***NOT*** In The Pits
The Portland Leather aftersales market is wild, I've learned, as I shed my life of most everything and wonder if being the asshole all the time is worth it anymore.
The last Portland leather bag just sold after about a week of haggling on one of those apps where you sell stuff you don’t want anymore.
Syd Fryer and I have 163 items sold and 420 active listings. We are basically running an online thrift shop that has been temporarily life consuming. I am selling my house, you may have read in another post, and so now I want to get rid of everything. I want to keep next to nothing. I am finding zero sentimental value in keeping any of the 20-plus years of crap accumulated in this house. Olympic and World Cup credentials and press items? Trash. Plaques and awards? Trash. A case of AP business cars? Trash. Chip-n-dip trays? Trash. I yesterday got rid of two things I truly loved — a blue and a pink artificial set of lit Christmas trees. The blue one remained up 365 days of the year after I was on a 2-year waiting list for it. Anyway, they are gone, and of everything, I might be saddest about them right now.
I also gave away the globe I picked from a catalog of gifts to choose from to mark 5-years with AP. By year 30, marked in January by an email I received as I walked through the Rolex paddock in Daytona, I was authorized to celebrate with a dinner up to $75. I never got another catalog after the fifth year.
Syd led us to this new side hustle of selling off as much as we can. And it’s what made the Portland Leather bag such a mystery. We get the Portland Leather love, we aren’t part of the cult, but we understand the affection for the bags and so we have/had a decent collection.
Once we started listing it, the Portland Leather bags would not last 10 minutes. We were pricing too low. We were allowing bundles. Total rookies. Once we got it figured out, we still had one, black, 9-inch circular bag remaining. Syd wasn’t even sure she wanted to sell it. But Portland Leather is a big seller on this app and the payout was going to be worth it. The entire thing is just one big game of counter offers, low balling, holding firm, caving just to get rid of something, and wondering if selling a beach cover-up I haven’t worn in 15-plus years is worth the $4 I will receive for packing it and dealing with the USPS. (More on that later).
Anyway, the last Portland Leather purse finally sold and it might be the most exciting thing that happens to me today.
If you’ve made it this far, this long Portland Leather black circle 9-inch purse was really just a monologue to get to this: I have not properly utilized this space because I have not yet wrapped my head around my life.
