It took until noon, but I’ve got at least a temporary fix on that tire. A perfect winter day helps when doing this chore, I worked in the front, sipping coffee and assessing the situation. The lowest quote I got was Firestone, a new set of two radials for $129. I hesitated. What good is a 40,000 mile guarantee when the car probably does not have that left on it?
In the end, I biked over to Wal-Mart and picked up a $10 compressor and a tubeless repair kit. I’m taking a noon break, turkey wings with home-made bread and pondering leaving early for the wig shop. This is the first time I’ve ever repaired a tubeless, and although it seems simple, I prefer to take back roads all the way until I have a little more confidence in the procedure.
Okay, now it is done and I am covered in grease and dirt. Some guys like it but you can have it. I promise to put my wheel chocks back in the garden wall where they came from and put all the tools back. After work, I mean, hey, at least I used chocks. Just for that, here is another picture of me also wearing safety glasses. So there! (The little blue box in my hand is the new air compressor. Works fine.)
Time to time, I’m still listening to that audio-book on the car radio. It is actually a fascinating insight into government corruption, American style. Outwardly, the book is about a brother and sister who are adopted by different families. They grow up, she gets married and he stays single. The sister adopts a child, then dies along with her husband. The child is suddenly worth a lot of money. The plot, so far, is how the grandparents and brother are both arguing for custody on the basis that the others are not “blood” relations. So far, the tale does nothing for me.
It seems, though, that the government gets involved, claiming the child’s welfare is at stake. They send a social worker over to investigate the lifestyle of the bachelor as to his suitability to be a father. Still no problem, until it emerges that the grandparents were not similarly investigated. Now, there is a problem, but a small one. The big problem is the social worker. This person has the power to make value judgments on your lifestyle, something no government should have, and certainly no civil servant.
The social worker determines he will be a good father. Well, right there, should I not be satisfied? Not so fast. It turns that the social worker is a middle-aged crone who cares far less about father-potential than husband-potential. His place is a mess but she instantly agrees with herself that it merely lacks a woman’s touch and she knows just the woman. Bonanza. That, plus he said “follow up visits” would be okay. The child’s welfare, my eye.
The wig shop. It was a quiet day, again I wish it was about six miles closer because that drive is murder. I come right back during rush hour. I should consider parking near the causeway and biking in. I’ve organized some of the basics and I stress that there was really not any organization [in terms of long-range industrial planning, pricing and correspondence] before [I got there]. Many similar operations are not even aware they are disorganized until they see what I can do.
My methods heavily involve the computerized sorting and categorization of information. It begins to uncover inefficiencies in other areas that come into contact with it, ask anybody who tries to work next to me. I have begun to pre-number all email communiqués with the factory. Ditto with attaching dates to every price quote and design change. A problem surfaced that would never have happened to me – there were uncertainties to the unit cost. I do believe Ruth was surprised when I pointed out that the counter samples she possesses are “probably worth $2,000 apiece”. (I add later that she may have been surprised that I think of such things.)
Lecture time. Just for a paragraph, though. A counter sample is a curious item. You send a factory a facsimile of your product, asking them if they can mass produce. They inevitably make certain changes and send this altered item back for your approval. This returned and factory-friendly version of your original is the “counter sample”. I believe it would make more sense if it were hyphenated, as in “counter-sample”.
Back to organization and the side effects. I am leery of that old thumb that you should triple your costs when unsure of pricing. My experience says that only applies if you own the means of production and have some say in the production costs after you make a commitment. When you rely on others, your retail should be four times. Tiny costs quickly balloon as each middleman bases the tripling on his own cost.
What I did was show Ruth a spreadsheet that tabulated the costs for each stage. Just now there are three. Production, packaging and shipping. It took weeks, but Ruth managed to arm-wrestle the production and packaging costs out of them. This leaves shipping. You have to fly over the water or sail across it. This is a tricky calculation because importing is still one of the most bureaucratic quagmires left on the planet. Worse, computers have allowed shifty operators to unbundle their prices and advertise only the shipping [without the dozen or so other compulsory fees].
The price will come down with time. Right now, it hurts. The option seems to be air cargo, with a 3 to 7 day delivery time. (No, you cannot choose how many days.) For a 2.5 pound package, the “on-line calculator” rang up a fee of $297 for that single box around the size of a small trunk. The relevance of this is that it brings the unit cost to over $8.00 for the quantity I chose as the test case. This will improve but I cannot underline it enough that this is just a preliminary. I do not yet have even enough information to separate the fixed and variable costs.
In the end, I wrote a memo (email) to Dongan [the factory] asking if they could recommend any shipper, and pointed out to Ruth that nothing will bring out the facts quicker than just placing a small order and watching what happens. She has not gotten a shipment yet but has now found herself swimming in a world of databases and spreadsheets and she ain’t seen nothin’ yet. It is overwhelming, but quite frankly I do not know of any other way to run an operation with the resources we have. For starters, there is no physical room for anyone else and I would be loath to hire someone, since I usually get stuck cleaning up their mess.
So, I may be busy for a while. As mentioned, I would never have embarked on the preliminaries without a firm handle on the costs involved. Here is a situation of things gone ahead without what I consider indispensable information. I should also point out that this is around the fiftieth time in my life I’ve found myself in a situation so unique that help is unavailable. That, to me, means heavy computer work.
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