For the last five or six days I’ve been almost completely away from the computer and anything eBay related due to personal reasons. Today, when I finally sat down to begin catching up with email, I found several readers had written asking basically the same question about the $1000 A Month Thrift Store Challenge.

“How many hours did I invest in the project and what did that convert to in terms of an hourly wage or dollars an hour earned?”

The answer was - I had absolutely no idea. I haven’t worked on an hourly wage basis since I had a part-time job while going to college forty years ago, so I don’t think that way. More importantly, I don’t believe thinking in terms of “dollars an hour” is a good way for someone who is self employed to measure their success or failure.

Many people who started what are now extremely successful businesses worked for one or two years, or even longer, without the business actually making a profit. If they had measured success or failure in terms of how many dollars and hour they were making, most would have quit long before the business became profitable and successful. Rather, they set goals of where they wanted the business to be at the end of six months, one year, five years, and judged their success by whether they met those goals.

Granted, most people looking at eBay as either a full-time, or a part-time, income source, don’t have the financial resources to go anywhere near that long without seeing some profit. They are looking for something that will produce a change in their financial life beginning in the short term. I understand that, and there is nothing wrong with that.

However, for many people, real success isn’t measured as much in dollars as it is in other things. It may be time to spend with their family or friends; time to spend on favorite recreational pastimes; having the resources to contribute to the welfare of others in some way; etc. People’s chance of attaining success, however they define it, is greatly increased when they step away for the hourly wage mentality, and begin focusing on goals they have set for themselves and their business.

I also believe that, while they may not realize it, when someone thinks in terms of “dollars an hour”, they can be setting unconscious ceilings on how successful they become.

The original Challenge was meant as a way to show readers that it was possible to pull a $1000 a month net profit from thrift store purchases - nothing more. Attempting to convert that profit to an hourly rate doesn’t present a fair picture, simply because unless I devoted a set number of hours to the project, there are no constant factors involved. Only variables. Done three months in a row might produce a $15 an hour profit one month, a $30 an hour return the next, and a $100 an hours the third month. That’s why it’s more important to look at results, no matter how you interpret them, based on a longer term scenario - several months or a year.

Now, with all that said, based upon how long it normally takes normally make the rounds of the thrift shops in town, how long it takes me to photograph or scan most items and write an ad, along with time spent packing, etc. I would estimate I probably had somewhere between 25 and 30 hours invested in the January Challenge. That would work out to approximately $30 an hour.

$30 an hour may sound good to some. It may sound bad to others. And, in the end, it really doesn’t mean much. If I’d invested half as much time in the Challenge, would the return still have been $30/hour? Probably not. If I invested the same amount of time the previous month would by return have been $30/hour? Very unlikely. Neither is it likely that investing twice as much time in the Challenge would have doubled my profits as would have been the case if I held a job paying $30/hour.

Selling on eBay is just not a “dollar an hour” job. People who find it necessary to measure their success by an hourly rate, will find they have much stress in their lives, if they simply pick up the want-ads or visit the local employment agency and get a 9 to 5 job that pays them an hourly wage equal to what they feel they must have.

Popularity: 4% [?]