Second Hand Rose, Buttons and Maths!

Last autumn I was at home wondering for the millionth time why there was always too much month and not enough money, and how with Christmas approaching a single mum with two kids was ever going to afford a turkey, let alone the enormous lists, stuck to the fridge, written to Santa which were getting bigger by the day.

The phone rang and it was Rose,  "erm.......Hi are you ok love....I have done something and I wondered if you could help me out?"  A phone call that starts like this is always entertaining as you never know what you are going to get yourself involved in, so I settled down on the sofa to have a chat and find out what my barmy ex mother in law had got herself into this time.


Rose had decided that "Memory Bears" were the future.  This was going to make her a LOT of money. (For any one unfamiliar with memory bears, they are teddy bears made out of old clothes from your loved ones.  They are really popular with parents and look something like this.)  As usual she threw herself into this project with gusto, making amazing teddy bears in all shapes and sizes, (rabbits as well now I think about it).


However, she did not have enough black buttons for the eyes, so had been looking round for a source of cheap black buttons. She ended up in a place that deals in bankrupt stock and found in a corner some buttons.  Careful enquiries established that they had been there a good few years and had been stripped out of a bankrupt haberdasher and no one really knew what to do with them.  After pausing for about a millisecond,  Rose decided that here was yet another opportunity to make money, so bought the whole damn lot!

Rose: "Well love, the thing is I have bought some buttons "

40Something: "Rose why on earth are you ringing me up to tell me you have bought some buttons? Your always using buttons?"

Rose: "Well there might be a few more than I can actually deal with"

I gave this some thought,  "how many buttons are we talking about?"

Turns out Rose had stumbled across a complete haberdashers stock and bought the lot. There were 8 crates of vintage buttons. Each crate held 96 tubes, and some tubes held upwards of 600 buttons! The average contents per tube was 500 buttons! So:96 tubes x 500 buttons = 48,000. 48,000 buttons X 8 crates = 384,000 plus some extra ones! (Bubble worked this out!).

I asked Rose how she thought she was going to sell all these buttons and discovered the flaw in Roses plan.  Rose had decided to put them on ebay, in small lots and really cash in this time.  However she was only allowed 100 listings in a month, and obviously selling buttons in bags of 20 or 30, still left her with an awful lot of buttons! Sitting in crates - in her kitchen - that everyone fell over.  Even my abysmal maths worked out that she would have 19,000 lots to sell and if she could only sell 100 lots a month, would take her at least 15 years!  Assuming she sold all of the lots every month! And....considering she is in her late 70's she would be more than 100 years old by the time she had sold them all!

Rose wondered if I had any spare listings on ebay that she could bung a few on.  I agreed to take a crate and said I would see what I could do......

To be continued.....

Thanks for reading






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