Archive for August, 2008

I finally got through all the hoops with one of the suppliers, and am now able to look at their catalog and price lists.

Only to discover that their “wholesale” prices are only slightly lower than retail. With shipping, it seems to cost about twice what it would sell for retail. What am I missing here? This is the distributor mentioned by the actual manufacturers, so you’d think there would be more of an actual, you know, profit here. Or am I expecting too much?!

Poor Toby has been working his butt off to finish up our website so that there’s more to it than what we have now. He’s been working on the design (which looks really good now, though you won’t be able to see it until it’s published) and doing research on some technologies to use on the site. But if we have no items that we can really sell… will all his effort have been wasted?

I’m getting really frustrated. It’s so hard to get information, and I think I must be missing something if the “wholesale” cost is twice the retail costs. So how, exactly, is this supposed to work?

I tend to have dreams that are recurring in nature. For instance, for several years almost all of the dreams I remembered upon waking contained some form of abandonment. I have a few themes that my dreams tend to fall into, and these themes are found in the vast majority of my remembered dreams.

I’ve spent the last few weeks dreaming of a childhood friend. Regardless of the thoughts and emotions of the people in my dream, the dreams are always melancholy in nature, perhaps because I know that when my dream self is happy, she’s living a fantasy that will never be.

Last night in my dreams, I couldn’t get her to talk to me, couldn’t get her to really even notice I was there. She was too busy speaking to someone else. This in particular is sad to me, probably because of how closely it mirrors reality. I woke up feeling kind of lost and very alone.

I wrote several months ago that I was going to let this go and finally move on, but it seems that I haven’t. I still think of her every single day, and I still am hurt over her lack of effort towards retaining our friendship. I don’t think it will be possible for me to move on and finally make some friends of my own until I reconcile these feelings and memories. Until I learn to truly let her go, I will never be able to fully heal.

It’s been a week since I resigned, and in this time I’ve been attempting to start an online business. I now present to you the result of all this effort… Hazel Cove.

Right now all we have are my old textbooks and video games, but I’ve contacted three different suppliers so that I can carry actual stock. Hopefully I’ll hear back from them soon.

You’ll notice that all our stock is on Amazon, instead of hosted on our own site or on eBay. The reason we chose not to do eBay is largely because there’s an initial listing fee, regardless of whether or not the item actually sells. With Amazon, you only pay for items that sell; the rest get removed after 60 days. Also, with Amazon the buyer pays up-front, so there’s no waiting for payment or fears that they won’t pay. And as for not putting everything on our site, it just doesn’t seem like a good idea at this time to be dealing with credit cards and all the risks and paperwork that go with them by ourselves.

I’m also in the process of applying for a business license, though that will have to wait until we hear from Toby’s workplace lawyer about the legality of him owning and working in an outside business so that we know whether to file under both of our names or just mine.

And finally… Why Hazel Cove? All I can say is, try going here and entering in all the possible business names you can think of that sound halfway decent. How many of them are actually available? …Exactly. But I like the name, and I like being in charge of myself, so I’m really hoping that this works out.

So, wish me luck!