Lynn’s eBay Ezine Volume V, Issue Number 3

‘Slow-Moving Inventory–When is it time to say Goodbye? (Instead of Good Buy!)

by Lynn Dralle, The Queen of Auctions

As I was sitting in my eBay room this past Sunday, pulling items out of my eBay store to donate to charity, I realized that it was my Grandmother’s birthday.

She would have been 97 years young. It is amazing that I still miss her every day and she has been gone for 8 1⁄2 years. What really got me thinking about my grandmother was the fact that I was going through the collector’s plates that had been listed in my eBay store since the beginning of time (or for at least five years!).

My grandmother had a special room built in her house to hold all these collector’s plates. Many of you have read about it in my books, but it was called The Tank and it was fireproof. It was a really creepy place!

It was entirely made of cement and had just one tiny 12″ by 12″ window. If you ever got locked inside (behind the huge heavy steel door), there was really no way out.

I always propped the door open with something super heavy when I was working inside. One summer, she paid me 75 cents an hour to categorize and arrange the entire place.

I worked on the tank for 100 hours and I earned $75.00, enough for half of my ten-speed bike. Do you remember those bikes with curved handles? My parents paid the other half and were so proud of how hard I worked as a twelve-year-old.

The tank was about 30 feet long and 25 feet wide. It had 40 or so shelves in it that housed the 10,000-plus collector’s plates that my grandmother carried. She had them from every vendor imaginable. Fenton, Bing & Grondahl, Royal Copenhagen, Hummel, Lladró, Franklin Mint, Veneto Flair, Berlin, Royale, Porsgrund, Norman Rockwell, etc. etc. She bought them all-new from the factories in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the collector’s plate market was at its peak.

The money she made from those collector’s plates actually paid to build an addition onto her house. In that addition was the tank. During a different summer, when I was working for her, I made the decision that we needed some type of floor plan of the tank so that we could find the plates we needed quickly.

I drew a very detailed map and put the letters a through pp on it for each shelf in order.

Then I wrote the names of the plate makers like this in alphabetical order. I taped it on the back of the door. That way it was easy to find the shelves with the plate you were looking for.

Bareuther–Shelf X

Bing & Grondahl–Shelf C

Berlin–Shelf E

Count Agazzi–Shelf Z

Dresden–Shelf A

etc.

Fast forward to working on my eBay room that currently houses about 10,000 plus items. Much like the tank! Strange how life is so cyclical. At least I wasn’t working that night in a cold dark cement room. I was in my house, in my cozy (yet cluttered) eBay room.

My new year’s resolution is to get that room organized and easier to manage. To start with, we decided to pull about 3,000 slow-moving items out of my eBay store. I have had Mo working on it for several weeks now and here she and Carmen are in our new and even more cramped quarters!

Mo would NOT turn around for the photo.