After the Gold Rush

Curio City needs a successful kite season (per my last post) to cover its monthly operating expenses. If it can’t pay its bills, it has no reason to exist. How much money is that?

Less than you might think. Arithmetic tells me that $1,000 a month will do it. CC has made that much every month this year – even in February, when I closed for a week after my computer died. If you remove kites from the equation, the bar falls closer to $750 because I’m not replacing any other inventory. 

Quickbooks says that there's still $15,300 worth of stuff in the cellar, and that it would be worth $32,100 at full retail. Quickbooks can’t see markdowns until an item sells, so it can’t tell me what it’s worth at the prices currently marked…I’d guess that's around $20,000. Selling $1,000 worth of stuff every month gets more remarkable as my stock dwindles. If I can keep reducing inventory by $500 a month, I could shave it to as little as $11,000 by the end of the year. After 13 years of acquiring things, that would mean that I ended up with less than $1,000 worth of dead stuff per year. Is that good? It seems good to me. 

It’s been a long time since Curio City actually required me to put in a full workday, but this week Mothers Day and Pentecost apparently combined to drive a whopping nine orders yesterday alone, and I've been in the saddle for five hours so far today. With expenses cut to the bone, CC’s checking account is finishing each month comfortably in the black, even after buying me a new laptop just three months ago. So I just gave myself a raise from 20 to 25% of sales – that’s more than I’ve ever taken out of it before. Congratulations, me! Monday’s paycheck will be the best one so far this year…and possibly better than any that will follow, since I just don’t have enough stuff left to keep up this pace. 

Just as I started to get carried away by the rush and reconsider closing my store, a problem customer reminded me why I'll be so glad to put an end to it. She ordered the wrong thing because she didn’t read the description. She demands her money back…but she doesn’t want to pay to return the product because this is my fault, somehow. Naturally, this was a dropship, so I have to loop the vendor in, too. 

As the old retail joke says, this would be a great job if there weren’t any customers.