I had this experience recently. I woman came to me and offered me her old beading stock at cost-less as she had no use for it. I went to look at the beads, where she again assured me of a good price. Under this understanding I took a lot of the beads. My mother (and business partner) and I then spent many hours inventorying and counting all these beads, as they were priced individually so as too work out the price of all this stuff. This we did and let me tell you the amount was not small.
Yesterday afternoon we went back there to discuss the final price and to look at the remainder of the beads which had just arrived. First I spend an hour picking what I want from her remaining beads, mostly some crystals and semi-precious stones. Then we sat down to discuss money.
Well, she announces, she will give us the cost price of 50% off but she needs to pay the taxman the VAT so she proceeds to add this to the price. So now she wants us to pay over the cost price when she offered us less! We were not amused, that had not been the deal.
Well a spate of very hard haggling followed. She wanted to charge us no less than cost and she was then going to make us pay full price on the stuff we had looked at that day. We insisted we wanted the cost less 15% that we had been offered originally. We had actually refused and were starting to arrange bringing her stuff back before she relented and gave us our price. She also let us have the remaining beads at cost. So in the end we did well but neither my mother nor I were impressed with her just changing her mind like that when she had offered something else!
I don't know if she had just gotten greedy or if she was feeling pressure from her own business partners but the experience was not cool. - Moral of the story NEVER believe what people say, especially over money dealings.
On a more positive note tomorrow is our next show to be held at the Fat Olive Market in Lammermoor. Please see my website for the address and directions from Johannesburg. This week has seen me frantically busy. After the last show I decided that our show stand really wasn't working, it was all flat and from a distance you really couldn't see what we are selling, so we have made a load of changes that I hope will make things a lot better, hopefully it will translate into sales. But it has resulted in me spending long hours this week over a sewing machine, making new table covers and overlays and throws . The sewing machine was so unused to this heavy workload that I managed to break a needle this morning, but its done, ill take a picture to show y'all next week.
Here is a picture of one of the many designs that will be on display at the market on Saturday
Cheers
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