While I get the joke, the question is accurate.

If I had $1000 and bought 50 cords of wood at $50/cord, and could only sell then for $40/cord, I'm left with $800. I took a $200 loss, but I'm hardly broke.

I'd go so far as to argue that this is a common occurrence in business when they haven't identified scalable marketing channels. Often you have to spend at a loss to gather data, optimize your efforts, and THEN hopefully make a profit.

So if I can take that remaining $800, optimize my efforts, and sell them for $51/cord moving forward (assuming no further optimizations), it will take me a little bit to earn my initial cash back, but I'm in essence printing money at that point.

I took it to mean, that they had to buy more to cut costs, fuel (less trips), economies of scale etc. Your way is interesting!

Heh, well, I'm a marketer, so that model is the basis of my job. It is very rare to be profitable right off the bat. A lot of times you hear all the success stories on how a company hit viral growth, but what you don't always hear are how many of their strategies and tactics bombed and were tossed.

It's not brilliantly told, and not great material but, yes, that's the joke.