How to Start Reselling (Even With $0 in the Bank)

Some of this stuff for just reselling, you don't have to spend any money. Seasonal arbitrage can make you rich. I click over to target, and there it is. They sell it for $250. Your cost per item is $3.78.

Wow.

You can do these deals every single day with this method. This is how you make $100,000, right? No doubt about it.

Something that almost no one thinks to do is to list stuff before you have it.

Buy with math and sell with emotion. I want to sell iPhones. No, you don't. There's no money in it. I want to sell sneakers. That's tough to make it. Go find the boring stuff that other people ignore. We are surro opportunity. I'm going to show you how to buy those products here in a couple minutes. It's crazy. You can spend, you know, literally a few hundred dollars to get involved in this stuff and learn how it works. And some of this stuff for just reselling, you don't have to spend any money. We have a member that is. He's a weatherman actually, up in. Up north, and he picks up free couches from Facebook marketplace, takes him home, cleans him up in his garage, takes better photos and everything, puts them back out in his driveway and sells them, you know. So he does nothing. No. No investment but his own time. And he's super excited about it.

Yeah.

I've posted about it. This guy Mike, he's amazing. And you can just conjure income out of just your time and your willingness to push the boundaries, Right?

Yes. Well, I'm about to share my screen and show you this picture here that I took in Utah. I was filming a video.

I saw this.

Yeah. Filming a video about appliance rental on Facebook marketplace. We got two videographers. We're walking down the street. We're talking about business. And I. I look over as they're filming, and I see this couch in the front yard. And if you're. If you're only listening, it just says free with duct tape on it in the middle of the cushion. And I'm just like, we need to film on that couch.

Yeah.

That would be an awesome album cover, first of all.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And that could be your first flip. You can make.

That could be it.

You can make 200 bucks.

Yeah. We sat there for a half hour and had one of our segments just brought down on the couch about flipping appliances.

And especially if you're like, I was talking about this. This young guy, Tristan, who bought this. He bought this truckload of flat pack, brand new flat pack furniture. He reached out and said, okay, what do you think? You know how it was a small investment. I think he paid less than $4,000 for the entire truck. This is 300 pieces of furniture. And I said, where do you live? He goes, I live here. And I said, well, you're right in between two colleges and you know, it's July, so this is perfect timing to start talking to parents, get into Facebook marketplace, get into Facebook groups. There's a group called Flown and Grown that's all about kids going away to college. So it's just perfect, man. The couch thing, I always tell everybody, I think I've said it on the show. If you live in a college town, you should be in the couch business. Because every kid and every house and every frat and sorority, they're constantly churning couches over and over and over. Just a great. It's right in front of you.

Beautiful.

That's right.

All right, well, what has been catching your eye on.

Yeah, let me share my screen. I want to show you some. Okay, here we go. So Target is an interesting company to buy from. I don't look at them all the time, but when I see brand new stuff I really like, that's kind of. That's cool. And I go down. I said, okay, what's this selling for? Target's telling us that MSRP is about $11,000. Okay, so that's not true, but we know that they put that there. But the first thing that caught my eye is this first line item number one. The auction's sitting at $525. Okay. Right now.

And it's gonna close three hours left.

Three hours. So yeah, it's gonna go a little bit more, but I predict that it sells for less than a thousand bucks. Cause I've seen these before.

First of all, what makes you even wanna click into sporting goods in the first place?

I like sporting goods.

Just cause of your history or why do you.

I'm curious about em and it. And it's so I go to Target. They have tons of stuff. You know, everything sells at a Target. But right now, this time of year, sporting goods, kind of great outdoor stuff. What do they have? I just curious to look at what it is and you know where it's at. This is five pallets, new condition unsold merchandise. So you get all this in there. Unsold merchandise, no signs of use. This is really important.

So not returns.

They're not returns. We're going to. I'm going to show you Some returns in a minute. But the. So as I was just kind of scrolling around, the first thing that caught my eye was this 10 by 6 rigid air dock. And Target says they sell for 250 bucks. So a lot of times they lie. But I just, I click over to Target and there it is. They sell it for $250. And it's one of those floating rigid docks. Like if you have a lake and.

Oh yeah, right.

That kind of stuff. You know, we're in the middle of July. Great time to sell it. You know, if you can get it here, $250. And right now your cost per item is $3.78.

Wow. So if you 99% off.

Correct. And this is. Yeah, I would look. Okay. If I'm going to spend, let's say a thousand bucks on this. Wow. How many of these do I have to sell at 100 bucks on Facebook Marketplace and blow one up and put it in the water and get your whole investment back. Then you have 66 pickleball sets. Trim a tree. We're going to talk about seasonal stuff in a minute. But then we also have this Intex 14. This is a swimming pool, a 14 by 42 clear view swimming pool that target sells $450. Right. And then you got 40 rollick play tunnels for your fast.

That pool would go on Facebook Marketplace right now.

Yeah, Today. Right? That's right. So that's what I'm. Oh my gosh. It's finding things everybody wants to like, oh, I want to sell iPhones. No, you don't. You know, there's no money in it. You know, I want to sell this. I want to sell sneakers. That's tough to, you know, go find the kind of boring stuff that other people ignore. So take a look at this. I love this deal. And I love the brand new. I love outdoor products. I love that it's got a manifest so I can go down and go through every single item. I love that there are 30 high ticket items that I can sell a portion of those quickly to get my investment back. I'm always focused on. Especially when you're just starting. The question in your head should be how do I get my money back? Not how much profit I'm going to make. Because you're going to learn all these lessons. You're going to learn about Facebook Marketplace, you're going to maybe learn about ebay, you're going to learn about shipping and logistics and you're going to make mistakes. So you're just like, all right, what's on this list. Oh, well, these 10 by 6 rigidaire and boy, I got this one swimming pool. It's a 14 by 42 pool, brand new. That's amazing. It's a great deal.

You know what I've noticed? Do you remember last time you were on the podcast I talked about how I had all, all these Tesla credits and so I was buying stuff from Tesla.com and selling them on Facebook Marketplace.

Yeah.

It's so interesting what you learn when you do that. Like just when you list stuff just to see what the demand's like. Because I listed like five things before I ever bought anything and the, the hottest thing I listed was a the wall charger. Like your standard Tesla. I think they're like $450 that people put in their garage to charge their Tesla Level 2 charger.

Okay.

What was very interesting about that is you can only get those from online. Right. Like no one's going to drive to a Tesla store to buy it. So they're $450 and then you pay 100 in shipping and then you pay 8% sales tax. So you're looking at 600 bucks. And I was able to sell those for 450, $500. And like I sold, I could have sold 20 of them if I had them because there was so much demand. Right. So what's also interesting, and you don't want to do this in your research, but oftentimes you can sell it for more than what you expect if it's a hot item simply because like your house is closer to their house than Target or you don't want to pay target 8% sales tax or you don't want to pay shipping or you don't want to wait for it. Maybe you pay the equivalent of what it costs at Target with the sales tax and with the shipping, but you don't want to wait three or four days so you'll go drive to pick it up, right?

Absolutely.

So I'm not suggesting that people bake that into their research, but have you ever seen that where you list something and you're able to sell it for closer to retail because of it's just like in demand or it's seasonal and you're in the season.

Yeah. And, and also like I had, it was a big life lesson to me when I started this handbag selling, designer handbag experiment. And I was selling and people were like, hey man, what are you doing selling it at that price? I'm like, well, I thought that price was close to the retailer and they Said, yeah, but there's a two year wait to get that bag. And I had no idea.

So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking about. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell. Just like that. Thank you.

So in that research, it is. What is the availability of it and popularity of certain things. Like, you know, there's people that resell those little Trader Joe bags.

Yeah.

Line up at the store when they release them and. Yep. So it's, it's like when you go to a restaurant and they have market price. Well, you need to know the market price of what you're selling and understand. And the guy that runs the mini Costco store up in Washington, full of stuff, he's like, you know, I price my shoes at like 70% of, you know, of the Costco price. And they sell every single day. And he's got racks and racks and racks of shoes. And so if you're not in as a competitive market or that's a hot product or you can sit on it, you know. One of the bags that I had the most success with their brand was a brand called Spray Ground because they do limited runs and I would buy as much as I could get my hands on and then I would just wait and then they, they're gone. They sell out. And then I would list them for sale and then you could. I would, I would sell them. $200 more than the retail price. Yeah, it's amazing.

Oh, man.

I want to show you another one. I want to show you another one.

Let's do it. I could do this all day.

I could too. Let me show you this.

My favorite so far. You shouldn't pick favorites, but I am.

Okay, let me share this one. This is interesting. There's a company called Walker Edison.

Okay.

And they make flat pack furniture. And like here's this auction entry tables, chests and more. You get a full manifest. You should never buy anything without a manifest because you don't know what you're going to get. You know exactly what the condition is. These are brand new. They've got photos that you can look at of the products that are all beautiful, factory sealed, fantastic. You look here, it's got, you know, everything from beds, entry tables, four drawer chests. Now, you know, they, they say it's retail. 76,000. Well, the retail price is a Lie. That's just a fact. So I just, like, just cut it in half. Just say. Okay, let's just say it's $35,000. And right now the bid is at 28, 25. $2,825. So this is going to sell for not much more than that. It'll probably maybe 3 or $4,000.

A 95% discount to quote retail, Right?

Yep. You got some freight because 16 pallets is almost a truckload. So to me, because this is in California, be like 1200 bucks. So let's say it sells for a guarantee that you're into this for less than $5,000. Mm. And this stuff sells itself. You get it. You put together a sample of each item. Now, I would want to look at the bed thing. This is the one that's weird. But this place has. There's three or four different auctions that go on every single day. There's chairs, tv, consoles, all kinds of stuff. But this stuff is not difficult to sell. It's beautiful. For Facebook Marketplace, you build one of each. You take some pictures.

I was just gonna say that. Yep.

You take some video of you building it. You do a time lapse video of you putting it together.

And that should be the first media.

Yeah, exactly. It's just going quick. It's. It's the same as grinding a stump. Same thing. You kiss your eye. They're like, what's this guy doing? You stop, you look and go, hey, you know, this is, you know, $170 item. I'm selling it for, you know, 90 bucks, whatever it is. And you'll be into them for less than $20, $20 an item. It's the same concept as Ikea. As a matter of fact, I would use some of that verbiage when I was listing it, you know, similar to Ikea or something like that, where you.

I would keyword stuff it with Ikea even though it's not Ikea, because it's like ikea.

Yeah. This company's Walker Edison. It's sold up on the B stock marketplace. So, you know, you're buying it direct. You're not buying from some middleman. B stock is not marking anything up. They're not cherry picking, which is why.

You need a reseller certificate.

You need a resell permit to get it. You can get it. I'll tell you where to get it. Just go to shannon jean.com resale and there's every list of every state that you can to a link to get your resale permit. It's easy. It doesn't cost anything. Don't pay anybody to do it anyway. So this is, you know, we've got 32, you know, 50 some out, 60 some odd pallets worth of this product. That's all selling at 90% off of.

Wow.

Their store price.

95%.

Yeah, 95%.

This is my favorite. I mean, I know we're not done yet, but this is my favorite mostly because I know that I can lean on Facebook Marketplace for this. This is. People go to different platforms for different things. Right. If I want to buy a used iPhone, I'm gonna go to ebay. Yes. I'm not gonna go to Amazon or Facebook Marketplace because I'm gonna trust the seller. They're gonna have good feedback. It's small, it's gonna ship quickly. If I want to buy a bed frame, I'm only gonna go to. Yeah, right.

That's right.

And you could just. Like I would use, like, the stock photos for this, and I would take my own pictures and videos of this and say, brand new. Like, of course you're going to be a similar price to the used. Comparables of this. Except brand new.

Except brand new. Yep. In the box.

So how do you. When you hear 16 pallets, that's like. So I like to say, all right, a pallet is almost 4 by 4ft.

Yeah, just about.

So 16. So we're talking like 200 square feet. So picture like a bedroom, and it's like a big bedroom.

You could put it in your garage if you had.

Yeah.

Emptied your garage. You put in your garage. Or you can buy a store, get a storage unit, you know, that kind of thing. If you didn't want, people come to your house. But I mean, this is how you build. These are relatively, you know, it's. It's low risk. You're investing, you know, less than $5,000 or this. There's a couple of them. $5,000. But you need to learn your market. You know, you need to go up and study it. It's like, oh, are people selling this kind of product on Facebook? What are the used stuff? Like you said, Chris, what do you stuff sell for? Gee, stuff sells for $100. I'm going to sell brand new, you know, that kind of thing. And I love deals like this. Again, because no one knows about this stuff. They just don't. They're not searching for it. And it allows you. These have like 19 bids, 23 bids. But there's probably three or four people bidding over and over again. Right. It's not like 25 even. So it's still not much.

But is there anything else on this page that kind of stands out to you that as a good or a negative indicator? Are there any negative indicators?

Well, the negative thing I thought on that last one was the beds. I thought that was kind of weird. I don't know anything about bed frames, but that seems like a slower mover versus a console to put a flat panel TV on. It looks like they have one here with a fake fireplace in it. That's cool. I'm always wanting to buy close to me. Like, I'm not going to buy this out of Ohio when I can buy it from California because I'm in California. So you always have to keep your freight. You know, you want to buy close to you. You know, one of the things I.

Do is you do your.

Do your study, figure it out, do your research, build, download the manifest that you'll get up here, which is essentially a spreadsheet. You list your prices of what you believe you can sell it for, and then you back it out. You just do it backwards. So you say, okay, if I could sell this one, we were, we were looking at if I think I could sell it for $50,000. What can I pay? What am I going to pay? Shipping included, everything. Okay, I'm going to sell for 50. It's going to cost me 7,000 to get here. Okay, do you want to do that for $43,000?

You.

And then if your answer is yes, go up and put your $7,000 bid in there and walk away. Don't walk. Don't watch it anymore. Don't get emotionally involved in the bid. You may lose that one, but next week there'll be four more. And over and over and over. One of the things I really like a lot of these auction places, especially Costco, they close auctions on the weekend. They always sell for less. So you should be bidding on the weekend because nobody else is. And you should put your bid in on Friday and leave. It's auto bid. It'll auto bid for you, dude.

And for the love of everything, if you're looking at this and you see the manifest, don't just do your math. Go to Facebook Marketplace.

Oh, yes.

Try to sell the thing. How many clicks do you get, if any? That could prevent you from ever buying it.

Yeah, that's right.

That's something that almost no one thinks to do, is to, like, list stuff before you have it. Just for the research purpose.

See how many clicks, how many messages. Yeah.

Yes. How about we do this real quickly. I'm going to do a little research here on the fly.

Yep.

And show what I would look for. Which one of them has an interesting word that might appear or stand out?

Maybe this rattan platform king bed.

Rattan paneled platform kingpad. Let me see. And for those that don't know what's called Walker Edison.

Yeah, Walker Edison. Yep.

They're trying to be like the E commerce only Ikea of the next generation. And they white label a ton of their stuff to companies like Wayfair and Walmart. But then they also sell directly. So it's pretty smart. They're like, all right, Ikea's crushing it, but they're retail. We want to be like Ikea, but we never want to sell retail.

Yeah. We don't want to store.

And so that also means that their stuff that you're getting on pallets is like it's well packaged to be shipped and sold only online.

That's right.

Right. Yep.

You got it.

Rattan paneled king bed. I'm looking dfw. I'm going to do condition new. You don't have the luxury of doing on Facebook marketplaces knowing you can, but not as well how much interest there is in any given thing.

Yeah, right.

But I'm seeing there's Almost nothing under $400, 3 to $800 for these king beds, some of them over a thousand new in box 550. Rattan style bed frame. 500. This might be the exact one. So if we were to, let's say conservatively, we sell them for 350, what would our profit look like on that?

Yeah, right now the cost is. Your cost on that landed will be about $30.

That's crazy.

Yeah, this is. And, and this is every day. I mean it's not. If you don't want to sell beds, find that. Go do the next thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's wild. Let me show you a bad example, dude. All that what I don't think you should buy because it's too popular. Let's see here. And if you're listening in, I'm going to show you. There's an image of this. Four pallets of Stanley 40 ounce stainless steel H2O flow state quencher tumblers. These are everywhere. Right. I don't.

Every young girl, every soccer mom, and they're Stanley's. This is.

And they're brand new. The problem is Target says they're worth $37,800, $45 a unit. But you do a quick search and you See, everybody sells them at 25 bucks. Maybe they're 25 because it's this, they're gray and they're not a bright color. So they, I don't know, I don't know anything about this market. But the bid is at $12,000 right now, not including freight. So they're at 1435 a unit. Well, that's not a good deal. You can't pay 50% of what you find them in selling for. You'll be upside down on this deal. But people get enticed. You know, I always advise Stanley, this is Stanley. And they're popular. I see them everywhere. That's a bad thing to sell. If Target is dumping them, what does that tell you? They can't sell them otherwise if they couldn't get them. So there's a lot of other reasons.

But their basis is probably pretty high because it's Stanley.

They're not.

No name brand from China.

That's right. And so, you know, I always tell people to buy with math and sell with emotion because if you use emotion when you buy, the math never works. And this is one of those deals that you should just, oh, I'm not, I can't, I'm not even gonna bid on these, you know, unless you had somebody that said, hey Chris, we really want Stanley 40 ounce tumblers, if you ever come across them, I can pay you 20 bucks a piece for them. Okay, well, that's a different conversation.

It's an exception.

Yeah, an exception. So you want to stay away from these. It's not, not a good investment.

When you say sell with emotion, do you just mean like storytelling, like good sales skills, enthusiasm?

Absolutely. Your story, the narrative, why you're selling. I'm putting kids through college or I'm, I want to pay for summer camp for my kids, or I'm taking my family on a trip and I'm trying to earn extra money, that should be in your, your, your listings. You should be talking more about it because people want to buy from people. Yeah. You don't want to compete on price if you don't have to. You want to be competitive. Yeah. You add your story, your purpose, why everybody wants to make money. That's just, that's table stakes. But if you're like, I'm trying to add an ensuite to my house so I can move my mother in law in, in the next two years. That's great, man. People share that. That's, that's what people want to know. People want to know about you and what you're doing. That's what I.

Especially if you're in a more competitive market or you're selling a commodity. When I helped those teenagers start the firewood business last year. Firewood is a commodity, right? I know if I go to Facebook Marketplace it's going to be 450 accord. And so I don't want to go 500 but I also don't want to go 400. So instead I went 450. And in the title was help us pay for college. 100% of the profits go to these high schoolers that are trying to pay for college.

Yeah, I love it, I love it. It's brilliant. Let's talk about batteries. I love obscure deals, right? Of course I love to sell the sexy stuff too. But there's way more competition in those markets and often less margin. And there's not as big of a moat because everybody wants to sell, you know, fancy sneakers or Blackstone grills, that kind of stuff. But this is a gov deals auction. Just@govdeals.com, it's a lot of 8,000. And it doesn't sound exciting cause it's not. It's 8,000 AA GP Gold Peak Ultra plus alkaline batteries, brand new. I don't know anything about batteries, right. But I'm like well there's 8,000 is brand new. It's kind of interesting. So I started looking at the pictures on the boxes and the one thing that stood out and I'm scrolling through these pictures here is there's a. Let's see, I can make it a little bigger for those on YouTube. YouTube is this, this date code 0820 31.

Okay, that was my next question is.

Like expiration these batteries after just a little bit of research, they're specifically made to have a 10 year shelf life. That's why they're valuable. And if you go and look at Amazon, if you search. So I just search for that brand GP Gold Peak Ultra. If you search on Amazon they're all over. If you search on ebay, on ebay they're selling expired versions. You can buy, they sell like a 200 or 250 pack for like $50. But on the current versions they basically sell for about a buck a battery. Wow. What it comes down to about a buck. So two pack, these are in two packs and they're not retail packed. So when you look at a retail pack like Amazon sells, sells them basically for like 2 bucks a battery in a retail pack. So if you look around, you know you're not Going to have a retail pack. You're not on Amazon, you're not going to sell it for that much. I go through and like, okay, what's it worth?

And so you said these should go for a dollar a piece. So are we talking $8,000 worth?

We're talking $8,000 if you have to go buy two pack of AA batteries. What's it cost, four bucks or something like that? I don't know what they are, but I know these batteries, easy. You can sell them as a reseller for basically a dollar each. And so you could sell whatever it is you sell. 10 pack for 20 bucks. You know what, however you're going to.

We're not talking about the Walmart retail price. That's unrealistic for us.

It's unrealistic. Yeah. You could go, you have to search like you're saying you have to go to ebay. You got to search sold listings, got to search for that brand. I like to look at Amazon because they show velocity really quick right there and they'll say, oh, 4,000 orders over the last 30 days. Very helpful. And you want to know, so I love this deal. Another reason I love it is it's small, it's 8,000 pieces, but it's only like six or seven maybe eight boxes that you could put in your, your bedroom or your office, whatever it is. So I love that stuff. Small things, very inexpensive to ship. If you want to sell them online, you can put them in an envelope, a free, you know, priority mail envelope so you don't have to buy packaging. You get to go pick them up. These are sitting down. These are in Gilroy, which is not too far from me. And the other thing I love about gov deals is you can ask questions. This is me right here. So they put, they're like, hey, what's the expiration date? And it said 8, 2031. And then there was this other date, 5, 29, 25. So I thought some were 2031 and some were 2025. And I'm like, what's the breakdown of the cases? You know, a number of cases with 2031 expiration date, number of cases with 25. And they came back, said they all expire 2031. 2025 is the month we answer that question. So, you know, these have been up here for a while. I think they didn't sell before and they got listed right, because they wouldn't be sitting here since May. But this is the kind of deal when I stumble across them or it's money and you can do this every day over and over and over and it wouldn't take you long to sell this. It wouldn't take you, obviously it's not going to take you very long to get your investment back. And that's a big part of what I try to show people is take calculated risks, but then focus on getting your investment back as quickly as you can. And that may mean wholesaling some to other, you know, shops. Maybe you walk into a hobby place in your town and say, hey, you want to buy Casey's batteries? What would you pay me for 500 of these?

So is that the play with these to wholesale them to a retail store?

That's what I would do, yeah.

Do people ever walk into like the Ollie's discount outlets or those dirt cheap? There's a, you know, a handful of chains around the country.

Yeah.

Is it possible to just walk in, talk to the GM and say, hey, do you want these? Because they could just put them on the floor. Yeah, right.

The key is not to walk in with anything in your hands. The key is to walk in and just say, hey, I'm, I'm a reseller, I get access to some crazy stuff. Could I, can I email and share anything? Do you guys buy from individuals or from other businesses? And some will say no, we do not. We have a corporate, yada, yada yada. Some will absolutely say, yeah, what do you got? And you get their contact information and when you get a manifest or a list like this, you say, hey, you fire off an email, you know, maybe you bring donuts by. You gotta build a relationship. This is a relationship business. And so you get that network going and you, you, you email and say, hey John, I got an opportunity on these brand new GP Ultra batteries. Looks like 10 years. Here's some Amazon, you know, links and ebay. Is that something you guys be interested in? Any idea what you might want to pay for 500 pieces? And you let them tell you the price.

Well, here's what I love about this product. So when I had my third party logistics company, we would occasionally inherit some just crap that some of our customers would sell and they were never, never able to sell.

Sure.

We were forced to liquidate it to pay for their bills. Their storage bills I get. Yeah. And I inherited a couple pallets of these blenders imported from China. They were like single serving blenders and they were good quality. But like who wants that? Like you can't sell that on Facebook Marketplace.

It's like a bullet kind of thing that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But with this, like, if I'm a store manager and I'm able to buy stuff, I'm gonna think, you know what? 100% of my customers use double A batteries. 100 of them.

Correct.

And so if I'm a customer, I'm gonna walk by that and be like, you know What? Those are $4 at Walmart, $1 here. I might as well pick up eight packs. I won't use batteries for another five years.

You got, you know, and the fact that they last for, you know, they're gonna last for another seven years or six years or whatever.

Yeah.

You know, so, but. Yep.

But that framework doesn't work for even most products. But it does for this. Because this is a commodity.

Yeah, that's right. Again, talking about unfair advantage. I'm going to share some Costco stuff here, liquidation stuff, in a few minutes. If you don't live near a Costco, that's a big unfair advantage for you. Because everybody wants Costco products. Right. They did 250 billion in sales. Right. So you can buy Costco liquidation items and offer them in your local community that doesn't have a Costco. Not only can you make money, but you'll be a hero. It's just a great product. One of the things that makes it so valuable is that everybody overlooks it. That's nuts. I don't want to sell batteries. I can't sell batteries, you know. Well, I'll show you how.

I just heard. I've heard the same thing recently from two different world famous investors, Scott Galloway and Manish Pabrai. They both said their best deals, their sexiest deals, their sexiest investments have been the most unsexy industries or businesses. Right. Like maritime shipping.

Oh yeah.

The most boring unsexy thing ever. And so that same framework holds true with liquidating items.

Absolutely.

So you've probably heard me talk about Beehive before and if you've ever received a newsletter from me, it was powered by Beehive. I've been using Beehive for the last year and a half. Their three founders left Morning Brew and built the platform so the rest of us could use the same tools that turn Morning Brew into a multi million dollar operation. That's why Beehive doesn't feel like every other newsletter platform, because it's not. It was built by people who scaled a newsletter empire. Now you know that I only recommend stuff that actually moves the needle. For me, this moves the needle. So go to beehive.com Chris. Use the code Chris30 to get 30% off your first three months. I just went to ChatGPT as you're talking, and I said, tell me the biggest metros in the US with no Costco. And I grew up in Logan, Utah. That's in Cache Valley, northern Utah. And there's, I think, a quarter million people in Cache Valley, maybe more. They didn't have a Costco until a few months ago.

Wow.

And it's slammed. It's slammed now.

Now, I could imagine. Yeah.

But, dude, Waco, Texas, 280,000 people, no Costco. Just north of Austin.

Right.

Like, you thought of someone in Waco driving all the way to Austin for Costco is like another planet. They're just not going to shop at Costco, Right?

That's right. So if you had a small warehouse and you had those same products and you were on Facebook Marketplace talking about it, and you were in parent groups on Facebook talking about it, you would just be inundated with people that wanted to buy those products. And I'm going to show you how to buy those products here in a couple minutes. It's crazy, dude.

Here's a few more. First of all, it told me Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Huntsville, Alabama, but that's false. They both have Costco's.

Yeah.

So these have been checked.

Yeah.

Yeah. They lie. Jackson, Mississippi, biggest city in Mississippi. No Costco. And a lot of these are because, like, Costco knows where they need to go. Right. They're not stupid. They know what demographics they need to support a store. But it doesn't mean that there's no people there. Right. Like, that would want a Costco, for instance. There's no Trader Joe's, like, in my area, because there's just not quite enough people. Yep. You know, but there are a lot of people. If you expand it out a little further. Amarillo, Texas, 300,000 people. Lubbock, Texas, 300,000 People. Laredo, Texas, 300,000 people. And Topeka, Kansas, 250,000 people. No, Costco's.

It's huge. I mean, it's such a basic concept that people love Costco. It's a cult. Right. I mean, they love going there.

The Hilton should. It's freaking awesome.

It is awesome. Changed my life. I mean, I'm telling you, sitting in.

I bet you especially changed my life.

And they're amazing people. They are truly people that care about everyone succeeding, which is highly irregular in the industry. And from a buyer standpoint, or however you want to call it, my relationship with them, they're one of the few companies that won't sell you out for a dollar, you know, because like, no, no, we sell to Shannon and he's reliable and we've known him for 10 years and we're going to keep selling to Shannon. And that is priceless, man. Priceless.

Jim Senegal, the founder, he is a testament that you can have your cake and eat it too. You can treat employees well, you can pay them very well, and you can offer the lowest prices on the market. Like, if any other company out there is saying, well, we can't do this because of that, just look to Costco, it's possible.

Yeah. And when you can sell a hot dog and a Coke for buck 50.

In like the most brutal industry grocery, where no one makes money, they're making money and they're treating their employees right and they're beloved by all. Like, yeah, what are we talking?

Huge. It's huge.

Before you contender another one more quick business idea, I can't help myself but doing the same thing with Ikea. There's a whole thriving industry out there of selling IKEA furniture to people in big enough markets that are big enough to have a good population center, but not big enough for an Ikea, because most markets are not big enough for an Ikea. They're a lot more selective. Huntsville, Alabama. Half a million people. No Ikea. I actually started a business in when I lived in Huntsville, called my Modern South. And that's what I did was I would load up, I would go to the Atlanta or the Memphis Ikea and place orders beforehand. And I would literally just say, go to ikea.com, tell me what, like, fill your cart, print out your cart, I'm going to add 30% to it. And then meet me at this grocery store parking lot. And I love it. Collect all the money up front. You rent a U haul for a day, you pay by the mile, you work that into the cost. You show up at a parking lot. If you're not here between this two hour window, I'm keeping your crap and you just resell it.

Yeah, I love it.

That's it.

Okay, so here's the deal. One of the things you do is you want to watch the news and you want to learn about companies that are buying other companies. Because when that happens, there's usually a large liquidation of products because they're consolidating. Maybe they're shutting down warehouses. In this case, we're looking at an auction from advance auto parts that got bought by Pep Boys. If you know them, they're big auto parts place. And so they closed a bunch of Locations, because then they merged them in with pep boys locations.

And.

And they've been liquidating auto part, auto repair parts and auto repair gear equipment tools for like the last, I'd say eight months. And what we're looking up here, it says truckload of ignition emission components, brake drums, rotors, and more 3911 pieces. Like, new condition. Now, like, new means it's. It's new. But the boxes may be a little beat up because it got moved around from warehouse to warehouse. They're not store returns, all that kind of stuff. Extended retail, $126,422. We know that's a lie. So let's just say it's worth 70, you know, or $60,000.

What do they. What do they mean, extended retail?

Oh, so unit retail is individual piece. So extended is just unit retail times the quantity.

Okay.

Okay. So that's all. So their full retail of this manifest, if you go to the bottom, they have it at 126, 422.

Okay. And pretty much on all of these sites, you can look at the manifest before bidding. Before buying.

Yeah. Don't buy without a manifest. That is rule number. Rule number one is don't buy unless you know what you can sell it for. Rule number two is never buy a deal unless you're very sophisticated buyer without a manifest because you'll have no recourse.

Why would you even bid on an item before looking at the manifest if it's there for you?

There are. There are people that buy. Like I tell you, bin store owners don't care as much about manifest because they're buying by the piece at $. Whatever it is. The dollar amount, my friend, that sells.

Shirts, they don't care.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but for the typical seller, don't. Don't do it. You'll get burned. So this is looking at this right now, the bid's at $4,000. Okay. It's gonna close tomorrow. One day and two hours. I guarantee you. This does not close. This bid closes for maybe $7,000. 6,000. $7,000.

Okay.

Okay. And if you go and look at this, if you sort by the products and you sort by the retail, you can just see the numbers, you know, 11 $38, 950, 730, 708, 532. On and on and on and on. There's line item after line item that are 200 to $1000. Right now. I don't know anything about this product, and I would not buy. I would not buy this because I don't know anything about car parts. If I was in that car parts industry business and I could do that and I knew that a speed calibrator, you know, really was worth a couple hundred bucks or a quick assembly, well, that would be one thing, but I don't, I would, I would rather go buy the. That furniture. Right. Because it's more broad. But these auctions at Advanced Auto have been incredible and auto parts guys that I've been sharing them with have just, they've just been going nuts and scooping this stuff up for next to nothing.

Dude, I'm picturing, I see all these lists. Like if you scroll down to the SKUS and the item numbers to me, it's as if I'm panning for gold. And I pull my pan out of the river and I see some shiny rocks, I see some fool's gold, I see some rubies, I see a lot of gray, a lot of crap like what? Where my mind goes here is to screenshot this stuff or to export the manifest, upload it to Manus, which you.

Could download right here, just. Yeah, yeah.

Which Manus is like a more agent friendly version of chat GPT or just chat GPT or Perplexity or whatever.

Yeah.

And say find the gold.

Exactly.

Find the fool's gold. And find the gold. And what I want you to do and then give it more sources. Like, and I would do this, I would go manually, find some gold like the leaf spring or the clutch pack. Go try to find something that appears to have more demand than supply and say, all right, I want you to go look everywhere you can. Ebay, Facebook, marketplace, everywhere. Message boards, subreddits, forums. What are the parts that are, that have more demand than supply? For example, here's three. And here's why I know this. And here's where I found that info. Like always give it source data and then just wait 10, 15 minutes and don't just trust what it tells you, but go and look at the list of what it tells you and go cross reference it and then you could like, then you have asymmetric information. Because how many people that are bidding or looking at this are doing that?

Shannon, what I just described, not enough. What I recommend they do as well, if they're not comfortable digging into AI or they don't know that there are those resources as well is I'm get the manifest and go start talking to people in the industry that you're interested in selling and don't sell. Just say, look, I've got this opportunity here's this list of new brand new product that someone you know, advanced, you can tell them you say advanced auto as it wants me to buy this. Because that's true. They want you to buy it and say, is this something that you're interested in? And you know, they'll look at the list and say, oh, it's not worth 126. Okay, great. What is it worth? Maybe they come back to you and say, you know what? This list is only worth $25,000. And you say, would you buy this list if I got it to you and I could sell it to you for $25,000? And then you go back and you know you have the answer. I don't want to sell one things one at a time, but I would love to buy this deal for 6 or $7,000 and sell it for 25 and let it go away. I would have the truckload brought to my freight forwarder. I'd have the freight forwarder strip every identifying thing out of it, of where it came from, and. And I would deliver it right to the buyer, get their wire transfer, and I'd be done. Oh, man, you do this over and over and over. This is what you do. This is your business. You don't stop with this. You know, you can do these deals every single day with this method, every single day.

I was like googling gas leak detector kit, Dewalt angle grinder. I just keep myself.

I'm the same way. We are surrounded by opportunity. I'm telling you right now. So let's talk about QVC and let's talk about why July is the best time to buy Christmas trees, right? And the second best time to buy Christmas trees is January, February, March. And that's where I have a student in our mastermind that he's bought so many Christmas trees that sold for like nothing from Costco and Target and everything else. He's going to open an artificial Christmas tree lot in his town. He's already got the spot.

Is that even a thing?

No, it's going to be this year. So I'm like, you know, he's going to have this whole thing, the whole setup, and they'll be set up and you can come pick him up. And it's. It solves the open box, you know, conversation that sometimes you have to have. You promote it on Facebook, Marketplace. You have great social walking around you. You do, you have a fire going. You do marshmallow, the whole thing. And you sell other stuff too. So what we're looking at here, this is qvc just, you know, the home shopping TV place. They have tons of, you know, this. I don't normally look at their stuff, but I want to talk about seasonal selling. It's really powerful. And there's four pallets of Christmas trees by Ebenezer and Company. I didn't know. They're 158 units. New condition. Okay. Retail. Retail 11,710 bucks. It's not worth that. You know, it's probably worth five grand. Six grand. Bids at $526. And there's only five bids because people just aren't interested in buying this stuff. Yeah, these are.

Which is.

These are small trees, 24 inch, 36 inch little tabletop trees. You know, they're selling for 65 and 89, but the same concept goes with the Costco tree. That sells for 1500 bucks is what I'm telling you. And you want to buy them. Like I don't know if you know this, Chris, but there's a large amount of people that buy a Christmas tree on December 26. They take it back to the store. And Costco being.