Things are much as I left them, meaning business has been bad. Of course, when has business ever been good? Teresa called and I went over to check the condo. Her real estate guy said things were missing. That didn’t check out. Even my $300 bike was still there. However, the water and electric had been cut off. Remember, this is still her property and the association has no right to do that.I went in and cleaned up the fridge. Shortly I’ll get over there with my wagon and get the remaining furniture. I was in the shop most of the day pursuing my planning for the east wall. If you read back a few years, you will find dozens of false starts and good ideas. For instance, I never did use the balance of my retraining allowance, and Barry had such high residency requirements that I would have had to repeat almost every course I ever took. When school gets expensive, it is wise to calculate the value of the payoff. I’m sad to report a college degree is no longer a guarantee of much. I attribute that largely to extremely low academic standards. Why, back in my day ….
Then, I’ve always associated college with getting a good job, not the social value of the degree. Maybe that is why I never studied Babylonian architecture or took a Latin course. Back at the shop, we are all in agreement that something has to progress. But nobody wants to take risks or cut into existing cash flow. I have failed to come up with a single idea that fit my original criteria. The main consideration was to find something we don’t have to “operate”. We want business that runs itself by taking advantage of floor space already paid for. Easier said than done.
This is what I’ve come up with. Again, as always in the past, the odds of anything actually happening are remote. All information here is, well, just information. Looking at the Postal Services disdain for private mail boxes, I see there are several ways around the law requiring ID. One is if your business is “secretarial” and not primarily established for the purpose of receiving mail. Keep that in mind, for that is the exact avenue I pursued in the following research.
What is the primary problem with a private mail box? You have to undergo the expense of regularly checking it and finding there is no mail. Wasted gas and time. Stay with me here. There is a huge outfit online in New York that will e-mail you when something arrives in your box. Neat idea, or what? You know the eBay ads that show a thumbnail picture? They scan your incoming letters and send you an e-mail of the envelope and the return address. Then right online, you can check discard or forward, or you can drive over and get the mail yourself. Provided you live in New York.
Stay with me here. If I were to offer even the most abbreviated version of this service, I would be overwhelmingly “secretarial” by any reasonable measure. I will phone, fax, text, e-mail or page you when you get a letter. That service costs twice as much as renting the box (the rental becomes a mere formality). You can assume I have thought through this much more than I’m revealing. I’ve run the numbers and it is possible I can create a full-time job.
The idea requires the cooperation of everyone at the shop, since that mail must be sorted daily. But even the starter kit of 30 mailboxes will pay enough rent to handsomely turn business around. (No, you can’t do the same thing unless you already have a suitable location.) I’ll be searching all day tomorrow. Let’s see how well I remember that locksmithing course I took in 1994. The static rentals alone make enough difference that nobody is going to mind the extra few minutes of work. I estimate startup costs to be less than $500, almost a trademark for me.
