Archive for March 2004
DT Log 419: When You Die, Your Possessions are Scattered to the Four Winds.
I have been selling stuff on eBay. Not just to get rid of junk, but to actually make a profit and jump start my business. I have been learning a hard lesson as to what sells and what doesn’t sell.
The only way to make a business of resale is to find the absolute lowest possible price for an item. This means buying something that is worth $20.00 literally for pennies.
The lesson is sardonic and cynical enough. I need to find dead people.
I have visited antiques dealers in La Mesa, Normal Heights and Pacific Beach. Each of these stores is actually two businesses: you see the retail side of things when you walk in. Tables and chairs from the nineteenth century, dollhouses and toys from the 1920s, “collectibles”, and believe me, a lot of things qualify as a “collectible” that have discernable value to me. The aspect you don’t see is the “estate sale.”
I have visited estate sales trying to find items to resell. One house was owned by a former librarian. There were four bedrooms, a living room, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a garage full of books and other things, but mostly books. This deceased woman’s belongings, what she spent a lifetime to acquire, were now going to end up in hundreds, if not thousands of different places. It’s a little sad, but I feel better knowing her heirs were going to have better lives because of this purging.
You can also voluntarily give up your possessions if you don’t need them anymore. That’s what garage sales are for (like the one my park is having next weekend). You can also haul your stuff to the swap meet for a fee and get higher visibility for your used merchandise. If you are a sales newbie like Bronwynn and I were last year, you can expect a swarm of resellers sniffing around right before the official opening time, offering money for our “personal electronics.” What did we care? We wanted to get rid of our useless properties.
I went on Friday with Siobhane for a buyer’s mission, realizing that as a seller, we were in a gigantic plastic bubble. Crap, crap everywhere. It was the “Craptiques Road Show”. One man had pulled up in a rented Penske truck and was shouting to the traffic, “Moving sale! Lots of junk! Lots of good junk!” I swear he even had a shovel, digging into the back of the truck like he was delivering coal in a boiler room. No blankets, no tables, no organization. Imagine if a tornado ransacked a Radio Shack, a Ross Store, and 99-Cent City; this is what I saw.
Finally, I have to mention the county auction, which is coming up on Saturday. Merchandise comes in two varieties. Estates with no heirs and police and tax seizures.
What do you suppose the lot of 20 heavy-duty scales, each emblazoned with an “evidence” sticker, was involved in? Better yet, since the lot sold for $70.00, can you guess where are they eventually going to end up. Sigh, we have a hard time keeping our kids and our scales off the streets.
The circle of crap rolls on… what doesn’t get sold, gets donated to a thrift store, where it will sit on a shelf until it is thrown out with the garbage, ending its journey at the landfill, finally returning to the earth whence it came.
I have too much of an ego to let my possessions scatter to the four winds. Hopefully, when I die, my heirs will not need the money. All my collections, my thingies, my favorite doo-hickies, they will not be sold in an estate sale or donated to charity. (Although charities will get a share of my liquid assets.) My ego is so big that my trust will direct that my maps, my writings, my indeterminate baubles of no value to anybody, will be set up as a museum.
Right between exhibit 24, the bronze baby trophy given to me when I was born, and exhibit 25, my collection of rocks from all 50 states, will be a picture of me, and a plaque.
The plaque will read, “WELCOME TO THE DAN TOUCHETTE MUSEUM. HE JUST COULDN’T LEARN TO THROW STUFF AWAY.”
Public response space has been provided.
