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Interesting and impressive hustle, and some delicate lines to be careful of.

> She became friendly with the customer service repos at the stroller manufacturers and could usually get replacement parts for free [...] The real secret sauce to her side-hustle was the relationship she had with the lady who managed the warehouse where she bought the baby stuff.

I think both of these could be OK. Such as if it was within the manager's/rep's authority to do this, and it was aligned with the business.

(For example, the appropriate level of decision-making might have decided that the business gets better rates, or has lower headaches, from letting certain good buyers cherry-pick. And a quality brand of baby stroller might prefer not to see the brand associated with "broken" strollers on the used market, and has an interest in someone repairing them, even if that cannibalized some new sales.)

> and I think she sold the warehouse lady a house.

Where I'd guess this might be a problem is if some question came up over whether the warehouse manager was supposed to be letting cherry-picking happen, and then there's this big-ticket transaction, in which the manager, hypothetically, could've gotten a quid pro quo deal (e.g., preferential access, or a discount on fees, or even discounted pricing).




Who is going to get you in trouble for this. The “warehouse police” don’t exist.


The deals with these warehouses generally forbid it, and there are in fact investigators working on supply chain compliance (warehouse police). There is a line out the door for these mixed pallets, and if you are caught fucking around they will sell to someone else.

If you want pallets of baby strollers, or even a specific model/type of stroller, for refurbishing or whatever - the retailers want you to go direct to them. They'll happily sell direct to you, but you need to buy a truckload or more at a time.


>and there are in fact investigators working on supply chain compliance (warehouse police).

So much for right of First Sale I suppose. Or has licensing so pervasively invaded our economic system that there isn't even the pretense of an equitable position in mercantile activity anymore?

Honestly, the further I dig into modern colloquial business practice, the more and more it appears everything is predicated on bad faith from the supply side from the start.


Right of first sale still applies. Nothing obligates a company to continue selling you goods if they don't want to.


The warehouse lady has a boss presumably. And the boss might be annoyed at the diminution of value for the items going to auction.


Warehouse lady might also have added value by turning 5 pallets of low-value junk into one pallet of slightly more value plus 4 pallets of low-value junk.

If pallets normally bring say $100 each but by letting the stroller lady consolidate the strollers into one pallet that she'll pay $250 for, everybody won.


Except for all of the customers who ended up with less valuable pallets assuming they expected more quality items to be there. If they knew exactly what quality they were getting and paid less then I agree it’s a win for all.


If you're just buying pallets of random returns, removing one category of items from that random pallet may not even devalue the pallet for that customer either. Heck, it might even make the pallets more valuable to have less variety in them (after all, the stroller-only pallets became more valuable when they are stroller-only).


Cherry picking pallets is a big deal and all the warehouses try to say they don't, but everyone does it. The only one I went to that was legit, had people line up outside when a truck arrived and everyone bid on the pallets as they were coming off the truck. Not surprisingly the value I got out of those pallets was 10-20x more than from other pallet warehouses.

All of the other places are cherry picking and reorganizing pallets to elicit higher bids and tend to run their own parallel retail / resale operations. It's probably necessary though because the guy selling directly off the truck went out of business last year.


Except next month and every month after, no one buys the pallets.


I maintain those pallets might be more valuable to other sellers with other stuff instead of strollers. If I'm running a business selling small stuff in flat rate postal boxes, and I don't want to deal with being a stroller mechanic, having broken strollers out of my pallets (and having other stuff instead) is actually a positive for me.


Bribery offences do.


play the cards you’re dealt

I’ve looked at many founders I considered successful, and they all had some card to play that others either: no longer could because the law changed, a relationship nobody else had, or was outright illegal but didn’t matter

I would say that there are no rules, only consequences. Or, the consequences are the rule.


Often you don’t know the consequences. This is sometimes a reason to live by self-imposed rules, because there are risks and they can’t easily be calculated.

FTX had consequences, but people had a very hard time predicting them for some reason.


> there are no rules, only consequences

I've been chewing on this idea for a long time and I have not been able to describe it so well, in so few words as this.

Well done, and thanks


It's a tidy idea, put in a concise and catchy way. It even sounds bold and empowering.

One problem with applying it is that could violate social contracts. When most people are playing by the rules, but one person gains advantage by cheating. Suddenly, it's more a freeloader/jerk move, than anything else.

Admittedly, things get more complicated when many people believe that the social contracts have already been violated, so there's no longer a contract (or "less" of a contract), so they might as well get the advantage, too. Before it got to that point, it started with early cheaters.


Violating social contracts has consequences.

The point is that rules don't matter without consequences for breaking them, and a rule is only as effective as the severity of the consequences.

When you're rewarded for breaking them, you can't even really consider it a rule anymore.


I don't think it sounds bold or empowering. I think it describes reality accurately, without bullshit. I wish someone had explained it to me as a young man. In my father's home, any rule was absolute law, and the consequence was always outsized.

The real world isn't like that.


I'm reminded of some popular news reporting of a psychological study (who knows whether it's reproducible), something like... People who behaved in some specific dishonest way also thought other people tended to have a similar level of honesty to themselves. Compared to people who didn't behave in that dishonest way, and who thought others tended to have a similar level of honesty to themselves.

How the causality works there, I don't have good guesses.

But the supposed phenomenon could reduce to simply differing conceptions of what the real world is.


The version I grew up with was "it ain't illegal if you don't get caught"



It depends on which cards I have to play and how I play them

You’re projecting your insecurities on to me without imagining more benign possibilities




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