[Today’s run: ran 6 miles yesterday, nothing yet today]<\/p>\n
I do not have a good sense for business.\u00a0 I think that I have a reasonable understanding of things like interest and opportunity cost.\u00a0 I do less well with ROI-type calculations, maybe because I’m not very experienced with trying to estimate the total cost of some activity and therefore the necessary margin.<\/p>\n
The whole idea of margin somewhat escapes me.\u00a0 If I can get widgets for $5,\u00a0 why would I mark them up to $10 to sell to someone else?<\/p>\n
I’m too much of a consumer.\u00a0 I figure if the widgets are worth $5 to me, who would pay $10?\u00a0 Why would a shopper not not call up the $5 source and get their own $5 widgets instead of paying me $10?<\/p>\n
Anyway, I think we had good luck with our little adventure in brokering VHF cavity filters.<\/p>\n
We traveled to Georgia last year and picked up these big combiner racks.\u00a0 That was a day of vacation, an overnight motel, food, and gas for a few hundred miles, and the joy of riding in the old truck on two lane roads with the windows down (no AC).<\/p>\n
After getting the thing home I advertised some parts on Ebay and brought in a bit from that.\u00a0 Then we finally have moved all of the cavities as of the end of this week, having spent another overnight in a motel, a few more miles on the road, a vacation day and a day sitting at the hamfest in Jackson.<\/p>\n
Some of that effort I chalk up to experience and learning.\u00a0 This is about the only way I would have to get my hands on some nice VHF filters.\u00a0 So I learned quite a bit about them.\u00a0 And I got to meet some interesting people.\u00a0 And we spent a few hours on the Atlantic shore (which I had never done before).\u00a0 And we got to drive across Alabama and Georgia (and most of Mississippi).\u00a0 So there is some “vacation” time in there.<\/p>\n
And I most likely would have gone to the Jackson hamfest either way. My back-of-the-envelope calculation has us making a bit of a return once the dust settles.<\/p>\n
Retail scares me.\u00a0 I don’t understand how retail stores figure their markup or how they know what to stock.\u00a0 I have a bit more understanding for “service” operations, consulting, etc.\u00a0 Clothing stores: how do they know they can charge $100 for this pair of shoes but not for that other pair of shoes?\u00a0 Isn’t it obvious that the markup on a materials basis\u00a0 is outrageous? So what differentiates the $80 shoes from the $100 shoes?<\/p>\n
I see that JC Penney is going to try the “always low prices” gag.\u00a0 I don’t think it will work.\u00a0 I think the people that shop at JCP are addicted to the “sale” concept.\u00a0 Going “always low” will put them in conflict with Wal-Mart instead of the department store level they want to inhabit.\u00a0 But they are retail and I don’t understand retail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run: ran 6 miles yesterday, nothing yet today] I do not have a good sense for business.\u00a0 I think that I have a reasonable understanding of things like interest and opportunity cost.\u00a0 I do less well with ROI-type calculations, maybe because I’m not very experienced with trying to estimate the total cost of some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2140,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions\/2140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}