July Is Dressed Up
Turning the corner on a bad month
I just bid farewell to the slowest month I’ve had in quite some time, certainly since opening the warehouse and embarking on record shows. It wasn’t a career-ender, but it’s not a sustainable level of business, and I’m fortunate to have better credit than before and some resources to get myself over a rough patch this time around.
I think I got myself into a negative spiral after my root canal, when I spent a couple weeks extremely fatigued on the nuclear dosage of antibiotics they gave me. I was treading water after working hard for months, and it happened right around the time sales typically slow down for the season anyway, so my lack of listing and hustling just made it worse. For the first time since I signed my lease, the impending rent payment made me go “didn’t we just pay this? Like, a couple weeks back?”
I’m grateful to have found Vinted last week, because it’s given me some focus when my normal tendency in a downturn is to take an unhealthy number of naps and ignore reality. I’ve sold almost 100 cheap CDs on the platform since last weekend, and I’m making it a goal to pay next month’s rent with Vinted money alone. My first two orders just got delivered Thursday, but the rest are en route, and I can easily bang out dozens of listings a day and keep the cheap titles slingshotting back out the door.
One of my weird superstitions is that when one platform takes off, the rest up their game to compete, and damned if that didn’t start happening almost as soon as the Vinted sales ticker blew up. I sold a bunch of books and Commodore 64 games on Mercari, my Discogs sales picked back up, and I’ve been hauling a couple tubs of mail to the post office at the end of each day this week.
A slowdown tends to dredge up the bad feelings associated with failures of the past, and like a lot of people who’ve lived this long, I have a whole roulette wheel of those to choose from when I want to sit around feeling less than. Writing projects, shuttered record stores, bad relationships, the awkward thing I blurted out in junior year trig? Get in line, y’all, we’ll re-litigate every last one of you instead of cleaning off the desk, putting on some Entombed and working our way out of this quicksand.
