30 fee, of course. I don't make any markup on Express packages; in fact, my shipping module seems to be charging the commercial rate whereas I have to pay the retail rate, so I'm losing a couple of bucks on expedited postage. I don't get any extra revenue for the extra work, but last week I took a lot of extra grief. 

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Last week really did end up being my first-ever two-digit sales week, netting just $69 from two transactions. As of this Wednesday, I was sitting at zero after six days in a row with no business. A test transaction went through normally on Tuesday, indicating no technical problems, but I still suspected that something I couldn't see must be broken. After all, Google says that I had 1,600 visitors in January, 2% of whom bought something, and that was a poor month. The dam finally broke on Wednesday night with three modest but reassuring sales. I'm currently sitting on $137 this week, and that feels like progress. 

Historically, these past two weeks are supposed to be among the year's worst. But if this keeps up much longer, Curio City's going to die all by itself and save me the decision to kill it. Monday's paycheck would have netted out to just $52, so I decided to combine it with the next two weeks...meaning February's only going to give me one paycheck, and it's going to be a tiny one.

Fortunately, I just accepted a $3,000 editing job from a new client who will probably become a repeat customer, and yesterday I earned $200 on a rush job for another client. I still expect a mega-project in the middle of March, and I have feelers out for a couple of other jobs. Work completed in March and April won't pay off until May or June, but it will pay off bigly -- it would take Curio City nine months to pay me $3,000. If the Blue Hills pipeline keeps filling up, Curio City will be a distraction by this summer.  

(And yet, I just finished setting up my January 2019 Excel sales page. I really don't plan to use it, but I'm compulsive.)   

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This is going to be my last candid post about Curio City for the foreseeable future. After Blogger autoposts this to Facebook (and Twitter, apparently), Sunshop will put a link to it at the bottom of my store's main page. Almost nobody ever clicks those links...but reading about a failing business will surely repel the few shoppers who do. Humans naturally support winners and shun losers -- that's why third parties never prevail in winner-take-all elections, no matter how unpopular the mainstream parties are. I can't risk being shunned during this sales slump. So next week I'll post something positive about Curio City -- I'm incapable of lying outright, but I can generate happy talk. The following week I'll plug Blue Hills. Once those two upbeat posts are linked, I'm not going to post any more gloomy news that will knock them off the page...at least, not for a few weeks. 

For What It's Worth

Seriously, lady? You're going to return a $4.98 item because it's not quite what you expected? Good lord. Fine, spend $3.75 to mail it back to me. I'll just drive to the UPS Store to pick it up, then process it through Excel, Sunshop, and QuickBooks, then log onto PayPal to issue your refund. Together with the credit for the product that you (suspiciously) claimed was defective, you just reduced my next paycheck by $3.40.

People like you are why I can't have nice things. 

No week has ever ended in the red before, but this week was heading there until it clawed its way up to $22 on Thursday afternoon. Since then it has soared to $69.45. I don't think any week has ever finished below three digits before, either, so we still have a shot at setting a record.

I honestly don't know why I'm still reporting monthly numbers. Of course they're going to decline year-over-year as I gradually run out of stock. Compiling them each month compels me to make sure that I'm taking enough markdowns to show a loss, and makes me explain any unexpected trends. And it's the last year, so there's a sense of completion. Mostly from force of habit, then, here they are:

January and YTD

Total income: -33.6%
Payroll: +39.8%

Marketing: -76.4%
Net Income (Profit) vs LY: -181.1% (-$160)

Actual Profit/Loss: -$72

$300 worth of Curio City markdowns more than offset a small Blue Hills payday. K-1 losses are one of the few tax deductions that the Republicans didn't take away. By passing 85% of its revenue through as payroll, Blue Hills is nearly incapable of losing money, so I need those Curio losses to keep coming all year.