Adventures in e-marketing

 I decided to devote this afternoon to adding a few things to the museum's EBay listings. A donation box from a few months ago included an amazing stash of vintage women's handkerchiefs, items that were both kind of nifty and totally useless. I mean, one or two colorful floral ladies' hankies might be neat to have around for if we ever dress a mannequin as June Cleaver (or her equivalent) so she could have it tucked in a pocket or sticking out of the end of a sweater sleeve, but there's no way the museum needs to keep a stash of 30 or 40 of them.

When the handkerchiefs first emerged from the box my first thought was to figure out a fair price and buy them myself. Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away I saw a remarkably nice quilt made from ladies' hankies. I believe the original pattern was in a women's magazine in the 1960s. It involved folding the hankies to form butterfly wings, appliqueing them to a backing, and then adding details like antennae with embroidery. It was nice. I saw the hankies stash, had flashbacks to the quilt Betty flaunted several decades ago, and briefly fantasized about chasing down the pattern and doing something similar.

Thanks to the wonders of Google, I did find the pattern. There are actually multiple options for turning cheap handkerchiefs into quilt tops. Then sanity prevailed. I have a remarkably high stack of UFOs now. Did I really need to add another Unfinished Object to that pile? 

No. 

So I took a lot of photos of handkerchiefs, measured them, and then kind of shoved the stack to one side. Recent adventures in cataloging made me realized something had to be done with the hankies. They needed to stop taking up space on the table in the office. They either needed to go into PastPerfect and then a drawer somewhere or they needed to get listed for sale. The latter seemed like the better option, considering that the museum really, really needs to build up enough money to have the building re-roofed. Besides, how long could it take to list a few dozen handkerchiefs on EBay, especially when they'd be listed in lots and not individually?

As one might anticipate, it ate up the entire afternoon. 

The good news is that one lot sold within an hour of getting listed so it wasn't a totally wasted day.

If I ever do decide to make a quilt like this, I have learned brand new ladies' handkerchiefs are available on-line in packs of 30. Are they being used for crafts or are there still people out there who haven't figured out that Kleenex exists?

Museum fundraising one EBay sale at a time

I may have mentioned that one of the revenue streams -- or, more accurately, feeble trickles -- for the museum where I volunteer is EBay sales. As we go through things, get stuff cataloged and organized, whether it's a box that's been hiding in the storage building for 15 years or a donation that walked in the door last week. we inevitably find things that do not fit the museum's mission. We also find items that are duplicates, like multiple wooden ironing boards or several sets of curtain stretchers. When that happens, the item in question meets one of three possible fates: we pass it on to another institution that can use it, we toss it, or we try to sell it. We sell used books through Amazon.com, we sell bulky stuff through a local Facebook group (Baraga County Stuff for Sale), and we sell miscellaneous collectibles on EBay.

Sometimes we get lucky with EBay items, like the time we stumbled across a first edition of an early William Faulkner novel that was in excellent condition. I think it set a record for the most we've ever gotten for one item. More typically we sell collectible postcards for a couple bucks each. As long as it sells, though, and we get more for it than it costs us to package and mail it, it's found money. Every little bit helps when our annual budget is just barely four figures.

Anyway, a few days ago I thought we might have gotten lucky. Another volunteer and I were looking around in the storage building for stuff that might be sellable on Baraga County Shit Stuff for Sale and pulled a folio-sized book off a shelf that had obviously been gathering dust for awhile. It was a huge volume, probably a good two inches thick, maybe more. I had glanced it before and knew it had art prints in it. (I had in fact been thinking about pulling those prints to sell individually.) This time we took a closer look. First, I got excited because the cover was embossed with a name, and year, Florence E. Jenkins 1895. My first thought was to remember the recent Meryl Streep movie and get hopeful it was connected in some way with that Florence Jenkins. Second thought was that maybe it would be worth something on its own if it turned out there was no connection.

So I did some Internet sleuthing this morning and discovered that sadly there is no connection between the Florence Jenkins on the cover of the book and the Florence Foster Jenkins portrayed in the film. So much for any value it might have had as a collectible curiosity.

Then I looked into the value of the book as it stands. Turns out it would be worth a shit ton of money if it was in good condition. Copies in good to excellent condition are listed at anywhere from $595.00 to $800 on ABE.com. Unfortunately, the one we have looks like it was tossed off a truck and run over a few times. Calling it "well read "is a bit of an understatement. Selling it on Ebay is probably not going to help the budget a whole lot.

Okay, so it doesn't really look like it's been run over by a truck, but the binding is shot, it has loose pages, and there are water stains on the margins of some of the art prints. But who knows? Maybe there's a passionate graduate student majoring in art history somewhere out there whose life will not be complete until he or she has a personal copy of Sheldon's Recent Ideals of American Art, especially when there's no way the typical grad student (or even struggling assistant professor) could afford to drop $600 or $700 on a copy that qualified as "good." Now all I have to do is figure what a fair price for it might be. Wish me luck.

I wonder what the media mail rate is for a book that weighs almost as much as a small car?

Random thoughts

I swear Atlanta has the worst drivers on the planet. This is the only major city I've lived in where quite a few drivers don't seem to have a clue just where it is they're going. Seems like every time I'm out and about I see what appears to be the classic Atlanta idiot driver maneuver: the left turn from the extreme right lane.

Yesterday was classic. We were on our way to the Container Store, cruising up Piedmont in the heart of Buckhead, aiming for the intersection of Piedmont and Peachtree (the Peachtree, not one of the 85 other Atlanta streets with Peachtree in their name). The Container Store is right on the corner so we were positioned in the extreme right hand lane, ready to turn right into the parking lot. We're almost to the corner when the driver of a white SUV in front of us apparently wakes up, says wait a second, I don't want to turn right! And cuts across four lanes of traffic to make a left on Peachtree. It was Saturday, so traffic was relatively light. . . so no screeching tires, squealing brakes, or crunching metal. . . but four lanes! Unbelievable. And I see this all the time -- people getting to intersections, being in a right turn only lane, and suddenly going, whoa, didn't want to go that way -- and whipping around to go in the exact opposite direction. And all without ever bothering to use their turn signals, of course.

There were Girl Scouts in front of the Container Store peddling cookies. The S.O. started mocking me because I had to stop to buy a couple boxes -- we had four boxes at home already because Girl Scouts accosted us in front of a Food Lion in Savannah. I told him to shove it. After all, I have enough restraint that the first four boxes are still unopened, unlike another buyer I spotted who had purchased multiple boxes of Samoas and ripped one open to get at the cookies before she even made it back to her car.

I always buy Girl Scout cookies. I was a Girl Scout leader. I've served my time in cookie hell. I still remember the semi pulling up in Tucson to drop off our troop's cookie order -- we had figured out how many cookies we had to sell in order to pay for Girl Scout summer camp for the troop members, arranged for a cookie stand in a shopping center, and then we adults got to stress for a couple weeks about whether or not we were actually going to be able to push that many thousands of boxes or not. We did, but being on the hook, however briefly, for $10,000 worth of Girl Scout cookies is not a fun place to be.

Tucson, incidentally, was the one Girl Scout council I've been involved with where when it came to the cookie sale every girl got the same sales recognition: a patch. No tee-shirts, no mugs, no Walkmans or other individual incentives for sales. That's always been the one thing I truly hate about kids hawking products, whether it's for school or for Scouts: the incentives that focus on individual greed or glory instead of focusing on the collective good. Other than the fact that the incentives put the focus on the individual rather than the group, a major flaw in and of itself, they are inherently unfair.

Anyone who's ever had a kid who had to do fund-raising (or did it themselves as kids) knows that every group falls into several categories: the rich kids, whose parents will buy X number of boxes of popcorn or cookies or pizzas or whatever it takes for their little darlings to get the top reward; the kids from humongous families who are related to everyone in town and have so many aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., that even if each relative only buys one box the kids get the top reward; and everyone else. The families that live way out in BFE land, so going door to door really isn't an option. The families on limited incomes, living from paycheck to paycheck, who can't afford to buy more than a couple boxes. The families who live in neighborhoods where they really don't want their kids going door to door peddling anything.

Interestingly enough, Tucson is also the one place where the average sales per troop member went through the roof. Our troop sold an amazing number of cookies, all without any parents having to bring order forms to the office or stock their own freezers. When it was a collective effort, we're all in this together and getting the same reward (in the case of our troop each girl was going to get an equal share of the proceeds to help pay for camp), the kids knocked themselves out. I was involved with a couple other councils after Tucson (we moved a lot in the '80s) but was never able to persuade them that the individual prizes were a bad idea. Of course, those were the days when the ethos of St. Ronnie dominated, individual greed was good, and it was hard to think outside that paradigm.