Getting Deals at Thrift Stores

This is one of the many videos on You Tube of people who find deals at Goodwill and other thrift stores and resell the items.  These videos will give you some hints on the deals you can find at thrift stores.

 Like all bargain hunting, remember, just because you can buy it cheap doesn't mean it's a good deal.  Buy stuff you know has value, or look it up on your phone before you buy.

A few years ago, while out of work, I discovered the Goodwill "Outlet" store in Winston'Salem, North Carolina, about ten miles from me.  Located on Peter's Creek Parkway, it's actually a big Goodwill complex.  There's a large, standard Goodwill store, a job training office, and the "outlet" store.  As I quickly learned, it's not what you think of as a typical outlet store.  The Goodwill outlet is where stuff goes first.  They literally dump hundreds of similar items in huge, rolling bins that are about ten feet long, five feet wide, and a foot deep.  As soon as they roll a new one out, local buyers descend on it like vultures, looking for good stuff.  Here's the crazy part, you buy stuff by the pound.  Nothing has a price.

I was new to the scene a few years ago, so I avoided the feeding frenzy bins and poked around in the bins that had been out awhile.  There were tons of bookbag type backpacks, and lots of women's purses.  So I bought a whole bunch of both for about $40.  It worked out to about $2 each for the purses, and less for the backpacks.  I wasn't even on Craigslist or Ebay then, I just shopped the stuff around to local boutique shops and women in my apartment complex.  This was just a side thing.  But I ultimately made about $120 off the purses and backpacks, and donated the leftovers to another thrift shop.

Two days ago, I was browsing Goodwill, and found a Green Day (the band) coffee table book, in pretty good condition for $2.  I had a Goodwill gift card I was given (yeah, they actually have those), so it didn't cost me anything.  I'll probably keep the book, but I could make a few bucks off it on Craigslist, I bet.

Goodwill, Salvation Army, and other thrift stores are one good way to find items to resell on Craigslist, Ebay, through consignment shops, or at flea markets and swap meets.

As I'm typing this, I'm wearing a pair of New Balance shoes that I bought at the Goodwill outlet over two years ago for about $2.75.  You never know what you'll find.

Buy Low Sell High: A Place to Start

Here's a random video about flipping stuff for some profit.  If you don't have a specialized skill to create your own job, or if you're starting on a real tight budget, buying and selling is a good way to make some cash fairly quick.

As I've written in earlier posts, there are at least 20 million unemployed and underemployed people in the U.S. right now.  There are tens of millions more who could use some extra cash.  Buying and selling stuff is a great place to start.  I've done it at various levels before. 

In fact my first business, in second grade, was selling pieces of Magic Rub erasers.  These gray erasers worked much better than the red ones, and we all wanted them.  Then I found out my dad was a draftsman, and used Magic Rub erasers at work.  He gave me a couple.  I used an thin piece of metal called an eraser shield to cut each eraser into about 8 pieces, and I sold each piece for 10 cents to my classmates.  Hey, we all start somewhere.

In today's highly connected, internet and mobile phone enabled world, there are all kinds of places to buy stuff cheap and many great ways to resell it for a profit.  There's one key to this, you have to have an idea what each item will actually sell for.  You may have personal experience with certain items, like antiques or vintage video games or whatever.  Or you can just use your phone to look up items on Ebay or Amazon to get an idea.  Whatever works.

Then you have to have a way to sell the items.  You can sell to collectors.  You can sell at flea markets or swap meets.  You can sell on Ebay or Amazon.  You can sell on Craigslist or one of the local sales apps.  You can sell at garage or yard sales.  You can sell at consignment shops.  My advice is to keep all options open for selling items.  Sell the better items for higher dollar amounts to collectors or on Ebay or to consignment shops.  You'll wind up with leftover stuff.  That's what you sell on Craigslist, at the swap meet, or at a garage sale. 

I'm going to get this blog going with several posts about many different ways and places to find bargains.  After all those posts, I'll bookend this section with more ideas about how to sell different items.  Good luck on your own efforts to Buy Low and Sell High.

How am I trying to start a business with literally no money?

For a variety of reasons, I can't get hired for even a lame job here in North Carolina.  Most people here give me the standard advice: "Tweak your resume' and keep trying."  But the longtime Californian in me says, "Screw that, I'll create my own job."

Right now I'm writing and self-publishing a book about my adventures in the early days of BMX freestyle in the 80's and 90's.  I stumbled into the industry, and saw a lot of really cool things happen firsthand.  After some trial and error, I decided to publish my "book" myself, laid out like a big zine.  It's just going to be a D-ring binder with pages I write and layout myself, and copy and put together myself.  Zines (pronounced zeens) were small, photo copied, self-published booklets we made to write about our friends and ideas in the 80's and 90's.  Basically, it's what bloggers did before blogs.  So I had the idea to do that, just on a bigger scale.  I'm writing 20 pages at a time, and using the orders I get on my Go Fund Me crowdfunding page to actually fund it.  Using advance orders to fund a business is an idea I got from a book called No Cash, No Fear, which it a good read for entrepreneurs.  Basically, today's crowdfunding sites are a high tech way to do that much easier.

Another way to start a business with no money at all is to provide a service and charge for that.  So how am I doing?  I'm finishing the first 20 page section of the book today, and I have 2 orders so far.  OK, a few more orders would be better, but it's a start.  I'm adding lots of goodies and giving the book a real hand-made feel, so hopefully it will do better once a few copies are out there and words gets around.  I'm also promoting it with my blog on the same subject.

Here's my BMX blog, Freestyle BMX Tales, with a link to the Go Fund Me Page at the bottom.

Taking Stock Of What You Have To Work With

This clip is from some footage I shot at the 2-Hip Mission Trails King of Dirt contest, outside San Diego, California in 1991.  The sport of BMX was "dead" at the time, the big bike companies were focusing their efforts on mountain bikes.  We were in the grips of the long, "double dip" recession of the early 1990's.  Yet this contest, the first true Huckfest in my opinion, changed the way we looked at bike riding.  History was made while most of the world was looking elsewhere. I edited this clip with my camera and a VCR for the S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.

Like tens of millions of other people in the U.S. right now, I don't have a "real" job.  I'm fifty years old and living with my mom.  Yes, I know how pathetic that is.  My last (of many) career was as a taxi driver.  I just can't make money doing that, the industry went downhill because of computer dispatching in the early 2000's, and then The Great Recession, and then because of services like Uber and Lyft. 

After several years of taxi driving, I wound up homeless in Southern California in 2007, and, after a year on the streets, I called my family, and they flew me to North Carolina.  I got here in November 2008, as the global economy was crashing.  I'd never lived here before.  My parents and sister's family just wound up here.  I haven't had a real job since.  I drove a taxi for a year, and quit when my dad had a massive stroke because I wasn't making any money at it and I wanted to spend more time with him those last few months.

So, here I am in late 2016, taking stock of my options.  I can't get hired for an entry level job, probably because of my age, weight (about 350), or sketchy work history.  I'm not sure.  I've written for magazines, worked on the crews of TV shows, and self-produced videos.  But none of that will get me a good paying job here.  The job market is terrible here in Central North Carolina.  A couple of weeks ago a Cheesecake Factory restaurant opened in nearby Greensboro, and 7500 people applied for the 255 jobs.  That's insane.

Now, most of those 7500 people probably went home, spruced up their resume' yet again, and kept looking through the job websites.  Hey, if you have skills that are in demand, that's great.  But the reality is, tens of millions of people in the U.S. can't find a good paying job.  I'm one of them.  But no one is really creating millions of good paying jobs.  The more I look into the job issue right now, the more I think millions of us will have to create our own jobs.  So that's what I'm doing.

The first step is taking stock of my current resources.  Despite my weight, I'm reasonably healthy, but in no shape to do physical labor.  So that's out.  I'm living for free, though I help my elderly mom out with some day to day tasks.  But she's paying the bills, which is something I hear about over and over every day.  But I have a roof over my head, and a really old and really slow, but functional, laptop.  In my crazy life, I've discovered that I'm a writer and creative guy at heart.  That doesn't sound like much, but lots of people haven't found their true place in the world.  I know that writing is what I am here on Earth to do.  So that's good.

But writing as an industry has changed dramatically since I got my first magazine job 30 years ago.  I've been blogging and self-educating myself for the past several years, but not making any money.  In today's tech heavy world, writers need to create their own following and then build a business around that following.  My following at this point is about 250 old school BMX riders who are my Facebook friends. 

So far I have a computer, experience as a writer, and a small following of guys (and a few gals) who were into BMX freestyle in the 1980's and 90's.  The thing that really tips the scale for me is that I have literally hundreds of stories from that era, because I managed to break into the industry, and be in the midst of it all. 

Now, here's the conflict.  I'm really into working on, and writing about, the current jobs issue and where our society is going.  That's what this blog is all about.  But I don't have a following in this area yet.  The thing about writing today is that it's easy to put work out for the world to see it on the internet.  But making money is a whole different game.  Most of the 200 million or so blogs out there do not make money.  Newspapers and magazines have drastically cut back their staffs over the last 20 years.  So how do I make money?

I've been struggling with this for a long time.  It finally dawned on me last week that I really need to put everything I remember from those early BMX days into a book.  And self-publish it.  And I have to do it starting with literally not a dime to my name.  We all have our challenges, these are mine.

So I started a Go Fund Me page as a way to pre-order the book.  I've decided to go with my DIY roots and make it a weird, but hopefully cool, kind of book.  I'm writing stories and thoughts, laying them out, old school zine style, on 8 1/2" X 11" sheets of paper, and putting them into a simple D-ring binder with a home made insert for the cover.  It sounds cheesy.  But it's something I know I can do as soon as I start getting orders and get it written.  And I can do any kind of black & white layout I want, which I can't do if I use a self-publishing service.  So that's where I'm at right now.  Here's the link to my Go Fund Me page, if you want to check it out. 

So... what resources do you have that you could use to start creating your job? 

How Sam and Mattie Made A Movie

Watch the clip, this is awesome.  I heard about Sam and Mattie on the CBS news last night.

Many years ago, Sam and Mattie, who both have Downs Syndrome, met at the Special Olympics.  They became best friends, hanging out with each other continually over the years.  A while back, one of their brothers saw them acting out mock fight scenes in the backyard.  He figured it was a phase the guys were going through.  But after a while, he noticed they kept acting out the same scenes over and over.  He asked them about it.  It turned out that they had written and entire script for a zombie movie, and were acting it out. 

So, with a little help, Sam and Mattie did a Kickstarter campaign, raised $70,000 and actually made their zombie movie, called Spring Break Zombie Massacre.  It'll be coming out soon. 

So... after seeing Sam and Mattie on Conan, tell me again what your excuse is for not trying to do something awesome.

Are 20 Million Americans Just Lazy?

This clip gives a short, concise, but well informed look at youth unemployment around the world. 

When your college offers a "paper or plastic?" seminar, you know the job market is looking bad.

OK, it's not quite that bad yet, but it's getting close.  The over-educated, over-qualified low wage employee has become an archetype in our society.  We've all seen them.  The barrista with a master's degree.  The senior citizen wiping tables at McDonald's after a 40 year career of skilled labor.  The grad student stocking grocery shelves.  For a year or so I've heard people throw out an estimate that there are 30 million unemployed and underemployed people in the U.S..  About a month ago, I actually looked up the best recent numbers I could find.  I came up with a number of at least 20.3 million un and under-employed people in the U.S., and that's a minimum number.  Nobody knows the real number.

So what's going on?  Are 20 million Americans just lazy?  The clip above talks about young people unemployment.  Man, I got EVERY job I ever applied for from age 17 to 28.  I was completely unqualified for most of them.  Hell, I managed a small amusement park at age 18.  Really.  That was starting in the 80's, in a city, Boise, Idaho, that actually had a pretty tight labor market for that time.  What has happened since then that got us in this mess now?  Here are some of the major factors:

Outsourcing- Millions of manufacturing, and some service jobs (like call centers for example) have been moved to other, much cheaper, countries, Mexico and China in particular.  This is the big culprit for the loss of good paying jobs in most people's minds, but it's far form the only one.

Taken by technology- This is the thing that most people gloss over.  Millions of jobs have also been lost or taken over by various forms of technology.  When I was a kid, and my parents drove into a gas station, a grown man would come out, pump the gas, and wash the windows and check the oil while we waited.  Those thousands of jobs were replaced by self-service gas pumps.  I read once that ATM machines now do the work that 800,000 bank tellers used to do.  I don't know if that number is accurate, but it gives us a sense of how those jobs were lost.  

Concentration of wealth- In the 1980's, the now legendary president Ronald Reagan helped push through tax cuts to wealthy Americans and corporations.  The idea was called "trickle down economics," or "Reaganomics" for short.  The idea was that by giving rich people and corporations tax breaks and loopholes, they would build or grow huge businesses that would employ lots of people.  A quick look around will show you that not a whole actually lot trickled down.  What did happen was that many wealthy people became super rich, and now control an incredible share of our nation's wealth.  That small number of people can't possibly spend as much as tens of millions of average Americans could.  In an really simple analogy, much of the U.S. wealth is in huge resevoirs owned by super rich people, but the rivers feeding everyone else have nearly dried up.  Money flows like water in a healthy economy.

Trillions of dollars held offshore- I've heard estimates that 1 to 3 TRILLION dollars are being held in other countries to avoid paying U.S. corporate taxes.  Even with all the loopholes in the tax laws, many major corporations are holding tens of millions of dollars or more in other countries.  No one has figured out a way to get this money back into the U.S..  Keep in mind, a trillion is a thousand billion.  

The Big Transition- This is my name for the period of society we're in right now.  We've left the Industrial Age, where factories in nearly every town and city employed most people.  We're heading towards a new age, called The Information Age, The Digital Age, The Creative Age and similar names, depending who you listen to.  But we're not in that new age yet.  We're in a decades long transition between the two ages, where one revolution after another in technology, communication, and business is surging through society.  Right now there are high paying jobs requiring tech skills and creativity.  Then there are a much larger number of low skill service jobs.  The huge number of good paying mid skilled jobs have disappeared.  The more I look into future trends by the people who study those things, the worse the future job situation looks.

So... again... are 20 million Americans just lazy?  Some are, of course.  But there a many, huge macro forces depleting the job market right now.  Millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide, are caught in really crazy circumstances.

So who's going to create the millions of jobs we need?  Senator Bernie Sanders, in his presidential bid, pushed the issue of putting millions of Americans to work repairing and building infrastructure, like roads and bridges, in the U.S.  This would be great... if the politicians could work together and make it happen.  I'm not holding my breath on that one.  

Professor Richard Florida, economic development specialist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, says we need to make service jobs higher paying and better jobs.  That would help, too.  But, again, I'm not holding my breath. 

So... who's left to create millions of jobs?  We are.  You and me.  I keep coming back to the same conclusion.  Millions of Americans (and people in other countries) are going to have to create our own jobs.  We just can't wait for other people to do it.  So, no... you're not necessarily lazy because you  don't have a great job.  But you might be fighting a losing battle in a job market with millions of similarly skilled people.  This blog is about finding our best options.   

How I Made $150 Trash Picking

The table in the clip above is similar to the one I'm talking about in this post, except the one I found had much more intricate carving. 

Back in 2006, I could tell that taxi driving was going to keep going downhill as a business, so I tried to escape it.  I had discovered storage unit auctions by accident a couple years before.  This was a while before the TV shows about storage auctions came out.  Oddly, I started in Huntington Beach, California, and I think Daryl who now stars in Storage Wars, was at the first auction I went to.

In any case, I was living in my taxi, and had my own stuff in a storage unit.  I started going to storage auctions and buying the cheaper units, and reselling things, making a bit of money.  One day, driving into my own unit, I passed the dumpster, and there was a big, round table top, and a huge table base nearby.  I didn't think much of it.  The next day, I went to my unit again, and I could tell the table was old, so I checked it out.  It was solid oak, definitely antique, with lots of hand carved details.  But there was some damage to it.  I threw the table top in the back seat, lugged the insanely heavy base into the trunk, and took it from the dumpster to my unit.  I happened to have a disposable camera so I took a few photos and got them developed.

Over the next few days, in the course of driving around in my taxi, I stopped at several antique shops to see what they thought.  The crazy heavy table I found in the trash was solid oak, made in France, and probably made around 1870-1880.  after about three days, a store owner said he'd give me $300 for it.  So I went to my storage unit, loaded it up, and took it to his huge antique shop.  when he saw it, he said, "That's a lot smaller than I thought it was, I'll give you $150."  A lot of people may have been  pissed off.  But I pulled it out of the trash three days earlier, I took the $150 cash and headed back out on the road as a taxi driver.

How did I spot it?  I worked for years as a furniture mover, and I got to know good furniture from bad, so it caught my eye sitting there by the dumpster.  You never know where a good piece will be found.  A lot of people put old furniture out by the dumpster or on the curb.  Like the old saying goes, one person's trash is another person's cash.  Keep an eye out.