About to open another small business

.com is taken, as is .net, .org, .edu and .gov.

 

A wise man.

 

i think you should start a kitten of the month club for celebs, and then you can sell their cats for big bucks after they trade them in

 

i like the box thing though, might make my own...and i guess that might be a problem, someone could just get their own box and send it...interesting though

 

I'm just saying if there's a commodity that is not being properly allocated to maximize revenue streams, perhaps there's an ecommerce solution I can provide that can do that. I'm a capitalist. I don't judge--I just figure out ways to make a buck.

 

Yeah, you probably can do it cheaper yourself. Just like if you want to give somebody flowers, it's cheaper to pick them and deliver them yourself than go with a florist.

Honestly, I think it's a great idea whether you use our product or not. Good for you and good for me. I figure the more people who use the idea, the more likely there will be lazy people willing to pay for the service rather going through the hassle themselves.

All told, it took about 6 hours of driving around and buying stuff, designing labels, and stuffing bags for me to initially build these for my two boys myself last Christmas. When I was done I'd spent about $65/box. You may find a way to do it cheaper/faster than I did. I could see cutting it down to 2 hours and $45 if I had to do it all over again from scratch.

Really, though, when you factor in time used you won't save that much. We buy the boxes, candy, bags and labels at wholesale prices. For example, we buy that wood box at the exact same price the local craft store pays. So it's marked up, but mostly not that much more than you'd pay in the store.

 

I like it! Actually, I think we could make more if we parted out the cat. Kill it (if it ain't dead already), taxidermy it, then cut it into pieces and auction off the parts. "Now you can own a piece of Britney Spears' pussy!"

 

ha! brilliant

or maybe grind them into dust that you could mix into your food like rhino horn

 

yeah id probably just use a shoebox full of different pills and broken glass, yours is much nicer

what the great part is, you arent just selling a box with candy in it, you have the story that goes along with it, and thats what will drive your sales, you seem to be on the right track

 

I would eat some of whatever Charlie Sheen keeps around the house for a pet.

 

Damn. That's the funniest shit I've read all month. "Ghetto Saturdaybox! Now with 20% more despair!"

 

i think you are on to something with the weekly thing though, playing on absentee parents guilt/ coresponding generosity is indeed a ticket towards self sustainablity

maybe something where you deliver new things every week for their saturday box? like one week its candy, next week matchbox cars etc, and the parent can sign up for it all at once, but to the child, they can think that each week they are getting a new gift...

like offer a 12 week package, where they get something different each week, or fuck it, a lifetime subscription

 

Thanks. Wish we could, but really there's no need to hire for a pretty long time. It's a virtual company with only one real employee (my wife). Even if it took off, it's a pretty automated process. If it ever really took off, it'd mostly be minimum wage jobs here (and probably much less than that in China).

That's the tough thing about this economy--there just aren't as many of those mid-level jobs anymore because of information technology and automation. It's got little to do with Dubya or Obama or taxes or regulation or immigration. The rules have changed, and a lot of people are just kind of screwed.

And it's only going to get harder. I see a generation of kids raised on youtube and Xbox. When they do get out they are shuttled from soccer to karate to hockey to whatever. Very little time or motivation to go outside and pretend to make up your own stories and be a superhero or a dragon slayer, which is all I did when I was a little kid. I bet when Steve Jobs was a kid he killed a lot of dragons.

Anyway, so I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where was I... oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...

 

back when the moon was the size of a wagon wheel, id get all hopped up on panther sweat, really splendidly owled, and make eyes at all the ripe tulips. then, when my hip flask of zozzle water went dry, id pontificate for a fortnight it seemed! ahh the roaring 90's, dames couldnt get enough, and how! all gussied up in my finest rags, id charleston the night away, swilling giggle juice straight from the bathtub, and smiling ear to ear, showing more teeth than a roebuck handsaw

 

I've been doing that for many years for my boys, now both in their thirties.

I use my empty cigar boxes and fill them with an assortment of gifts each xmas.

In order to teach them to be independent and decisive thinkers I let them open them anytime they feel like it.

I think your only market at $76 + shipping for a box of candy will be rich grandparents with alzheimers. Maybe you could come up with some more educational, useful or lasting box stuffers instead of candy.

 

You may be right. There are a lot of rich grandparents with Alzheimers, tho. In this economy, you either target the wealthy or the lower middle class.

Initially, it's just candy because that's easier to inventory. The nice thing about candy is you can repeat it in the gifts. A kid gets M&M's two weeks in a row and he's still happy. With toys, you have to have 52 unique, decent items, because you can't really repeat them.

If we can prove there's a market out there, we'll expand into toys (and like you say, I'd love to go after educational toys). It's going to be hard, though. Thanks to subsidies, high fructose corn syrup candy is cheap. Even shoddily made plastic choke-trap toys are generally more expensive.

 

Your comment really got me thinking. I added a $37 option--it just includes the normal box/letters and a candy/label supply for 12 weeks: http://www.saturdaybox.com/starter-box-special/

I figure I get them hooked with the lower price. Once the kiddie forms the Saturday habit, it's relatively easy to upsell them on the full year (because I'll have a whiny kid making the argument for me!)

 

Great idea. The only negative I see is the shipping charges. About $15 to ship to the NW area.

Can I get a porn box? New porn once a week!