Stocktake sale -- must end soon

OPINION: It’s that time of year again. The tax man wants to know how much we earned and we don’t want to overstate things.
 
Truth is we really didn’t make much last year, after taking the usual deductions and allowances. Makes me wonder how we manage to keep the doors open. Oh, that’s right, we use that wooden thing the nephew made in woodwork class.
 
The accountant is already grizzling about some of our deductions.
 
He says we can’t claim the six-week stay at El Questro as a business expense. Why not? They use PCs there, I saw one. I’m almost sure it was a PC. Anyway they could use a few more. Both the waitress and the barmaid separately told me to stop playing with my laptop on more than one occasion, so that’s gotta prove we were trying to sell technology. And that was before the mango daiquiris.
 
However, the most fun you can have at the end of the financial year is the stocktake. We’ve still got no idea how some of this stuff ever got here in the first place. And we’ve got even less idea who would ever want to buy the rubbish, but that doesn’t stop us from putting it out for the compulsory stocktake sale. Punters will buy anything if it looks, smells and feels like a bargain.
 
So you don’t think you can sell blown-up motherboards? Sell them as pairs. Plenty of nerds are convinced they can make one working board from two trashed boards. We think they’re working on the old-Volvo theory, the one that says you should buy one old banger that almost works and another one for spares.
 
Somebody will one day explain to the nerds that there’s only entertainment value to be had from de-soldering multi-layer circuit boards. Not to mention that it’s the second-fastest way to trigger a smoke alarm. The first is trying to tune the engine on an old Volvo.
 
Same thing goes for busted monitors.
 
You can’t sell one but you sure can sell a pigeon-pair of dead glass tubes. And dead keyboards and mice are also quite popular. Some of the geeks actually manage to get mice working again. The economics in that exercise are totally astounding. Only four hours to repair a $25 mouse. Go figure. We do admit defeat selling dead hard drives. Can’t manage to sell them even in a six-pack. Guess there aren’t that many nerds with their own clean-room after all.
 
The one place where you can really make money in a stocktake sale is with software. You know the drill. You’ve already RA’d all the old versions for credit against the new versions but the vendors never want the old boxes back. Come end of year, out they go at half price. That’s half retail price. That’s 100 percent profit, might be even more. Can you have more than 100 percent profit? If you can, don’t tell our accountant. Or the tax man.
 
Before you go off with the idea that all we do is dump a load of broken junk at this time of year, let me assure you that we also unload a bunch of brand-new never-been- opened junk as well.
 
These are the gadgets that nobody will ever own up to ordering in the first place, and nobody has been able to sell any of them to even the dumbest punters all year. That was before they all went into the stocktake sale bargain bin.
 
No problem selling those USB laptoplights at half-price now. Particularly after we strategically marked them up another 60 percent before we cut the price in half.
 
Memo to self: order another carton of those suckers for next year’s stocktake sale, along with a couple of pallets of 16MB memory sticks. Even the foreign minister couldn’t resist those, so don’t believe the stories about our politicians not being up with technology. We don’t mind if he wants to call them message sticks as long he buys them by the carton for his friends in Iraq.
 
Good luck with your own end of year stocktake sale. Don’t be frightened off by the David Jones crowd and don’t forget to use the “all sales are final” and “o warranty implied or assumed or inferred” stickers.
 
Gotta go! Customers waiting!

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