Nobody else is having problems. It must be you.
Why aren't you getting rich quick on Amazon's marketplace?
Good morning, Scam Fam, and Happy New Year!
Does your entire existence feel healthier and more valuable than it did this time last week or are you failing at everything again? My most significant life change is that I threw away all my 2017 condiments except the cooking sherry which actually expired in 2016, but with which I cooked because I needed cooking sherry for a recipe. The recipe turned out to be quite mediocre, and yet it did not give me food poisoning. My fridge and the 11-inch cabinet I refer to as my pantry are both cleaner than they used to be, and I look forward to filling them with things I will throw away in late 2020/early 2021 if the feds don't catch me first.
On January 1, I made black eyed peas and collard greens*, one of my favorite New Year's traditions, because I love money and I don't like to work very hard for it. That is a quality I share with all of you, probably, and certainly with the folks featured in this fine Atlantic article on How to Lose Tens of Thousands of Dollars on Amazon.
If you listen to Matt Behdjou and Mike Gazzola who charge a whole bunch of money for workshops on how to generate passive income selling cheap goods on Amazon, losing that kind of cash while selling stuff on Amazon is exceedingly difficult to do! But also a lot of people who listened to them (and paid steeply for the privilege) told Alana Semuels, who reported the Atlantic article, that they've lost tens of thousands of dollars unsuccessfully attempting to sell stuff on Amazon. Who can say what’s real?
I'm a human with a somewhat functional heart and income I at least treat as disposable, so I get that Amazon is evil even while I fill my cart with essentials like this giant shoehorn that came in a box one foot shorter than I am (real talk: it was a great purchase) or these dumb rubber things for the gap between my stove and my counters (such a disappointment, I don't know why I keep trying to make them work, they're useless) and stream Mrs. Maisel S2 and lecture people who definitely don't care about what's wrong with it (it's Daniel Palladino).
Amazon is, it seems, always a step ahead of me; I was still fretting about how it had broken books while it was out destroying your neighborhood moms-and-pops, contracting with warehouses with sweatshop-type conditions, putting robots in our kitchens to spy on us, and extorting/taunting local governments across the country. As I write this, Jeff Bezos is probably already in the process of constructing his snowpiercer train. We'll purchase tickets with our prime accounts and eventually learn that the engine requires one of your children and the destination is Mars, earth's over, sorry, I liked your kid and this planet.
But right now I am still stuck on this third-party marketplace situation! It is SCAM HEAVEN. For one thing, it is a bewildering, head-spinning mysterious other world you can attempt to but will probably fail to understand by reading this nutso Jenny Odell story from November (credit to scambassador, jam band connoisseur, and A+ friend #Thomas who urged me to read it; the whole experience induced vertigo, and I can’t say I enjoyed it, but it sure was impressive).
This less dizzying but still outstanding Verge story enters the labyrinth via another door and finds that:
For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced.
So that's fun! It's also where Behdjou and Gazzola come in. As Semuels reports, in their $3,999 workshop, they'll be your guides to this whole bleeding edge pioneertown, teaching students:
how to source and ship a product from China, how to list it for an attractive markup on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, how to advertise it to consumers, and how to get them to leave good reviews.
It is, bleeding edge pioneertown aside, a classic sales pitch. Here's how one unsatisfied customer describes his experience:
They brag about how much money they’ve made, he said, yet seem unable to help most students follow a similar path, disappearing when complicated problems arise. Indeed, he said, they make struggling students feel like failure is their own fault—a way to mask their lack of knowledge about the intricacies of selling on Amazon. “They say, ‘Nobody else is having problems,’” he said. “‘It must be you.’”
And it's not illegal, the website includes disclaimers like this one:
Oh, wait, that's just the one you see at the top of the page where you enter your email address. There's another one where, if you scroll down to the bottom, you find, in much smaller print: “All financial numbers referenced here, or on any of our sites, are illustrative of concepts only and should not be considered average earnings, exact earnings, or promises for actual or future performance in fact most people will not recoup their investment.”
If you're looking for a get rich quick scheme this year, I feel like selling things on Amazon may not be your best bet. But MAYBE, for a very reasonable price, you could teach other people how to do it? Seems like there's a pretty sweet market for that.
Don't forget to write 2019 on all your fraudulent checks!
Ruthie
PS: My latest One More Thing books column is on what to read when you're caught up in family drama, and Jane Mount knocked the illustration straight out of the park. You can read my other book recs here.
*I use bacon instead of a ham hock. Highly recommend if you're making a small quantity, have no loyalty to a ham hock tradition, and don't like ham hocks!
My Week in Consumption
I hadn't even heard of Support the Girls until I saw it on some best-of lists, and then I didn't really care until I saw it on Barack Obama's, and then I watched it, and oh boy, I adored it!
Caity Weaver's field trip to the glitter factory is, like everything she writes, a sparkly treat so enjoyable it tricked me into believing existential and environmental crises are fun.
More on sparkly treats! I made these cookies with my parents on Christmas Eve using my dad's beloved standmixer (he calls it a mixer master, and I dare you not to be charmed by that). We left the gold dust out—it seemed unappetizing and also I don't even know where you get gold dust for cooking—and they were delicious.
Two of the especially talented grown-up Encyclopedias Brown I work with at ProPublica, Hannah Dreier and Kavitha Surana, wrote about what happened to a teenager who declined to join MS-13. Unsurprisingly, it's terrifying. And very, very worth reading.
Welcome to those of you who are new here! You can find past editions in the archive. If you like something you read by me, click reply to this email to tell me how much (I love compliments almost as much as I love money), or share it with others and tell them they can get rich quick by subscribing. Thanks for scamming with me!