Flow My Cash, the Merchant Said

Eighteen months of unemployment honed my skill at redlining budgets. I used to preserve generous margins for error, even though I rarely err financially. Now those comfy cushions are gone. I often drain my accounts down to their last $5.

That’s safe with my meager personal finances. It’s more chancy with our household finances. It’s downright dangerous when applied to Curio City. For the first time in five years, I may have frakked up.


If September sales were worrisome, October is downright frightening. Only five days have beaten last year and I haven’t hit my plan even once. The income that I was pre-spending isn’t coming in, but the bills are. I’m averaging a decent five sales a day but too many of them are in the $10-15 range. Five sales a day at $40 is about where October should be. Five sales at $10…well.

And yet, spend I must. This compulsion could be a sign of the apocalypse, so alien it is to my nature. Skyrocketing keyword prices have doubled my advertising spend even as sales decrease…but cutting back on advertising would be suicide. After waiting literally for months for the supplier of my bestselling 5-LED Cap Light to restock, I finally gave up on them and found an alternate source – one who also sells a color version. Woo! This will be a surefire hit. But, of course, I had to spend money to bring them in. (Those links won’t work until the products arrive next week).

So I’ve deflated my cushion (I keep reminding myself that investing it in Christmas merchandise could pay off better than the $2 it’s earning in monthly interest). As of this morning, bills are outpacing cash by $1,600. Receipts between now and the end of the month might or might not cover that gap. I might carry a small credit card balance for the first time ever. That wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would feel like a frakup.

Well. October’s only halfway over and I have one good-sized sale in the pipeline (I’m waiting for a paper check to arrive for a deal struck a month ago). Lighted cap sales revived after I bid up my keywords and hopped up the page text to seduce Google. The next two weeks probably won’t reverse the damage from the first two, but they could at least stop the slide.

Curio City isn’t the only one who needs cash. Anne’s birthday is two weeks away, my packie’s huge fall beer tasting is almost upon us, the Boston Globe bill is due again, and I’ve got all of $17.74 in my checking account.

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Weird footnote: More than half of this week’s orders came from Texas, California, and Florida. I don’t know why. Under the “How did you find us?” dropdown one customer chose “You were linked in a blog or online article”. Really? Another said “Heard about you on radio or TV.” Wow. She probably saw Panther Vision caps on TV – one of the shopping channels used to sell them…if that’s begun again it would explain the cap revival better than my feeble efforts does. Believe it or not, most consumers don’t understand that retailers and manufacturers are different entities; many of my customers think I’m Panther Vision. I don't care if they think I'm Satan Claus as long as they place those orders.

The Good and the Bad

As much as I fret and complain, you might wonder why I do this for a living. I’m not a risk-taker or a capitalist or even a consumer. I don’t care about buying and selling. I don’t follow popular culture or keep up with technology.

I do it because it’s the only thing I know how to do without any education or training. It uses skills I picked up haphazardly over the decades. I need to pass the years productively until I retire or (more likely) die in harness. So what consolations does Curio City offer me?

Things I Like

I love being in control of my schedule. Freedom is the single biggest tradeoff for living in poverty. I don’t need anyone’s permission to spend a day tending to my garden or household chores. Business is slow? This week I cleaned the oven and mopped the floor. Living la vida loca!

I love being responsible only to and for myself. I never do busy work for appearances sake. My labor doesn’t further enrich some rich guy. Although I might fail, I can’t be laid off and if I’m not at the mercy of somebody else’s competence. Nobody else's fate depends on my performance.

I like statistics. I enjoy the accounting aspects when the numbers are good.

I like order. My wife, who was raised by wolves, lives in perpetual chaos and upheaval. Curio City is a tiny oasis of order. Plans are made, budgets are followed, accounts are balanced, bills are paid on time, loose ends are tied up, and trash doesn’t become clutter.

I like the way my paycheck tracks my results. I make more when sales are good and less when they’re poor. I get nice big checks when I’m working flat-out in November and December. I earn next to nothing during the summer drought, but I don’t have to work very much.

It has potential. If everything breaks my way, I could earn enough money to survive on and own a salable business by the time I’m eligible for Medicare. That’s my pipe dream, anyway: By the time I turn 65 (in 12 years), either hire someone else to run Curio City while I just skim off the profits, or sell it and live off the proceeds. Unfortunately it needs to be an order of magnitude larger for that to happen. The Great Recession was a major setback and I'm moving in reverse at the moment.

Things I Don’t Like

Uncertainty. Half of my annual income comes in November and December. Spreading the other 50% over the other 10 months yields laughable little paychecks. I’m thinking about level-funding my payroll next year. That is, I’d figure out my average weekly pay based on this year’s paychecks and then parcel that out evenly through the year, keeping enough of Curio City’s holiday windfall in the bank to subsidize the slow months. Of course, doing this would break the workload/reward mechanism that I listed under “likes”, and it doesn’t affect the next point:

Low pay. If I did level-fund my salary, the bi-weekly check would be uniformly disappointing with nothing to look forward to during my busy season. I do get tired of being chronically broke.

Slavery. I can never go home from work. I can never take a true vacation. I can never call in sick. There is no such thing as a holiday or a day off.

I’m on my own. Nothing ever gets done unless I do it. Nobody else ever has insights or initiates anything. When I suspect that something might be wrong, I have to figure it out myself. For example, the sales decline that began in July is still gathering speed. I blame lighted caps. Last fall they were blowing out at record speed as Panther Vision rolled out the new 3-LED Power Caps while I discounted my old 2-LED caps. This year they aren’t selling at all. Why not? I don’t see any formidable new competitors or discounters. My ads are still generating 30-40 clicks a day, so the interest is there. Is there something wrong with my site? Did Google change their mysterious algorithms and knock my pages out of contention? Are customers just being fickle? I don’t know and nobody’s going to tell me.

Another example: The Simplaris Blogcast application that spews my blog entries onto Facebook stopped working last week. If it weren’t for my Facebook readers I wouldn’t have any readers at all – even my own wife doesn’t read my blog. Eventually I found and installed a similar app. Does it work? I’ll find out in a few minutes, after I post today’s essay. If it doesn’t show up on my Facebook wall, it’s back to the drawing board.

Another example: An astute blog reader (hi Andrew!) encountered my admin password popup when he clicked last week’s link to Buckyballs. Gosh, do you think that might be why Buckyballs weren’t selling? It turned out that a graphic that I’d uploaded through Sunshop’s text editor was calling a path through /admin, and a layer of security that I added last week won’t let you in there without a password. Moved the graphic, changed the link, and all was well. Buckyballs still aren’t selling, though.

Another example: I want to add the transit times to the shipping options dropdown list that appears when you check out. I’ve been trying to make this simple change ever since postal rates went up last February. Adding that text to the UPS options was easy, but changing the corresponding USPS text doesn’t work. It is not being drawn from the appropriate source file. The Sunshop support forum is no help. I finally gave up and asked my developer to solve it for me.

That’s just one typical week’s pitfalls. I confront crap like that constantly.

Constant change. Whenever I think I’ve got things figured out, the rules change. Technology moves faster than I can follow, especially with the spread of smart phones (which I neither own nor want). Fashions in silly stuff like website colors and layout evolves; my five-year-old Sunshop template looks archaic. Technologies like Flash go in and out of favor. Search engine algorithms change constantly. Customer whims are unpredictable. Today’s hot product is likely to end up on the discount table next year.

Boredom. You wouldn’t think I could get bored given the constant state of change and endless mysterious problems. But I don’t care about my work on a personal level. It doesn’t make the world a better place. It’s not enriching in any sense of the word. It’s unimportant. All it does is earn me a living, and it’s not very good at that. Yet.

Isolation. When Anne’s out of town I can go for days without speaking to anybody or leaving the house. As a misanthrope that suits me just fine, but I get weird when I withdraw too completely for too long.

On balance, the good outweighs the bad. I don’t want to return to conventional employment (despite its higher pay) even if I thought that I could get a halfway decent job. Which I’m pretty sure I could not do anyway in the current market.

And so I soldier on.

It's Not Me. It's You. or, Buy Stuff, Dammit!

Year-over-year growth slowed in July and turned slightly negative in August. In September, it crashed. Let’s cut straight to the grim numbers:

Total income: -20.3%
Total COGS: -12.7%
Payroll: +34.8%
Net Income (Profit): -112.3%


Year to Date:

Total income: +21.2%
Total COGS: +35.2%
Payroll: +40.3%
Net Income (Profit): -103.8%

How can I sugar-coat that? September 2009 kicked ass. September 2010 was on the weak side of normal. This month was doomed before it even started. Last September brought a $1,100 lighted cap sale from Staples and another $500 cap sale to a business in Texas. Three other days during the month broke $300. This September delivered only one day over $300 with no big institutional sales.

If you remove those two big lucky strikes from last year’s sales, this month was about flat with LY. It’s a very healthy increase from the more typical September of 2008. As reassuring as that is, September still came in $1,500 behind last year. At least (the ultimate in sour grapes) I’ve set a more realistic target to beat next year!

My own pay is still 40% ahead of LY. Sounds great, huh? Yeah, but big percentage swings often mask small dollar amounts...and the "extra" pay comes directly out of my year-end profit-taking bonus. The bottom line is slightly negative right now when it should be solidly in the black. Cost of Goods Sold is running way too high due to bad luck and bad judgment: Two floods, two thefts, and two write-offs of dead merchandise (greeting cards and magnets, gone forever at last).

At this time last year, Panther Vision’s third-generation Power Cap arrived, forcing me to discount my old 2-LED caps. This year, my old mainstay is drifting nowhere. The wind has gone out of kite sales, too. With no hit product driving business this year and no capapalooza, October’s prospects look dim. BuckyBalls are languishing so far; so many competitors are bidding up keywords so high (a buck a click? Come on) that I effectively can’t advertise them. Incidentally, some manufacturers and specialty retailers buy keywords at a loss to freeze competitors out; Looney Labs does that with their Fluxx games because they favor b&m stores over web retailers. You can't possibly make money paying $1 per click for a $15 product.

My comfortable lead over LY is almost gone and I have no confidence going into these critical last three months, but at least I’m still (barely) ahead of my 15% planned increase. There’s little I can do. My buying frenzy is over for now; I’m well-stocked on everything that ought to sell and my OTB is more than spent. Like, WAY more. Cash flow – including the money that I had squirreled away for a rainy day -- is $120 in the red right now with $1,000 in payroll taxes due in two weeks. Today I added about 100 new keywords to Google AdWords, deleted some badly overpriced ones, and raised my daily budget. I’m flogging the new Microsoft adCenter, too, but that won't amount to much until they finish digesting Yahoo next month.

Come on, shoppers, are you even listening to me? Another weak consumer confidence report implies that you’re not. Consumers won’t consume until the job market brightens and businesses won’t hire until demand picks up. I’ve already explained this: Somebody’s got to blink, and it’s not going to be the corporations.