What's Left to Say?

After all these years, this blog might be finished.

When I upload a post to Blogger, an app called IFTTT (which stands for If This Then That) is supposed to copy the post title and URL to Facebook, which then sends it to Twitter. Nearly all of my readers come from that Facebook post. I don’t use Twitter, but it puts a link to the post at the bottom of my store page, and that drives the rest of my readership. Virtually nobody ever comes here except from those two links.

IFTTT failed to cross-post my last update, and turned itself off. “There was a problem with the Blogger service,” it says, with no details. I suspect it has something to do with the cookie disclaimer that all sites are required to display now for some reason. Today I turned it back on. If it manages to publish this post, I'll be back occasionally. If it doesn't, I am just screaming in an empty auditorium.

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My plan to close Curio City by the end of December hasn’t changed. I cleared out a lot of stock over the summer and hope to sell more during one last Christmas season. QuickBooks says I still have $11,800 worth of inventory on hand (down from $17,400 in January), and I’d love to get that below $10,000 before I write it all off. Today I killed the "mayor@curiocityonline" email address that had turned into a spam bucket...but I also renewed my SSL for another year, so I still haven't done anything irreversible.

Blue Hills Editorial didn't meet expectations this year, but I haven’t done anything to flog it yet, either. I'm pretty sure I lost one of my biggest clients when they were unhappy with an assignment that I turned in (I won't go into why, but I believe the blame for that is mutual). 

So far this year Curio City has only paid me $3,400 (gross!). I only need one big (or two average) editing projects to make that up.

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.

The Sale of the Century!

A friend asked if Curio City will have a big clearance blowout at any point. It hadn't occurred to me. Maybe. If so, it won't be until late summer at the earliest. 

Most merchandise is already reduced to near cost. I don't like to go below cost. If I paid $5 for a thing, I want to get my $5 back. Sometimes I might let it go for $4 or even $3, but not often. Isn’t it better to recover a couple of my five bucks than nothing? Not necessarily. Sometimes reducing Kraken Enterprises' profit by $5 is more valuable than increasing its income by $4. 

The first draft of this post walked through the accounting in mind-numbing detail, but I’ll cut to the end without showing you how I got there. Essentially, if I take $4 for that $5 item, I increase my personal income by $0.80, and at the same time I raise my personal income tax liability by $0.80 (because Kraken’s profit/loss goes directly onto my 1040), for no net gain. If I write off $5 instead, I don’t pocket anything, but I reduce my tax liability by about $1. 

In favor of selling below cost anyway, I’d rather have 80 cents now than save a dollar later on. I’d also rather ship the item to somebody than throw it away, and I usually make a buck on the shipping charge. Blue Hills Editorial Services enters the picture here. 85% of Blue Hills income goes into payroll. The other 15% covers the employer's portion of payroll taxes and leaves a tiny profit toward the $1,500 it costs to be a corporation every year. Apart from that, Blue Hills has almost no expenses to offset its profit -- that's where Curio City’s losses are nice to have. When Curio City is losing money on operations, as it’s doing right now, it offsets Blue Hills' profit without needing to take markdowns. I can sell that $5 thing for $4 and pocket my 80 cents without driving up next spring’s tax bill. But when kite season puts Curio operations back in the black, I need write-offs to make Kraken's profit disappear.

I'll talk more about Blue Hills in my next post. To return to what I opened with: I don't plan to have a big end-of-business blowout sale because the write-offs are usually worth more than the small amount of cash that I can get for them. Between now and closing day, individual prices will slide a little bit here and there, but if you see something you want...don't wait. It probably won't get any cheaper, and it might sell out at any time. 

I keep mentioning kite season. Kites sell year-round because there are people who live in warm places. But it really gets going when spring weather settles in. Ordinarily it opens with Christians buying dove kites for church plays. Dove kites have been out of stock since last October, and the manufacturer will only say that they'll be back "in the spring." So I don’t know if I can count on the Christians to kick things off this year.  

Finally: The same person who asked about a going-out-of-business sale also wondered when Curio City will close. I still don’t know myself. The short answer is “It depends.” At this point I'm only staying open in anticipation of kite season. If it doesn't perk up by the end of March, and the cost of staying open continues to exceed the money coming in, I’ll close earlier than I had intended. 

September – the end of kite season -- is the earliest ending that I foresee; Christmas is the latest. But circumstances can change – for example, PayPal keeps sending me technical emails that I don’t quite understand about PayFlow integration, and a friend identified a problem with my security certificate that will, if I don’t do something about it, blow up in either April or June (I’m not clear), but only on the Chrome browser…maybe. Meanwhile, Turnkey just published another Sunshop update, putting my store software at least three versions behind now. Some technical thing might come along and deep-six my site before I’m ready to sink it myself. OTOH, I keep updating my master Excel file each month, and that’s currently formatted through next February, so there’s a ghost of a chance that I’ll keep going into next year. I don't plan to or want to, but I just got word that my biggest Blue Hills job isn’t going to come through this year, so I still need Curio City’s financial lifeline.  

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Speaking of that, I robbed myself of more than $100 last month by forgetting to reset February's payroll percentage from 10 to 20% of sales. Since Curio City unexpectedly bought me a new computer, though, I’m going to let it off the hook for the difference.

Timing Is Everything

Christmas was supposed to seal Curio City's fate. Unexpected strength might have convinced me to reinvest and revive, whereas unexpected weakness would point to the exit. Weakness won, so now it's a question of how long to draw this out.  

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.