eBay the Right Way

eBay Seller Chat with Carol in Minnesota: "Toys & Games are My Dopamine Hit" 🤗

• Suzanne A. Wells • Episode 198

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Unknown:

Music.

Suzanne Wells:

Happy New Year. Everybody. Welcome to Episode 198, of eBay the right way. Today's date is January 1. 2025 starting off a fresh new year of opportunities. My guest today is Carol and no announcements, since everybody is probably still in holiday mode and maybe nursing a headache from a little too much indulging, so we will go right into the chat with Carol. Hello listeners, and welcome back to another exciting episode of eBay the right way. And I have Carol with us this morning. How are you doing today?

Unknown:

Doing well, happy to happy to be here. I always think of you and your guests as my co workers, because I'm alone all day in working on eBay, and when I hear you guys, I feel like, Oh, these are my co workers, so I'm happy to be a part of this

Suzanne Wells:

great, good to hear. Yeah, it can be a lonely business, but you know, there's trade offs for everything true. So now tell us where you're located.

Unknown:

I'm in Minnesota, and I'm in a small town about 40 minutes west of Minneapolis. Okay,

Suzanne Wells:

do you want to reveal the name of that town or keep it a secret?

Unknown:

I live in Delano, which is, is, yeah, just as, just small little hamlet.

Suzanne Wells:

Okay, okay, okay, so my connection to Minnesota is my dad got a job transfer there from the south when us kids were little, and I think he was working for Lehigh cement company, and my brother was born there in Minnesota, in Bloomington. Oh sure. So I don't remember any of it. I just hear the stories my whole life of how southerners should not move to Minnesota.

Unknown:

Oh, I first thing I thought of, I thought, I wonder how long he lasted here. Well,

Suzanne Wells:

and my mom's from Florida, so that was really hard for her. So anyway, we have pictures and we hear the stories, but I don't remember it. Yeah. And so what's your temperature there today?

Unknown:

Today we're, I think seven below is what my computer screen is saying.

Suzanne Wells:

Like, that's the temperature right now? Yes, yes. Yes, it's broken. Gosh, yeah. So here in South Carolina, it's 39 okay, I bet you're going to chilly, yeah, going up to 50, so I love it, yeah? Okay, alright. Well, now behind the weather report, tell us how you got started on eBay and when that was sure

Unknown:

it was 2002 and how I got started was my sister had been a eBay seller in the late 90s, and I really didn't pay a lot of attention to what she was Up to. And one day, we were at my parents house, and I found a little cardboard treasure box of things I would have had treasures than the eight year old would have. So in there was like, Wacky Packages and gum wrapper chains and Pez dispenser, you know the stuff you keep when you're eight. And I found it, and I was dumping it out, and my sister picked up the Pez dispenser, and I didn't think anything of it. And then a couple weeks later, she said, Oh, I owe you $240 what? And I said, the same thing, what? And she said, I sold your pest dispenser on eBay, and it had, I can't quite remember if it was a doctor or a nurse, but I think it was a doctor and it had its little stethoscope, and I don't know much more about it, but

Suzanne Wells:

she

Unknown:

sold it, and that's when radar, that's when eBay hit my radar. It's like, Holy smackies. What is she doing over there in that little eBay corner? And so a couple years later, I was busy. I had twin girls. I was up to my ears, but a couple years later, she brought bought me my first postal scale, and. Came over and sat with me and taught me eBay. And initially it was really just kind of wax and wane. I would do it when I had a minute, and I would sell stuff of the girls, their their toys, or whatever that probably gotten at a garage sale, sold them on eBay, and then just kind of over time, it just kind of grew. Now I call it a profitable hobby. It's, yes, it's not my day job, but it's my fun.

Suzanne Wells:

Absolutely, yeah. Now, did you have a professional career before you had your kids?

Unknown:

Yes, I did. I have kind of two separate careers. One, I started off in aviation at a college I was I had an internship at people express airline in New Jersey, which you may remember in the 80s, it was the low cost airline boom that was going on. Okay? I had an internship in recruiting for them, which led me to a job at the singer company who was starting a new division making flight simulators. So the sewing machine company was also making flight simulators, so worked for them, and ended up eventually moving back to Minnesota to work for a division of Northwest Airlines that was doing pilot training. So that was my career, pre children, and then I had twin girls, and stayed home with them. And as I got a little older, I ended up pivoting into teaching CPR and first aid. So that's what I Oh, gosh, okay, and I it I'm a contract employee, which gives me the flexibility that I really wanted. So they call me and say, here are classes we need to cover. And then I pick the ones that are going to work for me. So about two three times a week I'll spend it at it's a different company every time I teach. So one week I'm going into a cheese factory. The next week, I'm going teaching guys who work with sheet metal. The next day, it might be folks who work in parks. So it's fun, because it's something different, completely different kind of vibe every time I teach.

Suzanne Wells:

Okay, now, did you have a specialized degree to go into the aviation jobs,

Unknown:

no, because I was in the branch that had to do with marketing, and that was my background. I was a speech and English major. So, okay,

Suzanne Wells:

wow, you've done all kinds of things I

Unknown:

have, but that's just a moment.

Suzanne Wells:

Okay, so let's get into your eBay sales and history and how you do your business. Do you have do you specialize in anything? Are you just an everything seller? Um,

Unknown:

my first love are toys and games. So do you remember the feeling you used to have when you were a kid, looking at the Christmas catalog, look at the toys, and you just marvel, I still get that. I love toys. That's my dopamine hit. If you're opening the doors to a sale, I gravitate towards the table that has the toys first. I know them. I love them. That being said, I look at my store and it is absolutely everything from a snowmobile helmet to a candlestick. But if you gave me a choice, I'm always going to gravitate towards toys. So I pulled up some of the sales that I thought were a little bit interesting, and one that got a lot of reaction on your Facebook page was one recently where I sold nine Huggies, disposable diapers from 1999 Yes, and these diapers I picked up on the last day of a garage sale. And I picked them up simply because my niece has a little one, and I thought I didn't look at them closely. I just thought, everybody needs diapers tucked everywhere. Emergency diapers. They were cheap, couple dollars or something, so I picked them up, and then as I was taking them out of the car, I looked at the package and realized, this is older. This isn't how diapers look now. They were thicker and crinklier, and so I remembered the. Something about vintage diapers, and so I did some research and that, I think I have something here. So I tested it with just a single diaper. I threw one up for 26 bucks. It sold in 15 minutes, really? Yeah. So then I thought, Oh, was that a fluke? Put up another one. Nope, sold quickly, $26

Suzanne Wells:

so is this a pack of diapers or a single diaper? Single

Unknown:

diaper? So there's a 1989 I do. I had a pack with 11 diapers in it. Okay, so my way of testing it was just pull one out of this pack, put it up there, and because it was a partial pack, so it was no harm in opening it, because it was already open. So those sold quickly, and then the gentleman who bought one of them asked, Do you have any more? And so I kind of stalled a little bit because I didn't really know what I had, and I had to figure that out. But as soon as I did some research, I thought, Okay, I think a fair price is $235 so I messaged him back saying I can put them all up in a listing. I'll tell you I'm listing it now so that you have the first opportunity. And I thought he'd balk at that. I mean, I would, but nope, bought him right away. And so it's one of those things where there's a buyer for everything, probably, I mean, that just who would have thought

Suzanne Wells:

so? And he never said why he was buying. I didn't really want

Unknown:

to ask Suzanne. Now, if it was a more normal product, I would have it, okay, oh, it's so it didn't go to Hollywood, it went to Ohio. Um, normally, I mean, that's just one thing. I thought he's not volunteering. I'm not going to ask him, right?

Suzanne Wells:

Yeah, I get that. You gotta be comfortable with it. Yeah? Okay, yeah. I remember seeing that on the group, and that's on my radar now, because Marla and Ed that were on couple weeks ago, they were talking about some cloth diapers that they sold, and it just seems like this keeps coming up with the vintage diapers.

Unknown:

Sure, yes, yes. Keep an eye out, absolutely yes. And another sale that was fun for me was I was in a thrift store and there was a basket of ornaments, and they're all kind of jumbled up, and those can be annoying to look at, but I saw one that was an RV, and my husband always teases me that we're going to sell everything and go and live in an RV. So I thought, Oh, I'll get this ornament for them. And when I got it home, I realized this thing is talking like, oh, there's sound to this. So maybe take a better look at it. And I figured out that it was a Chevy Chase cousin Eddie RV ornament. Okay, and you've probably heard those are sought after, so I put that one in on auction. I paid$1 for it, and it sold for $270 now, when listeners are looking for this, be careful now, because that was a number of years ago, and now there's remakes that are not worth that. Mm, hmm. They're selling them at coals and all over the place. So make sure you do your deal due diligence before you think you have Yeah, the hot one.

Suzanne Wells:

Yeah, anything that's valuable, there's a crap reproduction of it. Precisely, precisely, yeah, you have to look at where it was made. Sometimes they'll have a date, um, like vintage uh, sheets, bed sheets. Sometimes they'll have a date on the tag that, you know, like the strawberry shortcake is hot again, but you know the original that came out in the 70s. That stuff's really valuable, but you gotta, you gotta do your homework and but there's also groups for everything. Just, you know, I have this, I can't figure out if it is original or reproduction, and it's just amazing the depth of knowledge some people have about the most random

Unknown:

things. Precisely. Yes,

Suzanne Wells:

yeah, that so were you shocked at that same, oh, that

Unknown:

one had my husband just bowled over when I was we were watching this auction, and I think that's when the light bulb went out for him too. Like, hey, this is a thing. This, this, you find the right the right thing. My husband is in sales, and he always says that even a blind squirrel finds a nut. Every once in a while, there you go. So every once in a while, you just get lucky and you. Yeah, so that was a fun one. Another one that stands out was I was heading, we have a little cabin, and I was heading there, and I drove by pile of stuff on this on the Boulevard. It looked like wood and stuff, just garbage, really. And I could tell someone was moving. And then I noticed, as I was blowing by, hey, wait, there was a free sign, and I think I saw a blow mold. So I do the little Starsky and Hutch screech, turn, you know, blow back. And went back and dug in there, and it found just the car of a train blow mold. So picture the the engine, and then there's a attached to it is a little car, like a coal car. And so I pull it out, and I thought, Hmm, I wonder if this is going to be anything, because it's only part of a set, but I threw it in my car, and then as I went to look up and figure out what it was, it ended up selling for over$300 for some just free little nonsense on the side of the road. So that one kind of gobsmacked me. But now I've, I'm on to blow molds. Now I've never met a blow mold I couldn't sell. So now, how big was this? Oh, let's see picture like two copy paper boxes stacked on top of each other. Okay, and it's lighted, um, you know, it has that little cord in the back with the light bulb. And I think it was union, or United, or some name like that, Empire is another common one. But blow molds, if you have the They're light, they're bulky, obviously, but they're not hard to ship,

Suzanne Wells:

right? Yeah, always lucrative. Even

Unknown:

the little tabletop ones I've sold quite a number of that are worth picking up. Did

Suzanne Wells:

you have those growing up? Did your family decorate with those?

Unknown:

We did not. We had wooden like vintage wooden manger scene that was life sized. They were all individual characters. I see them every now and again. And my parents did a lot of lights and things, but we never had the blow molds.

Suzanne Wells:

Okay, so what? What year were you born? 62 Okay, okay. So, yeah, you're right in the middle of all that. So with my dad's objective when decorating outside was to make it look like a used car lot and much stuff as you could put out there. And we had molds with like the Christmas carolers and the Santa and the reindeer. And they were the big ones that you Yes, you know, like, three, four feet tall that you put out in the yard. And, yeah, people are like, Oh, that's gotta be hard to ship. But, I mean, they're light, so as long as you cushion them, well, it seems to be okay, easily, right? They've been through a lot, so yeah, they've survived this long. Yeah, yeah. Well, that sounds fun. Okay, what else do you have on your list?

Unknown:

Well, I have a kind of a sweet buyer story I bought at a church sale, vintage talking wrinkles dog puppet. So this was in the from the 80s. Wrinkles was a sharp a dog that sometimes it would be a plush but this was a puppet, and it and the talking still worked, and I put it up. It wasn't valuable. I probably sold it for $25 it went to Florida, and then shortly after that, I get a message from the buyer, letting me know how thrilled he was. He was the inventor of the dog. Oh, and he had been the one the engineer that was tasked, he said he had four months to write the code for the artificial intelligence and the speaking vocabulary for this puppet, and he also had to figure out how to make him sing. And he said he drove the neighbors dog nuts, because all day long, there would be electronic voices, electronic barking coming from his house as he figured out how to make this puppet sing and talk. And he said, as part of his contract, he got a number of them, but at the time he gave them away. Okay, and now he has a nephew, and he was so happy to find one that he could gift to his nephew as kind of his, his legacy project. And so that was, I just kind of liked having that little back story.

Suzanne Wells:

Yeah, I love it when things come full circle, like that way home, just one link in the chain to help things. Yeah, I told

Unknown:

him. Wrinkles came back to his dad. Oh. The other thing I thought might help some new sellers is games, even if you think this game looks like the most boring game in the world, sometimes they're worth, worth picking up, because games at a thrift store or garage sale usually are a few bucks and sometimes less than that. And I just sold one called the American dream. And honestly, Suzanne, I, if I were a kid, I wouldn't play this game. If you gave me a million dollars, it looks so boring. It looks like here go work in a finance department. You can call it fun. You know, it just didn't work for me. But put that up, and it sold really quickly for $49 and there's also another one that I think looks not very exciting, but it's called the farming game, and it's, again, one of those finance kind of games, and I've sold a number of those for around $39 And but you can pick those up pretty cheaply, but with games, I always encourage people to think about parting them out versus selling them whole, because so often I find that the parting them out actually makes more money than the easy way of just, you know, putting it in a poly and off it goes. But, or sometimes you buy a pretty, pretty princess game from the thrift store and realize, ah, it's missing half its parts. Don't throw it away. You still got something here. You're going to take out the yellow earrings, and you're just going to sell the yellow earrings, and, you know, you'll just find a way, but,

Suzanne Wells:

or just the board. Um, yeah, you know, somebody may have the game and their board is dirty and old and falling apart, and they want a new if it's a board game, you know, they want a new board. Yeah, I think people forget about that. And you know, when you're out there looking at and sometimes the boxes are all taped up, have that stretch wrap on them. And, you know, I get why they the thrift store wants to keep everything together, but then you can't see what's inside because, you know, we don't all have X ray vision. We can't see what's and but, you know, it's what two or $3 take a chance see what's in it. And I've done that before. I'm getting back into the toys. But you know, there's so many different games. Yes, it's not just monopoly and Scrabble and you know,

Unknown:

no, it is. It is endless. There is another game that I always tell folks to look for. It is rare. It is called cranium, caribou magical treasure hunt. Okay, there's cranium games. They're ubiquitous, but this particular one, the caribou magical treasure hunt, I find it super hard to find. I found maybe two in the wild, and then, because it's for the littler kids, the pieces are often missing, but the pieces are worth quite a bit, and the game itself is over$60 all day long. And so if you're at a garage sale and that's priced, price, right, I would definitely pick up that one. Is it not made anymore? I don't think so. Okay, it must have had an early or a short run, simply because otherwise we'd be seeing him next to all the billion cranium games you see all the time at right?

Suzanne Wells:

Yeah,

Unknown:

my kids had it. It is a fun game. I get the appeal,

Suzanne Wells:

but you're right back to the financial games. Yeah, some of them look so boring, yeah? And you're like, why would anybody play this? But I think with Homeschool and even in the Oh sure, in public and private schools, you know, it's a learning. Tool. Parents want their kids to be financially smart, so let's play a game where you can learn about that, right? You kind of have to put your own personal opinions aside. It's, it's not pretty, pretty princess with the jewelry. It's, you know, this cash. It's cash flow, Robert Hughes hockey's game that is, I found that and sold that for around 50 So, but there's a bunch of them, you know, that's a popular thing. Now,

Unknown:

sure, yeah, makes sense. Yeah. One other thing I thought I would mention is sometimes, again, if you're a beginner seller, you can hear people kind of talking about, oh, I just bought a storage locker. I just bought this $200 coat to slip for 800 and if you're in a beginning seller, that can be kind of daunting, like, oh my goodness, I'm not laying out that kind of money, but I do want to say, I look at a lot of what I not a lot, but a portion of what I'm selling. I paid a quarter for it. Not everything has to be a huge outlay. And one of them that comes to mind was, I had, I went to a garage sale, and they had baby blankets, which we've talked about before, but I think I probably bought them because it was teenagers running the sale, and I felt sorry for them, like I thought, oh, I should buy something for these kids. So I bought a handful of these baby blankets, and they were like a quarter each, and one of them was Carter's Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar baby blanket. It's the cotton ones, and I put that up for $45 after looking at comps, and there weren't many. There was one. Maybe it sold within a day. So that quarter turned into $45 being that there's money to be made on items that you don't pay a lot for, and so you just have to kind of test it out.

Suzanne Wells:

Absolutely. Yeah, and I think it's almost like the challenge of how cheap and I get stuff. And, you know, some sellers just sell items less than $20 like, that's their their main source of revenue, but they're only paying a quarter for it. And so 100 of those a month add up,

Unknown:

right? And, and, yeah, I kind of think of it as if I saw $3 on the sidewalk. I'm picking it up if I can make a small amount of money with very little effort, meaning I could take four photos, slam it in a in a bag. I paid nothing for because I don't pay for my shipping supplies. I get them donated to me. It's easy enough and here and there, here and there, and it all just starts adding up. But it depends too about what you want eBay to be, what your goal is. You know, if you're trying to pay your mortgage and and finance a trip, trip to Japan, it's a different hustle then and then, maybe you are into the the bigger things with bigger payoffs. But if this is your your hobby, it doesn't have to be this, you know, big, huge outlay of of dollars to to make it profitable. Well,

Suzanne Wells:

and it depends on what your objective is like, you can hustle it really hard and just, you know, okay, I'm just going to list as much as I can and take those lower sales and and they add up, like, if you have a mission, you know, you're paying off credit cards, or you're saving for a child's college, or, you know, whatever it is, you can work it as hard as you want, or you can pull back. And you know, it does lead to burnout sometimes when you're just working it all the time. But then again, if you're wired that way, because, like, everywhere I go, I'm looking at the grocery store on the clearance shelf, and I'm looking, it's just I'm wired that way. Sure, nobody taught me to do it. I just figured it out. And it's, it's like, I guess that's my dopamine rush.

Unknown:

Yeah. Finding

Suzanne Wells:

those things. What did I find? The other day, I found some. I thought it was doll house furniture, like it was these little boxes of dollhouse furniture. And I opened one, and it's, it's a kit. It's these teen tall. Little furniture pieces, and you put them together and stay in the wood. And I'm like, Oh my gosh. Why would anybody want to do that? It's so, it's so tiny, and it's so, what's the word I'm looking for here? Like, like, meticulous work. But some of those little kits, they're vintage, like the Queen Anne cherry wood wardrobe sells for$50 for this tiny little kit of a few pieces of I think it's balsa wood, um, but I thought you're going to have to get a microscope to look through to put this stuff together. That was small, but so I just bought, like five boxes. I bought all they had. I'd never seen anything like that before. I knew about dollhouse furniture, but I didn't realize there were kits where you assemble it. Sure? Of course, I got home with it, and none of the ones I had were heavy hitters. You know, I internet. The store wasn't great, so I'm like, well, they're, you know, cheap. I'm just going to try it so, but it's stuff like that that you just, you see different things all the time, right? Just never gets boring. And okay, I learned something. I learned that people like to do this. And okay, if you're going to go cross eyed or go blind doing it, that's up to you. I will provide that product

Unknown:

well. And I think it's another benefit having this as a hobby my day job. Of course, I'm extra extroverting and and having to be animated and 100% out there, and then I go into my little eBay cave, and it kind of rejuvenates me. But the other thing is it, I think it helps my brain with all the mental gymnastics we have to do in all the different facets of eBay. It's, I don't even think we realize sometimes how much we're our brains are zigging and zagging and working and so it's just another way I can justify that this is my hobby, is that I think it's it's good for my brain to keep learning stuff

Suzanne Wells:

I have learned about myself that if I'm not excited about it, I am not going to list it like yesterday, I had a listing day, and I had been out treasure hunting the day before, and I just had all these things. I was so excited to dive into it, get it listed, and Oh, somebody's gonna love this. And if you don't feel that way about it, it is, if it's not energizing, then it's draining. You have to find those items that energize you. And for me, it's it's doing different things that I've never worked with before. Like, I want to learn about this. I'm going to find out about that, and then I determine, like, cameras, electronics, is just, I don't get excited about those. I just don't. But you know, the vintage items, the handmade little napkins and place masks that are embroidered, and all those beautiful things that were made 4050, years ago, I really love working with

Unknown:

that. Mm, hmm, yes. And then it doesn't feel like work. It just, it just feels fun. Yeah, right, I get it, yeah.

Suzanne Wells:

Okay. What other kinds of items do you have to talk about? Let's see

Unknown:

here. Um, one thing I do a lot, Fisher Price, little people now, okay, about the very vintage ones, which I do so, but the market is really kind of not what it used to be on the very early little peg people that used to be more sought after than it is now. And I don't know the reason for that, except things come and go and you have to move on, kind of thing, but the Fisher Price, little people, A to Z, some awful A to Z. Alphabet Zoo. This is a play set. It's not the peg people, it's later. And that set, if you've come across. It is worth 100 bucks. You can sell for 100 bucks, easy, or the parts themselves. So the waterfall is$30 and this, you know, the cave, is probably $30 and so sometimes I'll come across. Some of the pieces, and I just put them in a bin, because it's supposed to have 26 animals, and I might be missing a few animals. So every time I get an animal, I just throw it in a bin. And then my daughter helps me. Sometimes I'll just hand her the bin and say, Go find out if this is complete. And then voila, as soon as I've scavenged together enough for a set those will always sell. There are also a few little people, princesses that again, these little people, you see them for quarter in little garage cell bins all the time. One is, it's Fisher Price Little People Princess parade. So it's Disney Princess Little People in little floats. So little plastic floats about six inches long, but that little Jasmine with her float is $39 and I have come across her a handful of times so that one, but you could find Cinderella not worth more than eight bucks. But so there is money to be made, but you just kind of have to do a little research. The other thing I recommend always watching out for our veggie tail items. Oh, my goodness, some of those just surprise you. I had a three inch tall Larry boy, veggie tail character, and it talked. You pushed a button and it had a button battery and it talked. And that little rascal just sat around. I never listed it because I didn't assume it was worth anything worth worrying about. And I finally looked at it and that sold quickly for 45 bucks. So sometimes those little kind of oddball things always have your phone and check, check, check,

Suzanne Wells:

well, that's a good tip. I didn't realize those were popular again. I don't know when they came out. It must have been 90s.

Unknown:

The Veggie tale, yes, yes. And, oh my goodness, there's this Larry boy who is, from what I can understand, kind of a super ego of one of the main veggie tail guys. He comes out as this superhero there is, like a car that he's in that's worth some money. I sold two little three inch figures that did nothing. They were just a, I don't know, a gourd and a squash or whatever they are. And those two together, those sold for probably $39 those took a while, but that there's a veggie tail nativity set too. That. Oh, really. So, yeah, keep it. Keep an eye out for those even plush. And I think I don't know if they don't make them or what the appeal is. But why ask why? I

Suzanne Wells:

don't know. Well, if they came out in the 90s, those what were kids are now adults, you know, are getting into their 30s, so maybe they're reliving that with those toys for their kids.

Unknown:

Yes, yes, the full circle kind of thing. Yes, I get that.

Suzanne Wells:

Yeah. Well, that is a great tip, because I did not realize they were hot. Again. Is your main source of inventory from thrift stores. Obviously, you only have summers to do garage sales, right? Well,

Unknown:

here is the thing, Suzanne, I my favorite are garage sales and church sales. I do so well with that a church sale, there's something on every table that's and it's all compact and reasonably priced, and you feel like you're helping them out. And so give me a church sale all day long. I'm there. There are few thrift stores. I'm kind of like I said, it's a small town. Estate sales are pretty much unheard of. I've been to some estate sales towards Minneapolis. I'm not sure I like the vibe. It feels a very maybe, just because I would go in and open, but it was so frenetic. You know, people like zigging and zigging, and they're too

Suzanne Wells:

aggressive, like, you can't shop because the people are aggressive. Yes, I, I've been in those situations, and I don't I'm a slow, peaceful, leave me alone. Let me look kind of shopper. I'm not in there to run and grab and throw to my partner and, you know, tag team and, no, I don't want to shop like that, right?

Unknown:

And that was my experience with estate sales, where I just thought, oh, this just feels so I don't Chadic. I didn't like it. So, um, so my main sourcing are the garage sales and church sales. So I hear, of course, every reseller bemoans their death pile. Oh, my goodness, the death pile is the bane of their existence. I love my death pile. I call it my job security pile because for five months I don't have a really good source. So when I So you mean you're not

Suzanne Wells:

going out today at seven below to go to some Brook stores, new I don't blame you on that. And just yeah, the death pilot. It's what you it's what you the way you think about it. It's change your thoughts, change your perspective. And sometimes you need that to work from like, if you're a lot of families are sharing a car. Now you know one works at home. Why do you need two cars? So if you can't get out and just go, go, go whenever you want to, you have to plan it and coordinate it. You need a pile to work from, or like you in brutal cold weather, you don't have to leave your cozy little home. You can just work from your pile Sure.

Unknown:

And some days after I've been teaching classes during the week, I just want a date at cocoon, and I don't want to have to go out and and treasure and if I don't need to, so I like then I pulled on a bin, and I say, What did I buy last summer that I've completely forgotten about, right? And then you open it up, and it's like, Oh, I forgot I bought this. And then you can just start working off that. So everybody's different on how they you know, how they want to work that, but I like having that, because I get when the gettings good, and that's May through September, and then well, and I

Suzanne Wells:

think there used to be a stigma with the death pile, that it means you're a hoarder, right, right? You're not listing your stuff, but it's all about that, you know, in the fall, be like a squirrel and gather your nuts, because, you know it's going to be a long, cold winter, or whatever the reason is, you know, people have legitimate reasons. It's, it's when it gets out of control. And you're not listing,

Unknown:

sure, yeah,

Suzanne Wells:

I'm not judging anybody, if you've got 1000 items sitting there, but you're listing every day, sometimes you gotta get when the getting's good,

Unknown:

right? Yeah, my daughter, sometimes I'll ask her, we'll get an offer. I'll get an offer on something. I'll ask her, do you think I should take this? And she'll say, we're not a storage facility. And that's just a way of saying, yes, just move it on out. Move it on out. So I'll take offers on anything that's reasonable. I'm not wed to anything I want it to go where it belongs. So, yeah, keep

Suzanne Wells:

it moving. Because I don't think anybody out there has a problem finding stuff, maybe finding it for the price you want to pay. But there's no shortage of stuff, and it's it's just going to keep multiplying as we go forward into the future, because of all the baby boomers and the generation before them that are downsizing, going to assisted living, or, you know, whatever the situation is, where's the stuff going to go?

Unknown:

Yes, yeah, it's that's real, yeah.

Suzanne Wells:

Well, you had a cute story for us. And I think this is very relevant, because I think this happens, and where are the people going to get the items to do this kind of thing. So do you want to tell your story now?

Unknown:

Sure, sure. The story is, my parents lived in their house for the house we grew up in into their 80s. They were there 40 some years. I have three siblings, and every now and again, I would ask my Mom, mom, whatever happened to like my baby small talk, or, do you remember when I had Archie paper dolls, whatever, what went on with those? And she would say, you know, oh, I don't know. We had four kids. I don't know. Did that end up in the attic, or did we send it to the church sale. Maybe it's around here somewhere. Maybe someday we'll go up in the attic and see what we find. So she was kind of vague about it, and then one year, I was probably about 30 years old. I'm the youngest, so my older siblings and I were all home for Christmas. Us, and we woke up on Christmas morning, and there were stockings from when we were young, but underneath it were our childhood toys that my mom had, in fact, held on to, but never told us we had. She still had them. Okay, so I came in and there's baby, tender love and my View Master and my my marks, doll house, those metal ones, uh huh, um, all this, these things that I was so bonded to as a kid. I felt like, you know that movie, Toy Story where all the toys are alive and the kid is so bonded to him, and I was like, oh, that's how I felt about my toys as a kid. So it was really just this nostalgic rush of of kind of emotion. But that was her, also my parents way of saying, okay, you've got your own places now. These are your things. They're going home with you. And if you don't want them, you find them a new home. If you want them, they don't live here anymore. They live with you. And it was a way of trying to start emptying out the house, but it was in a very, very very sweet, very sweet way to to give us back our things. And so some of those things, like my baby tender love I still have it could never make my girls love it the way I did, but right, I have, oh, view masters. I have some toys, but I did end up selling some of those later. As I got into eBay, some of them, I thought, okay, I don't need Archie anymore. So off they went. But well,

Suzanne Wells:

I love that she saved everything and she was organized enough to do that for you and your siblings. And where I was going with this story is, well, when my brother turned 40, which was, I don't know, 15 years ago or something, I bought him for his birthday The $6 million Man lunch box with the thermos, the Evil Knievel wind up thing where, you know, if you wind it up, and he shoots out that a fisher price bus, and some another, maybe a GI Joe, something like that. Just, you know, vintage toys, just for the nostalgia of it. And he loved it. I bought all the money Bay, and, you know, he loved it. And he sat there and played with it. He he rigged up so the Evil Knievel would jump over the Fisher Price bus. He was playing with all his toys and doing the$6 man theme and all that stuff. And so, you know, just for the listeners, it's not just collectors that buy these things. It's, you know, for nostalgia, whether you're buying it as a gift for somebody or yourself, just because you loved that item. Now was baby tender love, the one where you feed it and change the diaper,

Unknown:

no. Baby tender love was unique when she came out, because she was squishy, soft, like a foam where our dolls before them, like my baby small talk, which was the talking one, her body was hard, right? The dolls bodies were okay. And what was novel, I think. And now that you mentioned that, I think baby tender love might have had a bottle that I don't know that she was drinking wet. I can't remember that part, um, but the fact that she felt soft was novel in

Suzanne Wells:

Okay, so my sister, my youngest sister, was born in 1970 and she, I was born in 66 so she got all the good dolls that were, you know, I was too old to play with them by then, but she had that baby alive, and you feed Baby Alive and change diaper and all that stuff. Oh, yes, I'm the second of four. So I took care of my little brother and sister, and I changed my little sister's diapers, and I could not figure out why she wanted a doll that you had to change the diaper on. Like that is not exciting to me,

Unknown:

okay, youngest, just like me. Young, yeah,

Suzanne Wells:

yeah. And she got, like, the McDonald's play set with the the McDonald's restaurant, and then inside, you had the workers and the food, the drive through with a little car, and she had all these, these cool toys that I remember, you know, we had a little kitchen, a play kitchen, and we didn't have any of the play food. You. So we use, like golf balls for meatballs and little tiny socks for bacon. You know, we had to figure out what to use for food because it came with a few little things. But we just, we kept adding more stuff to it. Now,

Unknown:

very imaginative, very good. And

Suzanne Wells:

you, you know now it's like, these huge bags of play food. There's everything imaginable, and there's like, Velcro where you can stick the pickle and the onion to the hamburger and all this kind of stuff.

Unknown:

You don't need the imagination of the sock

Suzanne Wells:

bacon. Yeah, yeah. I was like, Oh, I just stole some tongs from the kitchen, the real kitchen, and would pretend to make bacon. So anyway, well, we have been going about an hour now. Oh, my goodness. So I told you that would go by fast. Yes. And so are you leaving home today on this seven below

Unknown:

temperature day? Well, Suzanne, I just got the memo that Christmas is coming, so I need to get some I need to deck the halls here it's looking pretty bleak, and I need to get some some decor up. So my day today is hunker in here. Put on cozy clothes, put on some Christmas music, and let's get this place decked

Suzanne Wells:

Deck the Halls, okay? And if you don't have a fake background, like I do with a meticulously decorated, trendy Christmas tree and log cabin. For the listeners, I always have some kind of background on the Zoom call, because I do these so often I get bored, and so it's, I go find a fun, festive background. Carol was like, wow, look at your house. And like, no, it's, it's fake, it's virtual.

Unknown:

It inspired me. Yeah,

Suzanne Wells:

so too bad you can't do that in real So, okay, well, thanks again for agreeing to come on and good luck with your decorating. I'm sure you'll get a lot done. You seem very industrious. I hope

Unknown:

so. Thanks. Okay, have a

Suzanne Wells:

good day. Bye. Bye. Thank you, Carol, I really enjoyed that. It was fun to talk to you and learn all about your business. Next week, my guest is Laura, who has had some very tough life struggles, but she is back on top of things and will share her journey. She really is an inspiration. And thank you listeners for supporting this podcast. I appreciate all of you, and I wish each and every one of you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2025 talk to you next week. Bye for now, bye.