your_grammars_bad

My local city in CA has a food truck fest every week in a public spot, a "community event". ~10 food trucks, decent crowd. Just an idea, maybe persuade some HOA's or other residences to host a "dinner comes to you" night. Parents might be thrilled.

Since everyone here is already a member, you can check out REI's publicly available financial docs. (Fun fact: you can also see what Jerry makes).

As examples, Blerta and Shmerta work for REI. Blerta betters herself by increasing her product knowledge, specifically, boots. Shmerta only cares about Fallout 4, but she has one of those persuasive personalities that hustles memberships like they were goddam french fries. So Blerta books boots on average 5 pairs of boots/day, while Shmerta superbly sells 5 memberships/day.

Now, maths. Boots retail for $100, but only cost $56 (a 76% markup! pg. 4 Net Sales vs. Cost of Sales). Though after labor/advertising/all overhead, Blerta brings in just 2% of that (pg. 4 – Comprehensive Income divided by Net Sales). So Blerta's boots makes $10/day in comprehensive income.

Shmerta's sales are calculated differently, since memberships are just pieces of paper. At $20/membership, Shmerta's sales makes $100/day in comprehensive income

Why are they calculated differently? Because boots require shipping, storing, and showing. Some don't sell (ugly, bad fit, etc.) which lowers profit, and requires advertising, and experts to know which ones to buy for REI, etc. Comprehensive Income from physical goods was $44mm in 2014 (pg. 4), or 2% of sales. So for every $100 of sales at REI, they only walk away with ~$2.

Memberships, however, require no infrastructure, except some giant software database that the store is already using. They always fit, cannot be refunded, require no shipping, storing, or showing. They do require dividends to be distributed, but that comes out of all sales, and is a fixed expense. Theres a bonus though – did you use your REI dividend in 2014? Because $31.5mm of dividends went unused in 2014 (pg. 9). So in addition to the $18mm from newly issued memberships (pg. 6), and the increased loyalty sales of a membership program (pg. 9, also), memberships generated $31.5mm of uncollected dividends (175% in addition to the membership sale itself!), for a total Comprehensive Income from memberships of $49.5mm of free money in 2014. So for every $100 of memberships sold, REI walks away with ~$275. Remember, no actual good was sold.

On Blerta's day off, the store continued to sell roughly 5 pairs of boots/day/sales rep (maybe 4.5), but the difference was hardly noticeable when her manager looked at the store's bottom line that month. Shmerta, however, was missed like the goddam ice cream truck at a park in summer on her days off. Why?

Final score:
Blerta's Boots – ~$10/day
Shmerta's Sales – ~$275/day

Edit: some maths & words

I believe those islands are already completed, which is why you haven't heard about them for awhile.

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