Wheelin' and Dealin'
I'm a kid of the 1970's, my dad was what people called a "packrat" back then, what's called a "collector" on American Pickers, and what some people a hoarder now. We didn't have the crazy hoarder houses you see on TV shows. Even though we moved nearly every year our basements and garages were full of shelving units, boxes, and cabinets, all piled with pieces of machines, tools, gun parts, motorcycle parts, and random mechanical things, that my dad intended to fix or build, "some day." Most of this stuff he either traded a friend for, or picked up at garage sales and gun shows. So I tagged along with him, learning the fine art of "wheelin' and dealin' as people called it then.
Buying and selling was a hobby for my dad, and for most people into garage sales, back then. The factories in Ohio, where we lived, and the whole country, were booming. Most people made solid, Middle Class incomes, and making a living off of garage sales wasn't necessary. But my dad nearly always made a little bit of money on his deals. When my mom was a little short for food money or whatever, my dad would always tell her he'd try to "borrow $5 or $10" from somebody at work. It wasn't until I was 14 that my dad told me all that "borrowed" money came from his gun money, well over $2,000, a few dollars at a time.
Though my dad hated violence, he was an avid target shooter and gun owner. Once I was about 8, he'd take me to gun shows, where he'd buy and sell guns, gun parts, reloading supplies, military surplus stuff, and whatever seemed interesting. He taught me to walk the whole show, see what was there, and scout out what seemed like good deals. He taught me to talk casually to people who had something he wanted to buy, and not seem to eager. He taught me to walk away when they wouldn't come down to the price he wanted to pay. That walking away, in a polite and friendly way, often was the trick that got the price to a decent level. He also taught me to bundle a few things together at times, or add something in trade to sweeten a deal.
My favorite deal I saw him do was when friend, a guy from work, another avid gun owner, had a little suitcase with 30,000 pro gun bumper stickers. Yes, I know a ton of people are anti-gun now, because of all the horrible mass shootings. Those are terrible tragedies, and there is no easy answer to solve that issue. But those incidents were rare when I was a kid, and target shooting was a common recreational sport, and many people in Ohio hunted as well.
In any case, my dad paid $30 for the case of 30,000 bumper stickers when I was about 5 or 6 years old. That's 1/10th of a cent each. There were 6 different bumper stickers, and he had 5,000 of each. For the next ten years, I watched my dad sell those stickers for $1 each, 1,000 times what he paid for each one. I watched him add a few stickers to a deal to sweeten the pot. He didn't try hard. Bumper stickers were a natural trading item at gun shows. Ultimately, my dad made well over $300 cash for his $30 investment, and got another $300 to $500 in trade, maybe more. Then, with my mom sick of seeing that little case in the basement, he sold the case, and the 20,000 or so remaining stickers, to another guy, for $30. Watching him milk that $30 investment for a decade, in my childhood, was a great lesson.
In today's world, the high paying factory jobs are mostly gone. Tens of millions of people are struggling. More important, we have the internet, computers, and smart phones, which offer a whole bunch of new ways to both buy an sell things, to a much, much wider audience. Flipping, as wheelin' and dealin' is now called, and retail arbitrage (buying consumer goods at one store and selling somewhere else), is a huge industry. Ebay, Amazon resellers, online stores, and all the other web platforms and apps, have tens of millions of items, new and used, that people are buying cheap and reselling somewhere else.
My own main experience in this was mostly from buying units at storage unit auctions, which I discovered accidentally in about 2005. I tried to turn this into a business to escape the downward spiral of the taxi industry, and I did make money consistently. But I was working 80 + hours a week in the cab, and I didn't make enough to make it a career. The funny thing is, the Storage Wars TV show started a couple of years later, and Daryl, "The Gambler" on the show, is from Huntington Beach, where I lived, and he was at the first storage auction I ever went to .
This is a Snoopy/Peanuts colorform set, where you have the little, rubber, flat people inside, and you stick them on the background scene in some way. This version, with the circle seal in the lower right corner, is the 35th anniversary remake of the original set. I bought this for about 20 cents (paid by the pound) at a Goodwill outlet store. These sell for $9-$10 on Ebay, and the 1972 originals sell for about $20.
I'll go into more detail in future posts on flipping ideas. But here are some places you can buy items to flip: garage sales, thrift stores, auctions of all kinds, online auctions, Craigslist, and Chinese distributors like Alli Express.
Here's where you can sell these items at a higher price (hopefully)- Ebay, a Shopify or other online store, your personal website, Facebook Marketplace, Let Go, Wallapop, the local flea market or swap meet, or Craigslist.
You get the idea. For more ideas on how to make some extra cash, or how to help get your own small business going, check out WPOS Kreative on Pinterest.
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