How did this make it to the top of the page?
Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage
21–30 of 111 posts
Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage
#22Did you really think arbitrage of used goods could be a business? I think the best thing these types of experiments do is expose pain points and inefficiencies that you can make businesses out of. When I was in my ramen phase of startup life (and newly married), I used to (among other things) buy clothes at local thrift stores and resell them on eBay for a decent margin. You quickly learn what brands/items sell and o…
Exactly. It's a hobby, but while scaling it up is hard to do, it is not impossible. Two stories.
I wrote a program awhile back that would look for iPod Touches on my local Craigslist and would analyze the price for many different versions. If an individual iPod was available and was below mean price within a given time frame, I'd send the seller a note almost immediately. Then, if I purchased the item, I'd relist it at the mean price. Completely an arb play.
What I learned was that 1) iPods are easy to sell, 2) People who buy on craigslist are flaky and tend not to show up, 3) The time spent waiting around to meet people was obnoxious, and 4) Sometimes sellers see what you did with their item and send you angry emails.
I never made more than a few hundred bucks, but it was an interesting experiment nonetheless.
Second story: For years, my wife sold used books. She'd go to estate auctions and buy boxes and boxes of books. She'd go to library sales and buy hundreds of books. Then she'd sell them on the Amazon marketplace. She would walk into these places with a barcode scanner and would check their price and sales rankings on Amazon. If it was in a decent margin for her, she'd buy the item. This actually did scale, but she quit when it became less of a hobby side income and more like real work. She's a nurse by trade, and the book selling was never meant to be anything more than a hobby.
So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that arbitrage of used goods can be a business, but it depends heavily on the availability of the supply of used goods. Books worked for my wife because she could buy dozens of them at a time and ship dozens of them them all from the post office down the street as orders came in. For me, I was running around town picking up items and dropping them off.
Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage
#23It's worth noting that $300 for a day of manual work is considered a good salary in many parts of the country (and even in San Francisco).
$300 for three guys. Once you factor in the girlfriend subsidy, they would have made better money with far less risk by getting shifts at local fast food restaurants.
He said they only worked for about 3 hours.
Even if you take out $75 for the GF subsidy (being generous and assuming she gets an equal share), each guy made $25/hour, cash (i.e. ~$30-$35/hour pre-tax), which is >3x what they'd get at a fast-food joint.
Now of course, one does need to take into account the fact that they're restricted in spending their loot on beer, which they are obligated to share. From a short-term economic standpoint this is probably a significant hit on their profits (i.e. unlikely that the three gentlemen will consume the majority of the beer). However, from a longer-term/more holistic view, purchasing beer for the group will surely lead to fun, team building, general goodwill, and so on, which is arguably more valuable than the $300 cash at this point in the startup's lifecycle.
tl;dr startups should use aeron-chair arbitrage to fund investment in beer, it's science.
Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage
#24You do realize that by having your buyer PayPal you the money you basically lost $50 on PayPal deposit transactions. I would have had him send me a corrected cheque instead.
Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage
#25I can't tell if this is a joke or not? Some frail guys can't hack lugging chairs around so it's not a viable business model for anyone? This is a very viable business that you guys feel too entitled for.
Open your eyes and guess what a pawn shop, antique store, used office furniture dealer, or IT equipment reseller do. It's not far off from this, but they aren't bitching about it and plugging a silly website.
Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage
#26I still dont get what priceonomics provides that craigslist or ebay doesnt. Craigslist: * Listings have "ASKING" prices and can easily negotiated down 5-20%. So even if you provide a historical information of "Asking Prices", its still not a 1-1 relationship to how much you expect to sell your item for or its "BUYING" price * I do question the value of historical information on CL: Its never been available, therefore…
also, judging from most deals i made on ebay/craigslist, 101% of them required me to call/email the seller to make sure what they were selling.
specially for the lower-than-market value ads. and NOT excluding expensive ads such as cars.
that alone would be a complex problem alone.
Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage
#27I still dont get what priceonomics provides that craigslist or ebay doesnt. Craigslist: * Listings have "ASKING" prices and can easily negotiated down 5-20%. So even if you provide a historical information of "Asking Prices", its still not a 1-1 relationship to how much you expect to sell your item for or its "BUYING" price * I do question the value of historical information on CL: Its never been available, therefore…
You sort of answered your own question -- in both examples you specifically pointed out work that you have to do in order to calculate a price -- you need to sift through Craigslist items, keep track of what you find, apply a calculation, and come up with an estimate. Same for eBay.
The work you're doing there takes time and has value, and Pricenomics is trying to capture that. I'm not intimately familiar with the company nor do I know if they'll figure out a viable business model, but I do see the intrinsic value in what they're proposing.
Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage
#28I see two problems with estimating price off craigslist.
1. List price is not the same as selling price 2. The averaging is being moved by "accessory items" i.e. http://priceonomics.com/computers/apple/macbook-air/ shows a lot of things that aren't MacBook Airs in the low price bracket. Maybe tossing out anything that is a few SD away from the average would fix that.
Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage
#29Did you really think arbitrage of used goods could be a business? I think the best thing these types of experiments do is expose pain points and inefficiencies that you can make businesses out of. When I was in my ramen phase of startup life (and newly married), I used to (among other things) buy clothes at local thrift stores and resell them on eBay for a decent margin. You quickly learn what brands/items sell and o…
Exactly. It's a hobby, but while scaling it up is hard to do, it is not impossible. Two stories. I wrote a program awhile back that would look for iPod Touches on my local Craigslist and would analyze the price for many different versions. If an individual iPod was available and was below mean price within a given time frame, I'd send the seller a note almost immediately. Then, if I purchased the item, I'd relist it…
Arbitrage is technically a set of simultaneous transactions where you buy and sell at the same time. Purchasing something and reselling it later for a higher price is not arbitrage.
It is usually used to describe a riskless transaction.
Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage
#30Did you really think arbitrage of used goods could be a business? I think the best thing these types of experiments do is expose pain points and inefficiencies that you can make businesses out of. When I was in my ramen phase of startup life (and newly married), I used to (among other things) buy clothes at local thrift stores and resell them on eBay for a decent margin. You quickly learn what brands/items sell and o…
>Did you really think arbitrage of used goods could be a business?
Isn't that basically the business model for antique dealers and pawn shops?