Selling The Wrong Thing

Yes, it may be stupid to complain, since they are actually buying, but... really!

After all those hours of work, all the TLC, honing the skills... wasted? I'm referring to two-plus years of lapidary, selecting the stones, sawing, shaping, polishing, mounting, and finally stringing on a chain to sell as a necklace. Some get rejected by the committee, very properly, for using the wrong gauge of metal, a less than ideal example of wrapping, a bad job. I get that. Make corrections. Resubmit.

Then I get a call from the club President. Somebody wants to buy one! Yay! Well, not exactly. How about if he just buys the (really, really) cheap necklace it's strung from because he's really just looking for one in that color, and leaves the rest behind? Oh yeah, he'll pay full price, but nevermind the beautiful stone, we can keep that, put it back on sale with a new (really, really) cheap necklace.

OK, a sale is a sale, I still get my money. It's just the appreciation of my work that's missing. It chafes.

A few weeks later I get another call: would I sell just the (really, really) chain from another necklace, and if so, for how much? Again, I can restring the pendant, keep it in the shop to resell.

Dang!

Oh, all right. Quick calculation: about $.45 of factory preformed unidentifiable metal chain; two jump rings, albeit hand made, about $.03; one lobster claw fastener, I forget how much but surely not over $.30 each. They're tiny, so maybe just half that. Insult brings the cost up to $10, take it or leave it.

They take it.

Wasn't it P.T. Barnum who said something memorable about the stupidity of the consumer? I checked in the club store the other day because I'm doing a project in sterling and was looking for a quick necklace to hang it on, since we can only get sterling prices if all metal parts of the item are sterling. I don't do that level of work yet.  We sell sterling necklaces for as little as $10.00 each! But hey, if you want to pay the same price for a piece of crap, who am I to argue? Still, I do wish the hard work would be considered worth something. I'm really selling the wrong thing.

I got another of those calls today.