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During lunch, I went back to the 99¢ store and bought two more boxes of the same cookies with the profit from the first sale.
That afternoon, no one bought any more cookies and my first customer already had his eight cookies. My goal was to let the cookies sell themselves and not make any more noise about this. If I start knocking on peoples’ doors to buy cookies, it becomes a time sink, and then I might as well use my time to sell my services instead of cookies. That said, if I say nothing, the cookies might not sell themselves.
Not to mention the fact that it’s kind of weird for a software engineer to be selling cookies at his workplace. I almost didn’t go through with this several times but then rationalized continuing with this because A) I was told to hustle, and B) This experiment is no weirder than a dude doing things like going to a stranger’s house and asking to play soccer in his backyard. At least it makes life a bit more interesting, if not somewhat weird and awkward.
I already see problems scaling this to even a paltry $32:
- The 99¢ store seems to have limited quantities of that particular brand. I’m suspecting surplus lots or something like that. Not sure what I’ll buy if that brand runs out (or if these cookies will even sell).
- I’m conflicted about how much I should publicize this effort within my workplace: cluing people off vs. seeing if people discover the cookies on their own.
- $32 means 16 boxes of cookies = 128 cookies. That’s a lot of cookies, but I haven’t given myself any deadlines, so I guess the only danger is more weirdness and/or expired cookies.
Update (31 Jan 2017)
Sold four cookies for $1!
Update (06 Feb 2017)
Sold five cookies for $1.25! Also received my first Venmo payment today! Four clients total. This is going more slowly than I expected, but there’s still foreword momentum and I expect to sell all cookies (six remaining) before the expiration date. Also, one cookie has gone missing so the maximum I’ll be able to make is $3.75 with this most recent batch of cookies I bought.
Update (13 Apr 2017)
So I made probably another $1.25 in cookie purchases and bought a can of Pringles at the $0.99 store for $1 for resell for $2. No one has bought this yet. Since I’m trying to avoid actively peddling my goods and since interest in my snacks appears to have waned, I’m kind of at a loss as to what to do now. I’d say my total profit is $2.50, plus one can of Pringles. Ideas and feedback welcome.
Outcome (16 July 2017)
I reached out to entrepreneur Cody Shirk and asked what he thought of this whole thing. His answer:
Doubling your money…?
Just go to the ‘free section’ on Craigslist and sell or recycle what you find. Or just do Craigslist arbitrage with anything you find.
Rereading my rules, I saw that there was nothing that prevented me from borrowing an item from someone, selling it to someone else for a higher price, then paying the original seller with part of the proceeds. In this spirit, I got someone to lend me this item (a lovely ASUS TF101 tablet I wanted to keep for myself):
…and he told me I could either give it back to him or else pay $15 for it, resold it for $30 (thanks Pete!), and got to keep $15 profit. Add that to the $2 and I’ve blown past two powers of two for a net profit of $17.
Woot!