I think it finally struck me why pirates call their treasure “booty”. It’s because when you sell that treasure on eBay it takes approximately 1.3 cubic assloads of time to pack it, carry it to the post office, and buy postage to ship it.
I’ve been thinning my stash of old unbuilt plastic model car kits for the past four or five months, I’ve sold somewhere between 100 and 150 of them so far. I try to list somewhere between 8 and 12 items per week, any more than that and it’s a logistics problem to organize and pack. I can ship 10 individual items with one Sunday newspaper used for padding, usually. I figured out very early on that it didn’t make sense to try and ship stuff the day after I receive payment electronically, some people pay immediately while others take their time so I was running to the Post Office every day or so. Since I usually come home for lunch on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and since it’s most convenient for me to stop by on my lunch break I started posting a notice on my auctions that I would ship on Wednesdays and Fridays unless the buyer made other arrangements. Today is a case in point. I didn’t ship yesterday since I didn’t go home for lunch yesterday. I had seven items from last week’s auctions to ship out, plus one item from the week before where the buyer’s e-check had just cleared the bank. Two items were international, one to Germany and one to Canada so I had to fill out customs forms on those. Packing required probably the better part of an hour, then 15 minutes to print the forms and electronic postage for domestic shipping and another 15 minutes to attach all the shipping labels. The Post Office wasn’t too crowded today, add another 10 minutes of waiting in line, filling out customs forms, and paying the Postal worker for the appropriate postage.
If I didn’t need to get rid of stuff just to have space in my hobby room I would never take the time to do all this! |
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