you can make first-class profits with a secondhand business

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Slowly, though, our trade picked up. One of the best gimmicks we had for building business turned out to be a more or less weekly ad in the local paper. I tried to make the wording catchy . . . and succeeded, I guess, since the editors gave us much more space than we paid for and threw, in some showy typesetting. They said people bought the paper just to read our notices!

A typical ad went like this:

The Jungle has stalled off creditors for another month and is still doing business under the fair trade system: Buy low, sell high. Remember . . . antiques made while you wait. Puppies given all children unaccompanied by parents. Free Coke with every $500 purchase. Browsing privileges extended to animals and people.

Or sometimes we'd paraphrase the advertising of the leading furniture stores. One firm's publicity said:

"When you see the big green truck go by, you know another lady has been made happy with furnishings from ____."

Our version:

"When you see the old beat-up pickup go by, you know another lady has been made happy because we bought her junk to sell to her neighbor."

(Incidentally, out of this experience has grown a weekly column of nonsense which I've now written several years for another paper. They even pay me. That's nice!)

Whether our ads really sold papers I don't know, but they did sell our goods. People started coming into the store strictly from curiosity, and stayed to buy.

As time went on, our business grew . . . but not quite enough to both finance the increasing amount of stock it required and pay us a decent wage. We kept the bookkeeping department at the local bank busy renewing old notes or tearing them up and making new ones. (Of course, you wouldn't necessarily need to do the same if you ran such an enterprise from your garage or didn't need a full-scale income. With three kids in grade school, though, we had to make money in quantity.)

I'll pass over briefly what was in fact a lot of blood, sweat and tears. My husband did carpentry work when the unemployment ran out and helped at the store as he could . . . and—finally!—we began paying off our notes. Then we found a large Quonset with three lots for sale outside the town's main business section on a well-traveled street. This was a steal at $8,500, and the Scott family (with a big assist from the bank) bought it.

Most regretfully we said goodbye to our 40 acres, purchased a two-story house and had it moved to one of the parcels adjoining the store. This worked out fine because we could keep an eye on the children while working next door. (Of course, we've never sold our dream of returning to the land when the offspring leave the nest . . . and, meanwhile, the business has kept them in pretty good feathers as they grow up. They've also developed self-reliance by assisting in the store and running the house.)

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print