Pay As You Go

This week brought a $117 bill for another year of web hosting. Since I don’t intend to keep Curio City going past December, I switched to monthly $11.50 bills instead. I can keep paying that to keep the site up indefinitely, if I want to, but now I have another incentive to shut ‘er down in December.

I wouldn’t have thought twice about buying another year of hosting if I were enjoying a robust kite season (see my last two posts). But I’m not. Jackite never got their dove kites back in stock, and now they’re out of poles (blame China). However, my other merchandise is clearing out more successfully than I had expected, so sales are still high enough (and costs are negligible when I don’t have to buy kites) to justify going on. I don’t have any more big annual expenses between now and December. 

Recovering some of the dollars locked up in dead stock isn’t profitable, but it’s happening, and 25% of those dollars find their way into my pocket. I’m going to miss that money when it goes away:

•        Blue Hills Editorial has stalled. The two big jobs that provided most of my income last year (and which I had thought would become annual gigs) didn’t recur this year, and I’m not getting enough piecework to make up for it – especially over the summer. Blue Hills has paid me $3,400 so far this year, versus just $1,860 from Curio City, and more BH work can come along at any time…but $3,000 of that BH salary came from one job.
•        Curio City contributes $110 for internet and phone access to our household budget every month. That will be hard to replace.
•        Curio City got much less annoying after I removed my phone number from my website and omitted Curio from my voicemail message. Customers have to use email to irritate me now.
•        The workload and brainpower required are minimal since I stopped seeking out new products and reordering old ones.

I still haven’t done anything that would preclude rebooting my store with all-new merchandise next year. Not that I want or expect to, but I could.

OTOH, I could still decide to shut it down before December if the bargain hunters stop finding things to buy; I do run out of another item or three every week, and the cellar is starting to look positively roomy. But I still have a fair number of Christmas decorations to sell, and of course there are way, way too many Metal Earth models (which only sell during Christmastime). That stuff should start to move just about when kites die.

The Supreme Court’s decision that states can collect sales tax from all retailers was the death knell for all mom-and-pop online shops. The legal and accounting details will be crippling. I hope that it will take months, at least, for states to codify their extortion schemes, so I’ll probably be gone before that happens. But if laws come together sooner than expected, and if there aren’t any carve-outs for microscopic businesses like mine, that will put an abrupt end to that. 

And don't even mention that EU cookie reporting requirement. I have no idea what to do about that. I just hope that I'm too small to attract anyone's attention, and that I'll be gone before it can matter.