True to the quote on the masthead, we’re all over the map here at Sippican Cottage. But every once in a while I suffer a blow to the head, or some other pleasant diversion, and it reminds me to talk about what I’m doing all day when I should be answering my email. I make furniture.
I’ve made a lot of furniture over the last eight years. Hundreds and hundreds of pieces. The business is like a bicycle, and you keep pedaling while looking at your feet, and lose track of the landscape a little. I should know, but I don’t know how many states I’ve sent the stuff to at this point. There’s a little hole in the middle of the country that are strangers to me, still. I’ve never seen a Yeti, or a customer from North or South Dakota. They must live indoors there now; don’t they need furniture? I don’t know. I wish them well all the same, and lurk in the Intertunnel’s bushes, waiting to pounce on them if they pass by.
I’ve made some furniture that’s ended up in England and Canada, too, but I don’t sell furniture there. People bought it here in the states and took it with them and told me about it. Really nice people in Canada (are there another kind of people in Canada?) have offered to buy things from me fairly often if I could figure out all the paperwork. I couldn’t, so I haven’t. I know you can’t tell by reading what I write, but I’m not a dullard. It just requires more time than I have to figure it out properly, and is fraught with peril for a very small business like mine. One has to be conservative in your behavior to stay alive in the world of commerce these days. Many things are worth doing but there is no time. Maybe later.
I am ashamed to admit that I don’t even have pictures of all the stuff I make. I’ve put a lot of stuff into boxes with the muttered oath: I wish I’d taken a picture of that. If the camera battery is dead or the FedEx man’s arrival is nigh or it’s pitch dark or something, it goes out, and many times, out of my memory.
But lovely reader and commenter Leslie purchased a pair of tables last month — or was it the month before; what day is it? — and I managed to take a picture of them before they went the way of all lignin and cellulose and corrugated cardboard. I thought they were awful pretty. I made them for her special in all tiger maple with Pumpkin stain. Tiger maple is endlessly interesting stuff. No two pieces of it are quite the same, and so, they’re endlessly interesting to look at and challenging to work with. Leslie even found time to send me a snapshot of the little four-legged buggers in her home way out west where they don’t shovel. Lovely!
My business is sometimes anonymous, but less so than it used to be because I socialize with many customers here on my Intertunnel Logos Stand. It’s always piquant to see the things I make in their natural habitat, because a workshop is not the natural habitat of such things. Your house is.
I’m grateful to everyone that reads, and those that leave comments, and link here, and purchase things from Amazon through my portal which throws me a few bucks which we sorely need and appreciate, and everyone that’s kind to my children, and everyone that buys the furniture. I love you all more than my folks.
I live in a cottage in Maine and make furniture. That’s more than most that sell Maine cottage furniture can say. I’m busy, busy making made-to-order furniture for lovely people from hither and yon and to and fro and so forth and so on and here and there, (here and there is in Arizona, I think) but I’ve also got a selection of items ready-to-ship over at Sippican Cottage Furniture. I call these ready-to-ship items “Ready to Ship,” to confuse my competitors and astound my enemies by telling the truth. My competitors can’t compete, and my enemies need an enema…
That didn’t come out like I’d planned…
No, that won’t do, either. Mentioning “enemas” and “things not coming out as planned” isn’t going to sell any tables. I could sell a couple billion shares of facebook stock with that approach, but my customers demand more.
How about 1/3 off and free shipping on sevenfive three (better hurry on over) beautiful, handmade, solid wood, handmade-in-Maine items?
I’ve never been unemployed that I can recall, so my experience is perhaps not helpful. But then again, I haven’t had a “job” for very many of the very many years I’ve been working; I just worked. I’ve been an employer, too; I’ve employed somewhere between no one and two hundred people at one time or another, so I do know what a person with a job looks like, anyway.
I loved this exchange:
…One guy I dated (the /only/ much older guy) impulsively quit his
executive job over some political issues at work. He had nothing else
lined up, and then he didn’t start job hunting, and the resulting stress
helped end the relationship. He started talking about pursuing
furniture building and other unrealistic career paths that could not
provide a livelihood…
Amy responded:
He started talking about pursuing furniture building and other unrealistic career paths that could not provide a livelihood.
This sort of thing is a big deal. When women are willing to give a guy who is having some financial trouble the benefit of the doubt, they want to see realism and potential.
I dunno. I’m told some women want to see furniture. There’s at least one I know of that wants to see the furniture maker, too.
5/19/2012: I read Woodweb from time to time. I learn very little of a factual nature there, and offer no advice there, either. Like many places on the Intertunnel, I read it like I’m looking into a petri dish or I’m visiting a zoo. I don’t stick my fingers through the bars or into the dish. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. It’s useful to me because you can get an imperfect feel for a portion of the zeitgeist there. Putting your finger in the dish affects it.
They’ve front-paged a man blegging for advice about his one-man shop. Most such questions are simply a plea for sympathy or praise, sometimes both. People look for accomplices, not advice, generally. Almost all the advice he got was worse than bad. A man can learn about perfectly elastic demand only once.
I’m fascinated that so many persons that have absolutely no interest in running a business start businesses. Hell, I may be one of those people. But people on the stage deserve a kind of respect that people in the audience do not, no matter how bad the show is. I’ll give that respect, instead of advice. But I’m reminded of Twain: If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
[Editor’s Note: First offered four years ago. Timely, years in advance. There’s a word for that, isn’t there?]
[Author’s Note: Yeah: Broke-ass loser. And there is no editor.]
You don’t understand economics very well.
No offense. I don’t know who you are, but I’m willing to defame you like that. Why do you suppose that is? It’s because nobody understands economics very well, in my experience. When I see the poll question: “Which candidate for President do you trust more to run the economy?” it’s the question itself which bugs me, not the percentages assigned to the candidates. If you’d ask or answer that question, you have a pre-civilized view of economics in my opinion.
I’m not educated in economics, so I know a little about it. If I was educated, I’d know about an economics education. Not the same thing. I learned what I know about economics by getting the treatment a baby gives a diaper every day out in the economic landscape. You’re not allowed to indulge in fantasy very long out here. You can do it for a lifetime in a college. And beyond, if you can get published.
I want to talk about price elasticity, because it interests me. It refers to the relationship between the supply and demand for things as you tinker with price, or supply, or a host of other factors.
In general, people who work with their hands seek price inelasticity. That means that demand falls more slowly than an increase in price. Since the amount of work a person can do is finite you want to raise your price to perform the work without decreasing demand too much by doing so. You work less, for more money.
If demand is elastic, this means if you raise your price, the demand falls, and doesn’t make up for the increased price. You raise your prices but you make less money.
If it’s unit elastic, there’s a direct correlation between price and demand. Raise the price, demand goes down exactly the amount necessary so that revenue stays the same. An accountant is the only person to have ever seen this creature.
Now let’s go out on the economic map where navigators used to see “Here Be Monsters.”
Perfectly elastic pricing is where if you raise the price one iota, the demand drops to zero.
And finally, if we talk of demand being perfectly inelastic, no matter what you charge, the demand stays the same. You’ve got a crack stand in Marion Barry’s living room.
Now I want you to come out to the edge of the map where I live, and have lived for the vast majority of my life. Forget inelastic price, elastic price, and the unicorn of economists, unit elastic demand. Those are just things that determine whether you’ll buy a flatscreen TV or an end table or not. I want to get existential on you.
If you have a sinecure, you will never understand what it is to be in a walk of life where demand for your production risks perfect elasticity. You simply talk about the churn in the economy. No sympathy for those buggy-whip manufacturers. They should have been smart and got a job collecting tolls on the highway and then they wouldn’t have found themselves in that pickle. People with whales on their pants who refer to their significant other as “Lovie” like this line of reasoning a lot, too.
People often tell me that my cottage furniture is very inexpensive for what you get. Raise your prices, they counsel. Maybe. But more likely, they don’t understand that the market often doesn’t make such fine distinctions about your pricing structure. Sometimes it’s pass/fail. I have to be careful never to hit the fail point because there’s no readjustment period. You’re just dead. People with straightforward jobs can picture this best by imagining that if you went into you boss’s office and demanded a raise, the only two answers are: “Sure!” and “You’re fired!”. You’d be less extravagant in your demands then, wouldn’t you?
What about the political angle I mentioned earlier? Oh, that’s where perfect inelasticity comes in. See, you don’t understand it, because if you answered the poll question above, you think the government is the producer in this scenario. You think they produce prosperity, and through some jiggery-pokery with inelastic set-asides, or elastic statutes, or unit elastic Smoot-Hawley tarriffs or raging carpet-bombing wars, they’re going to arrange for the shelves in the US Store to be stocked with goodies for you. But you’ve got it exactly backwards.
The example often used for perfect inelasticity is the human heart transplant. If heart transplants were ten dollars, you wouldn’t want one just because it was cheap, and if it cost eleventy-billion dollars, but you needed one, you wouldn’t care what it costs. You’d beg, borrow, or steal the dough to get it.
So in the real world with the government in the picture, I am the good or service. But the United States Government is not a supermarket. It is a pawn shop. And I am born pawned, and I wake up every morning pawned. And if I want to get myself out of there, to work all day and try to make a few bucks so I can worry about something other than my very existence, I’m going to do whatever I’m told, and pay whatever is demanded of me. My interest in continuing to be me is 100%, and my demand to continue being me will not diminish no matter how abusive the situation you plunge me into.
My demand for me is perfectly inelastic, and the government knows it. Pay up, sucka.
The Mafia always understood perfect inelasticity, too. They’d come in, tell you how much protection money was required, and mentioned that your kneecaps were perfectly inelastic if you bent them backwards.
I watched intently, but I did not spot a little wrench to put the furniture together with.
Hands was an Irish TV program from about thirty or forty years ago that featured people who worked with their hands. I can find no current evidence of the Robinson and Sons furniture business on the Internet.
Tag: furniture
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A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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