Sunday, November 24, 2019

Quiet Sunday

It's the weekend before Thanksgiving, and I'm sitting here, a bit sleepy yet, working on a few things before feeding the zoo crew and then back down for a bit more sleep. Working second shift pays better, but your sleep sure gets messed up, and for whatever reason, I couldn't get sleepy till 8AM, and I've been half-awake since half-past noon. So I really need more sleep so I can get into work tomorrow. Three days on, four-day weekend, and a slightly short check next week due to the holiday. At least I'll get four days on the clock, and hopefully enough hours to make a full check, but I won't hold my breath on it.

This last week alone was really crazy. Everything was going nuts at the plant, to where first shift got scheduled to work yesterday just to run totes by the end of their day on Tuesday. Then management decided to cut back on our trucks for Thursday and Friday, so we could run all of them. Still over 100 totes run on Friday. It sucked. Three-day old birds, despite being kept cold and near-frozen all that time, really don't smell that great. If I pulled meat out of my fridge that smelled like that, it would be getting fed to the dog. But considering all the dip tanks the stuff goes through before processing and packing to kill off any bacteria, it's okay once we're done with it. It's just, in the meantime, that stuff is kinda WHEW.

I'm getting quite a bit done on the shop, separating the Etsy stuff from the Pattern side. Etsy will hold my candles, the embroidered stuff, beads and charms, and all the digital files. The embroidered stuff and beads and charms will slowly disappear as they sell, and will not be relisted or anything, so that the Etsy side of the business eventually will be just the candles and digital products, which are knit and crochet patterns and graphics files. The Pattern side, which is my top-level domain, will be all the pet lovers gifts and pet products like pet shirts, food bowls, pet placemats, pet beds, ID tags, and the like, plus the gifts of shirts, mugs, ornaments, and so forth for the stoopy hooman slaves to said pets.

It took me a whole maybe ten minutes on a site called Canva to rebrand the Pattern site. Poof, it's done with no agonizing. They've got a lot of templates, including for Etsy, so it was super easy to do and looks quite professional. All these people who are on various Etsy groups I'm in, grousing about their branding and how it's got to be just right and having an existential crisis over a freaking font need to go there and throw something together. Quit having kittens, brand yourself, and be done with it so you can get on with the business of running your business.

I'm also looking into getting into a bit of retail arbitrage once HE is back behind bars in a few weeks. Considering his ongoing lack of a job even now, he's probably going bye bye for a long time on the 16th. It's not that I'm happy about it, but I'm at peace with it and accept it as a quite potential fact of life. He did a lot against me personally and against our marriage in the last couple of years, and more against me and our marriage even before that. He chose to leave me and use the drugs. He chose to threaten my life while high. He has continued to choose being lazy over getting and keeping a job while on probation. So as far as I'm concerned, and his family agrees, he's choosing to go back to jail or off to prison. No skin off my nose, and likely I'll be in better shape without him. It's going to be a tough adjustment, but I'll manage.

Anyhow, retail arbitrage. What it is, is you buy something at a low price and resell it higher, for a product that you can resell either in your own storefront locally, or most commonly, on Amazon. There are a number of YouTube videos on the subject, and on various ways to work it. One of the best ways is to hit up your dollar stores and use the Amazon app to scan the barcode to see what the product is selling at on there. If you can make a reasonable profit, selling the product for at least double what you are buying it for, you buy it and then take it home and list it on Amazon for sale. It may take a little time to unload the thing, so you'll need a little space for it all, but I've watched several videos now, and it's not difficult. One fellow spent about $10 and profited about $60 for what was essentially a couple of hours of effort, including the shopping and listing. Now, personally, I'd stay away from things like lotions and powders, because they require special packaging to ship them like extra baggies and tape and things like that in case they explode in the mail, but there are a LOT of products you can get and resell for a good price. So once I'm on my own again and have the time, I'll be looking into that for a bit of extra income over and above Etsy and the Just Over Broke.

Right now, it's closing in on 2PM and my usual get up and feed the zoo crew time, so I'm off to take care of that and then deal with a bit more of a nap, before I get up and work on the shop a ton today. Be safe until next weekend!

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