People romanticize businesses like this but there’s a reason you’re not posting the link. It only works when it’s for a small group of people who are in the know and refer trusted buyers.
It’s also trivial to set up any number of different online purchase options that would avoid all of the problems with this for a nearly trivial fee.
I guess I’ve spent enough time dealing with things like non-payment or doing work for trades that never arrive that I just don’t romanticize this stuff any more.
You are correct that I was a worried about an HN hug of orders for brass tacks.
> I guess I’ve spent enough time dealing with things like non-payment or doing work for trades that never arrive that I just don’t romanticize this stuff any more.
In this case there isn't much of a choice. When the last manufacture of brass tacks closed down, John bought the machinery and is the only place I know of to get proper shaker-style brass tacks in the US. I wanted the tacks, so I had no choice in the method of payment.
I understand your sentiment but it was perfectly normal to pump gas before paying in the U.S. for a very long time and still is in many places. In other cities it is unheard of. Restaurants we can still eat before paying, but not many other places still give consumers much trust.
I had a friend who worked at a gas station in high school. Filing police reports for people who filled up and left without paying was a standard part of operations.
This was in a nice area, too. Often people just forgot and drove away. They had recourse because they had security cameras and people had license plates. The cities where you’re forced to pay inside first probably have police departments that don’t respond to non-payment as gas stations.
If someone showed up with a gas can or something they were instructed to shut off the pump and make them come inside to pay. It wasn’t as much of an honor system as it seems if you’re not familiar with it.
You can’t have a pay-later business without an amount of non-payment, which has to be compensated by higher prices (which other customers shoulder).
These are all choices a vendor can make. Something like this usually lasts right up until the secret gets out to a wider audience where the people who don’t care about social norms have no problem abusing a system left wide open.
People who never experienced high-trust and customs societies cannot grasp why and how it works infinitely better than low-trust ones.
But granted, all it takes is a few determined bad faith actors to break high-trust, when they are not vehemently and swiftly rejected…
But we have created an environment where this kind of thing is unthinkable, not even because people won't do it, but because they will only create legal trouble for themselves if they try. So the modus operandi for your average citizen in Western societies in general and US in particular is to not get involved and leave it all to law enforcement.
This is why some things can’t be found/bought without hetting the right path/contacts.
Contrast with the typical restaurant.
Moreover, trespassers, in addition to pursuit, often get flagged in a shared « do not host » book file across hotel lines.
The business can just make less money than they would if everyone paid (which is, as you say, impossible). Costs and prices are linked in some markets, but it's not a natural law.
An interesting story behind those:
https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-20...
What you're insinuating is true, but more likely the reason they didn't post the link is that it's not relevant.
That's probably alien to HN and a lot of them may try to contact him, as if they have a possibility of becoming his customer, which they don't.
I know the other way around is basically the norm: how does one know the company, the seller, will actually provide the product after paying. But the prevailing culture, currently, is that companies in this regard are trustworthy and customers are not. It's a bit debatable but it makes sense.
Yes, I believe it does. These are highly specific brass tacks for making oval shaker boxes. There are very few manufactures of a proper #2 brass tack these days, so I would very much want to stay on the good side and any suppliers.
I think they said in their faq that twice they haven't been paid in 20 years or something like that. Their online "store" appears to be down right now–hopefully they are still in business.
edit: It appears John passed in 2023 :( https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-20...
Most people are not scammers and will pay simply because it's the right thing to do.If your margins are decent, you can just eat the loss to some scammers as the cost of doing business. Especially if there's no real resale market for your product.
With the "pay the bill later" it's entirely up to the recipient whether they decide to pay. Some will even just forget it with no ill intent.
While an e-commerce solution is not always needed, there’s a good chance that a very simple shop cart facility will convert more than an email link, for certain types of products.
Yep :)
Why do I want "interesting" ways to buy things? I want to be able to buy what I want quickly and reliably. I don't get the benefit of making me try to figure out how to buy something I want
Why wouldn't you appreciate getting out of the (often) dull (sometimes) frictionless select-order-pay-receive-use-store-forget-discard purchase experience?
Understandable view, but try thinking it from the producers point of view. They want to create an sell in the way that makes sense for themselves and their goals. There are all different types of people with all different types of goals, so it is really awesome when there is all different types of commerce going on. It isn't about eliminating something, but the freedom to make something and sell it on your terms.
It's only a matter of time before this seller falls victim to a scammer - once they're found. I used to work for a book publisher who started doing their own e-commerce, and at the time one of the payment methods was a "pay later" one that predated the internet ("acceptgiro"). It only took a few months (if that) after the first sites went live that someone placed an order for a few hundred euros worth of books and had it delivered at a storage unit address. We scrapped the pay later payment option for orders over a certain amount then, and I'm sure later on the pay later option was removed entirely in favor of pay in advance methods.
There's newer pay later schemes now (Klarna IIRC) but the risk and debt collection falls to this payment provider. Of course, they got in legal trouble recently because they're a loan / credit company but didn't present the user with the right legalese for that.
It's one of the earliest lessons you'll learn from starting a company. Another close one is to not waste time on failed sales and annoying customers, replacing them with new customers is usually more profitable and enjoyable.
Consider also that if you have a plumber, electrician, or some other tradesperson come to your house, you don't pay them until after they have done the work. You could choose not to pay them, but they have your address, and you'll never be able to do business with them again. On a small enough scale, this is all you need to prevent abuse.
Payment after receipt is very common in Switzerland, but fraud is presumably rare. Your name would probably go on the debtors register and that's the sort of bad credit history you don't want to have. At some point the police/debt collection is involved, they get sent to whatever the address is and so on. For the average person it's not worth burning your name and address for a free spokeshave.
There was a story posted on HN once about a business saving money by prepaying. Some guy was working for a restaurant and saved 70% (yes, over two thirds) on their meat by, instead of ordering each day and settling on net-30 as they had been doing and as is typical, calling up their meat vendor and committing to a certain minimum order every day and paying for it right then. Because cash flow is that important to some businesses. The vendor said they'd never had a customer so good before, and yet it wasn't such a big deal for the restaurant. (Yes, they tend to run on thin margins, well, now their margins are a little bit fatter and they can afford to have mispredicted their meat usage a little, and still come out ahead).
It's the same as Hetzner vs AWS. You buy AWS, you can ramp up and down your bill any time, but you're overpaying by a huge multiple (can even be 10x-100x). If you get your servers from any traditional provider that's updated their price in the last five years, they'll bill you monthly for your server, and there's a setup cost of approximately one month, and you can't scale up without a week latency or down without two months, but you get the same amount of server for an incredibly low price (if you're accustomed to AWS) which - if you're not running a workload as bursty as Amazon on Christmas Day - lets you overprovision enough to more than make up for the inflexibility.
I would immediately discard any website that makes me send an email to order.
I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to.
There are so many way to do commerce both on and offline and if you squint and look closely you'll find interesting people doing interesting things all around you.