An enthusiastic, authoritative program for turning one person’s trash into another person's treasure—and making a profit...
A step-by-step debut guide to selling items on eBay.
At the start of his short book, Allen finds inspiration for new consignment-selling strategies from an unlikely source: his church pew. During a service, he looks around at the numerous elderly attendees and considers what they own, balancing that tally against what they need. Allen spent 36 years as a marketing consultant before transitioning to consignment selling, and his new guide distills his experiences for readers who may be interested in trying it themselves. After his church epiphany, Allen began doing presentations for retirement homes and senior centers, bringing in a professional appraiser to help elderly people discover what treasures they may own without knowing it; one person, for example, owned a fine set of World War II–era cameras. He stoutly defends this approach against possible charges of opportunism: “Many seniors are living on fixed incomes….They are highly motivated to turn their stuff into cash,” he says. “You are providing a much-needed service, so be proud of your work.” Allen describes himself as an avid history buff with a passion for discovering the past, and tells how he relished the experience of surprising seniors with unexpectedly high payoffs. He makes those paydays possible, he says, with his own online savvy and his use of professional appraisers, telling his elderly clients that such experts are worth every cent they charge. He includes several useful public-speaking tips when making presentations to potential clients, which deal with stage fright and the like. He also describes his own transition from the senior circuit to “eBay Heaven,” sharing fees with lawyers for consignment sales of warehouses full of items owned by their clients and their families. Many of these sales forgo eBay auctions altogether in favor of dealing directly with collectors, but some of the advice in this section may still be of use to beginners in the practice. Indeed, anyone interested in reselling items online (and fans of Antiques Roadshow) will likely benefit from Allen’s clear prose and infectious salesman’s confidence.
An enthusiastic, authoritative program for turning one person’s trash into another person's treasure—and making a profit along the way.Pub Date: May 10, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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