Update on Chile Chew’s Cut the crap challenge

I laughed my way through an amazing thread this week, over at MSE about unusual things people had sold on eBay. It bought true meaning to ‘one mans trash is another’s treasure’.

It’s 26 pages long, so I’ll sumarise some of the things that came up several times for you:

• Empty fragrance bottles
• Old car tax discs
• Damaged electrical goods such as laptops, mobiles, cd players, gameboys, digital cameras
• vouchers and coupons from papers such as ‘kids go free’
• old magazines / argos / Littlewoods catalogues
• Toys from cereals and McDonalds meals (unopened and unused preferably)
• carrier bags and gift bags with designer names on them
• diet books, particularly weight watchers and slimming world (even the ones you get free with magazines appear to sell)
• Nylon clothes – ewwwww! Apparently the American gay community can’t get enough of them.
• free cosmetic samples – like the ones you get attached to glossy magazines
• used ticket stubs and old programmes
• Theatre programmes – our American friends again
• empty ink cartridges
• old prescription glasses
• old remote controls

As I was reading through I had a bit of an epiphany. It appears we are nation of collectors. We are hoarders. We just love to collect things. Maybe our left brain likes labels and boxes so much that this is how we satisfy our need for order in our lives.

I admit I’ve done poorly with this challenge this month, but it will be ongoing for me. I have a big box of things put to one side to stick on eBay, but that procrastination monster gets me every time. I have a real thing about sitting there loading up my stuff on Turbo lister.

I read about people who love it! They love putting things on, seeing how they do, watching the bidding war at the end and they’re just so fired up by it. I, on the other hand, get really disillusioned if I spend 15 minutes taking photos and putting up an item only to have it sell for a tiny amount or nothing at all.

I know that if you sell something for 99p and you sell 2000 items for that the maths isn’t hard, but I just can’t get into the spirit of it all with joy in my heart. I find it gutting that we buy something which loses value as soon as it’s in our hands. I’ve also noticed that the price of postage is so high, so by the time I’ve taken off pay pal fees and listing fees the profit margin is dwindling (for the sort of things I have to sell, anyway).

So, now I’ve moaned (and I thank you for listening) I need to get a plan in place. Once again, I know what I need to do, I just need to do it and stop being such a whinger. I need to list up one item a day on turbo lister and be done with it.

So what stops me?
What stops me entering into the spirit of loving eBay I wonder?