If you've ever typed in "make extra money" into Google or YouTube, you've come across "flipping" posts or videos. Flipping is good, old fashioned, wheelin' and dealin', as they called it when I was a kid. You buy an item at a low price, and sell it at a higher price, and make a little (or big) profit. Here's a flea market flipping video I pulled off YouTube, to add a visual to this post. Nothing exciting, but a good look at a flipper in today's world of Craigslist, eBay, LetGo, Shopify stores, and Amazon resellers, all flipping merchandise to earn money.
Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of my dad's death. So I spent some time thinking about all his influences on me. At the same time, I've spent about four years telling people that this crazy, long, economic downturn is coming. Something like another Great Recession, but lasting longer, like the long recession of the early 1990's. I'm a futurist/economics geek, the kind of thing that even computer geeks call geeky.
No one cared much about my ideas on the economy, until 2020 happened. But now we are heading into what I think will be the longest and gnarliest part of the three "recessionary waves" I see us having in this decade. Basically, the 2020 depression* was the warm-up, and now we are heading into the recession where things will really get gnarly, stocks and crypto appear to have just hit a false bottom in July 2022, and real estate and the car/truck markets are beginning to really tank. Recessions lead to great deals, and it's a great time to do some flipping.
Recessions are when the whole world goes on sale, and almost nobody wants to buy
This is my dad, Tom Emig, with my little sister Cheri on the left, and me on the right. This is about 1972, when I was 6 or 7. A couple of years later, my dad started taking me to gun shows once in a while, teaching me how to wheel and deal, or flip, as we call it now. His $30 purchase, that I'm writing about in this post, happened about a year before this photo was taken.
My dad loved "wheeling and dealing," or flipping, his whole life. As a young single guy, he bought and sold about 40 cars, including three classic Ford Thunderbirds (two 1955's and one 1957), a couple of Chevy Corvairs, and a dragster, among them. He also bought and sold motorcycles, motorscooters (like Vespas), as well as guns, and anything mechanical that caught his eye at a garage sale or flea market. He was a long time target shooter, and responsible gun owner. In fact the local police showed up at his house one morning, when they needed to borrow some ammo to demonstrate a Thompson submachine gun they just aquired. The ammo for it didn't show up, so they hit up my dad, knowing he could help them out. My dad was friends with a couple of the officers, and they knew had a .45 auto or two, which used the same ammo.
I grew up waching him negotiate and barter for items at garage sales flea markets, and gun shows. In those days when I was a kid in the 1970's, family economics was a lot different. Most men had jobs that paid pretty well, families usually lived off the man's income in most cases, and a large percentage of women were housewives, staying home with the kids. I'm not saying this is how life should be, ladies, or that women shouldn't work, so hold off the hate comments. That's just how things were back then. Most families could live fairly well off one income.
Because of the different economics of those days, where it wasn't two income households straining to pay all the bills, flipping items was more of a hobby for extra money, than a necessity. You didn't really see full time mechandise flippers, like we do today.
After getting married, my mom shut down the buying and selling of cars pretty quick, and my dad focused more on supporting his family. Most of his wheeling and dealing then turned to things he bought at gun shows. Those were also much different back then. Most familes had guns then, a lot of men, and a few women, went hunting each fall. Many others, like my dad, were avid target shooters. Shooting was a popular hobby, like bowling, golf, or softball.
So my dad would go off to gun shows every couple of months, on a Saturday afternoon. Since my mom didn't really like guns, she never asked much about what he bought, only how much he spent. Usually he would buy pistols, or pieces of them, to rebuild guns, with the boxes of gun parts he had in the basement. He also reloaded his own bullets, so my dad also bought reloading supplies and equipment. Later on, he started collecting American military items, thinking of maybe opening a small museum some day. He bought most of the uniforms and other military gear at gun shows as well.
After one gun show, when I was 5 years old, my dad came home with this ugly brown case, like a beat up, small suitcase. My mom didn't like it from the start, just because it was ugly. She liked it a lot less when my dad said it was full of 30,000 gun oriented bumper stickers, which he paid $30 for. Mom gave him a hard time for wasting so much money on it. One of the bumper stickers was the classic, "I will give up my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers," which I thought was really cool.
My dad made his case. A guy he met had made thousands of bumper stickers, which were popular in those days, when cars still had actual chromed steel bumpers. The stickers were all text, black lettering on white, pretty simple looking. But even back then, when no one had computers or printers, bumper stickers sold for $1 each. The guy had made 40,000 stickers or something, sold a bunch, then just got in a financial bind, and needed to sell them cheap to pay some bills. So my dad was happy to buy the case of them for $30.
From my dad's point of view, he got $30,000 worth of stickers for $30, a great deal. He paid 1/10th of a penny per sticker. Every sticker he sold for $1, worked out to 1,000X return. Not bad. From my mom's point of view, he spent $30 ($219 in today's dollars) on stupid stickers in a really ugly case. My dad took the case into the basement, and tucked it away with his gun stuff, near his work bench.
For the next ten years or so, I watched my dad take some of those stickers from the ugly case to gun show after gun show, and also show them to friends who visited. He was a draftsman/engineer, a guy who designed machines, and thought of a machine's entire working life, as he was desiging it. He thought long term by nature. The bumper stickers were never meant to be a quick flip.
When he took them to gun shows, he would keep them hidden, in a bag or case, when negotiating on one thing or another. When the seller would get close to the price my dad wanted to pay for something, my dad would pull out the stickers. "You know, I have these bumper stickers, you can easily sell them for $1.00 each. Since we're $10 off on our price, how about if I throw in 10 bumper stickers?" The seller would usually say something like, "Well, it'll take me a while to sell all those stickers, how about 20 bumper stickers, and we'll call it a deal." My dad would hesitate a moment for emphasis, and then say, "OK, 20 stickers and we'll call it a deal." He got $10 in trade off of 20 stickers, which cost him 2 cents total. Not bad ROI in trade. I watched him do that time after time after time as I grew up. He also sold some to people for $1 each, and sold quite a few to dealers for 20 cents or so each, for them to resell.
I think I was in high school, over ten years later, when dad came back from a gun show, and told me he finally sold the case of bumper stickers, and he still had something like 28,000 stickers left. He sat down and figured it out. He made over $300 cash selling those bumper stickers, and got well over $700 in trade as well, over 11 or 12 years. Then he sold that ugly case, with more than 28,000 "vintage" bumper stickers, for $50. So, by jumping on a good deal by a motivated seller, on a weird item for that time, my dad made over 11 times his money back in cash, and well over 20 times his money back in trade as well, and saved himself a ton of cash in deals on guns, knives, military gear, and other things.
The point of this post is that when you're looking for items to resell to make money, it's smart to keep your mind open, and think about more than just the quick flip for a 50%, 100%, or 200% return. Sometimes an odd item, like the bumper stickers my dad bought, can lead to more money, or a great trade item, over time. So thanks to my dad, for showing me another trick of old school wheelin' and dealin'. Now, 50 years after he bought that ugly case, and endured my mom's unhappiness at his buy, I'm telling a new generation of flippers another technique to keep in mind when trying to flip items for some extra cash, or even to earn a living.
*Yes, the economic downturn in the Spring and early summer of 2020 was an economic depression. There is a definition, The traditional definition of a recession is an economic contraction for two consecutive quarters. Basically, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the measure of economic growth in a country, goes down for six months straight. That has been the agreed upon definition of a recession for 100 years or more. Right now politicians and economists are trying to change that definition, to avoid saying we're actually in a recession, right now, in August of 2022.
An economic depression, if you read the traditional definition linked, is a recession for two or more years, OR a drop of 10% or more in GDP. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the mandatory business shutdowns, the U.S. GDP dropped 31.7% in the second quarter of 2020. 31.7% is more than 10%, three times as much, and yes, that qualifies 2020 as an economic depression. Just because economists and politicians are afraid to say it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. If you're reading this, you have survived an economic depression. It wasn't fun, be we made it through. So we can all handle another gnarly recession, right? Sure we can.
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