Hotcakes wish they sold like this.

Hey, why is this ten bucks more than it was last time? Where do we get off raising the price just because our previous sales of refurbed Toshiba Chromebooks sold out in less than two hours? Isn’t that something a normal greedy business would do?

Well, kind of. Really, if we ran Meh like a normal greedy business, we wouldn’t even have a store. We certainly wouldn’t turn down a wholesale offer for $180 per unit to sell it to the general public for $160 - but that’s exactly what we did. Why? For that matter, why even have a store if we can make more money as a wholesaler?

Not because we’re nice. Because we’re selfish.

First and foremost, our jobs are more fun this way. There’s no excitement for us in being the anonymous behind-the-scenes wholesaler providing the exciting deals for somebody else’s community. We want a community of our own. We want to feel like we’re bringing something awesome to like-minded people. That’s why we look forward to going to work instead of dreading it. And that’s worth leaving some money on the table.

As a corollary to that, if we’re going to run a weird little store, the deals have to be exciting. Legendary, even. Spectacular enough to keep you coming back night after night, or kicking yourself for missing out. So, selfishly, we push prices down as low as we can to get you addicted, like the proverbial drug pusher offering free samples. At our last job, we would’ve been required to figure out exactly how much that customer loyalty is worth, which is one reason we don’t work there anymore. But we know it’s worth something. Hence lower prices than what we could “get away with”. Call it addictive pricing.

If it was all about maximizing every penny right this second, we wouldn’t bother to exist. We could just set up an algorithm on Amazon Marketplace to undersell every competitor by a nickel. Or just do wholesale and save ourselves the hassle of running an online store. We do this because we’ve never given up on the dream job: making money doing crazy shit.

Only… we can only afford to just so crazy. If Circuit City or somebody else came along and offered our supplier a higher price for these, then we’d never get our hands on them at all. In the competition for product with other potential buyers, our bids have to be high enough to win. But then, in the competition for customers, our prices have to be low enough to win.

We can’t control what the Circuit Cities of the world will pay for product, or what price they’ll sell that product for. All we can do is slash our own margin, so we pay more for product and sell it for less. We make enough to keep the lights on, you guys get a holy-crap deal, and our jobs continue to not suck.

So yeah, maybe we are acting just like a greedy business. But not a normal greedy one, because we take some of our payment in the form of fun, excitement, community, laughs, insanity. Those guys would say we should be greedier with money. We say they should be greedier with fun.