Among other things, I am a long-term seller on Etsy, an e-commerce site that used to be all about handmade arts and crafts. I also sell on eBay, but for the purposes of this post I'm going to focus on Etsy, primarily because eBay has always been a pretty "catch-all" proposition.
Naturally, the Big Brother algorithm knows that I'm active on Etsy — and have been, for 18 years — so I get served a large number of ads and links to various "helper apps" allegedly designed to help Etsy sellers maximize their success.
I'm OK with that... I'll take all the help I can get!
But that help is not actually useful. In looking at the 100 largest sellers on Etsy and making "recommendations" accordingly, success comes from offering thousands of low priced items people will buy purely on impulse.
But here's where the whole thing breaks down, at least from my perspective: being successful on Etsy no longer has anything to do with "handmade goods" and everything to do with reselling cheap trinkets from giant importers like Ali Express or TEMU.
Except... it seems that everybody has been reading the same playbook and so you end up with hundreds of hopefuls (not) selling the same trinkets in a marketplace so saturated that nobody is enjoying any actual success.
Sadly, the only real success here goes to the giant import conglomerates... where they are undoubtedly laughing all the way to the bank because they keep selling crap that cost them 10 cents each to entrepreneurial hopefuls for 99 cents each... who then turn around and have to sell them for $1.25 each because their original dream to sell for $9 each has been made impossible by oversaturation.
Of course, by the time you've handed off your slice to Etsy, PayPal and shipping supplies, the entire proposition is upside down. The only way to make anything substantial from cheap trinkets is to sell hundreds of thousands of them... which returns us to the domain of large organizations, rather than individuals hoping to create a successful home-based business.
As for the whole "handmade by unique individual craftspeople," that has completely gone out the window! People are instead spending their hard-earned cash on bucketloads of junk that's cute for a few minutes, until it breaks or ends up in the next garage sale.
Which brings me to a completely different corner of the American Dream: Homeownership.
We talk a lot about how we are "much better off" than we used to be because (among other things) the typical family home is more than double the size it used to be, just 50-60 years ago. Ironically, over that same period, family size has decreased.
I became really aware of how things have changed when Mrs. Denmarkguy and I toyed with the idea of moving to a smaller place... only to discover that the "2bed/2bath starter home" has pretty much gone extinct, in favor of a new norm that's pretty much the place we already have. Nobody builds 1200 square foot houses, anymore. That was the norm in the 1960s... but it has been growing steadily ever since, peaking/plateauing in 2015 at 2,700 square feet.
And there we were, trying to downsize from 1,800 square feet!
Now, remember the bit about family size shrinking, because people are having fewer and fewer kids? Mean we have even more square footage per person living in the house, relatively speaking.
Now, if we back up to the previous Etsy development — where people were buying one nice handmade item for maybe $75, now they are buying an entire shipping cart full for the same amount — what we really have here is a world in which we have larger more expensive "containers" in which to put all those cheap trinkets we're constantly being pressured to acquire.
And even so, something on the order of 30% of American households have at least one offsite rented storage unit somewhere, and an equal number no longer have room in their garage for actual cars because they have so much stuff to store.
And clearly, I am "doing it wrong," at least if I want to enjoy any level of success.
Not to be macabre, but it is at times like this I am not really sad that I (most likely) don't have that many years left on this planet!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!
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