'best' Way Of Dealing With One's Purchasing 'mistakes'?

[A Smug Dill]

The 222nd and 223rd different commercially available inks, being Diamine (Cult Pens Exclusive) Iridescink Christine and Philip, just arrived to join my remaining collection today. My ink cupboard space is way past being at capacity, and there are three more inks on order yet to arrive (which could take a while).

 

Obviously, out of the eleven or so litres of ink, there are some colours that in all likelihood I wouldn't use again — and, in some cases, never really used beyond superficial testing (and found I wasn't particularly impressed or taken by them).

 

What's the most rational and reasonable way of dealing with that? Pour them down the toilet (and risk staining the porcelain) or drain and keep the bottles, which I have to clean, and cut my "losses"? Throw them still mostly full and completely sealed out with the garbage? Try to sell already open and slightly used bottles on a platform such as eBay, and risk not recouping the cost in fees and open myself up to unwarranted claims of "item not as described" because someone may want to get the items effectively free (and shipped to them at my expense)? Arrange to give them away as "PIFs" or whatever, because supposedly someone will value them (more than I do) even though that's just going to add to my expense (never mind my "budget" for the hobby) and cost me more than just throwing them out, even though for all intents and purposes I don't know any of the would-be recipients from Adam, so to speak?

 

While I'm not particularly given to doing business analysis for others (unless I'm on their corporate payroll), I see enough others here seeming to think crowd-sourced business analysis (or group-think) in "a thing"; and then others who decry just throwing out unwanted products because someone else may enjoy and/or value them but redistribution will come at someone's cost. I struggled enough to get an Australia-wide giveaway initiative going when the cost of participation is just postage, and have personally put in about $200 worth of products into it to stir up interest and get it going.

 

(Never mind how much or how little I can afford to spend; redistribution of "wealth" outside of the "hobby" is not even remotely the objective.)

 

What would you do? Would you "throw badgood money after goodbad" in the name of supposed benefit to some faceless fellow hobbyists (but nevertheless strangers) you don't know from a bar of soap, as a consequence of your retail purchasing mistakes? Or throw the unwanted products in the garbage and chalk it up to experience while telling others you did what a rational consumer would do?

 

Right now I'm leaning towards pouring the three half-bottles of Parker Penman (Ebony, Emerald and Ruby) ink down the drain and "recycling" the bottles — which are squat and space-inefficient — with my empty wine and detergent bottles. Domestic postage in Australia costs a minimum of A$8.30, for which I could tack on at least two 30ml bottles of Diamine inks I haven't tried, on my next order from Cult Pens in the UK.

 

I cannot even begin to think about what I'm going to do with the thousands of dollars "worth" of unopened NOS pens, some of which are "irreplaceable" but obviously haven't been delivering any value to me as a consumer and fountain pen user.

 

You can call this a symptom of my mid-life crisis on occasion of my forty-something-th birthday.

 

<EDIT>

Obviously I wasn't even managing the simple tasks of thinking and expressing myself clearly any more.

Edited August 29, 2019 by A Smug Dill

[silverlifter]

Do you not have a pen meetup near you where you could distribute them without the hassle of dealing with Australia Post?

 

If not, you could approach a local school and see if anyone there is interested in them for their classes. Or a community art group. That sort of thing.

[vicpen123]

_{Take a stall at the Melbourne Pen Show on 10 November.}

 

_{Spread them out, price them realistically and see what happens.}

 

_{I'll be there at 9.00 to look at the pens but not interested in inks.}

[A Smug Dill]

There is no (semi-?) regular fountain pen hobbyist group meet-up in Sydney, as far as I'm aware. Caveat: I don't do Facebook, so I have no idea what the Fountain Pens Oceania group is up to, despite it being purported a "public group" whose discussions are nevertheless closed to anonymous viewing without a registered user logging in.

 

Pen Shows: I gave the Sydney Pen Show this weekend just past a miss because, as a commercial venture (in that it sells tickets for admittance to the event, and were obviously keen to sell advance tickets months ahead), it did a ****-poor job of advertising what the value on offer was. Some posts were put up piecemeal in August about who and/or which businesses would be setting up stalls, but by that stage I've lost interest and dealt with the most pressing problems (an Pelikan 18K gold nib that needed customisation work, etc.) myself in sheer bloody-mindedness, since I wasn't sure $100 (2x $20 for entry tickets + whatever the fee a local nibmeister would charge, if one turned up at all) would be the extent of my expense, and by the end of July I'd already made other plans for that weekend.

[vicpen123]

It's only a 10 hour drive to Melbourne and the pen show is organised by pen enthusiasts.

 

What do you have to lose?

 

And there are pen people like me who would appreciate new blood.

[azbobcat]

  On 8/28/2019 at 6:40 AM, A Smug Dill said:

The 222nd and 223rd different commercially available inks, being Diamine (Cult Pens Exclusive) Iridescink Christine and Philip, just arrived to join my remaining collection today. My ink cupboard space is way past being a capacity, and there are three more inks on order yet to arrive (which could take a while).

 

Obviously, out of the eleven or so litres of ink, there are some colours that in all likelihood I wouldn't use again — and, in some cases, never really used beyond superficial testing (and found I wasn't particularly impressed or taken by them).

 

What's the most rational and reasonable way of dealing with that? Pour them down the toilet (and risk staining the porcelain) or drain and keep the bottles, which I have to clean, and cut my "losses"? Throw them still mostly full and completely sealed out with the garbage? Try to sell already open and slightly used bottles on a platform such as eBay, and risk not recouping the cost in fees and open myself up to unwarranted claims of "item not as described" because someone may want to get the items effectively free (and shipped to them at my expense)? Arrange to give them away as "PIFs" or whatever, because supposedly someone will value them (more than I do) even though that's just going to add to my expense (never mind my "budget" for the hobby) and cost me more than just throwing them out, even though for all intents and purposes I don't know any of the would-be recipients from Adam, so to speak?

 

While I'm not particularly given to doing business analysis for others (unless I'm on their corporate payroll), I see enough others here seeming to think crowd-sourced business analysis (or group-think) in "a thing"; and then others who decry just throwing out unwanted products because someone else may enjoy and/or value them but redistribution will come at someone's cost. I struggled enough to get an Australia-wide giveaway initiative going when the cost of participation is just postage, and have personally put in about $200 worth of products into it to stir up interest and get it going.

 

(Never mind how much or how little I can afford to spend; redistribution of "wealth" outside of the "hobby" is not even remotely the objective.)

 

What would you do? Would you "throw bad money after good" in the name of supposed benefit to some faceless fellow hobbyists (but nevertheless strangers) you don't know from a bar of soap, as a consequence of your retail purchasing mistakes? Or throw the unwanted products in the garbage and chalk it up to experience while telling others you did what a rational consumer would do?

 

Right now I'm leaning towards pouring the three half-bottles of Parker Penman (Ebony, Emerald and Ruby) ink down the drain and "recycling" the bottles — which are squat and space-inefficient — with my empty wine and detergent bottles. Domestic postage in Australia costs a minimum of A$8.30, for which I could tack on at least two 30ml bottles of Diamine inks I haven't tried, on my next order from Cult Pens in the UK.

 

I cannot even begin to think about what I'm going to do with the thousands of dollars "worth" of unopened NOS pens, some of which are "irreplaceable" but obviously haven't been delivering any value to me as a consumer and fountain pen user.

 

You can call this a symptom of my mid-life crisis on occasion of my forty-something-th birthday.

 

IF you simply don't want the ink advertise you are willing to give it away for FREE... either IN PERSON, or via post IF *they* are are willy to pay for the postage. Then you are out of ZERO money, AND you have given the ink to someone who will give it a good home.

Edited August 28, 2019 by azbobcat

[ethernautrix]

Out of whimsy, leave a bottle here and there around your city, wherever you happen to be. Let the fates decide what happens to your unbeloved inks.

[Uncial]

How do you return ink on the basis of 'not as described'?

[carlos.q]

  On 8/28/2019 at 8:10 AM, azbobcat said:

IF you simply don't want the ink advertise you are willing to give it away for FREE... either IN PERSON, or via post IF *they* are are willy to pay for the postage. Then you are out of ZERO money, AND you have given the ink to someone who will give it a good home.

 

This seems to be a very sensible approach.

[txomsy]

I concur, a sensible approach would be to set up a PIF where the receiver pays for the cost of mailing. That, certainly, is better than throwing it all away. And Parker Penman inks were really attractive, at least Ruby, which is one of my preferred reds. So, maybe someone else will be interested (don't look at me, I already have too much ink and live way too far).

 

Swapping them for other inks you may like is a second option. You pay postage but get another ink sample in return. You may ask if there is anybody nearby who may be interested.

[A Smug Dill]

  On 8/28/2019 at 10:13 AM, txomsy said:

I concur, a sensible approach would be to set up a PIF where the receiver pays for the cost of mailing.

Well, I set up a PIF for (one single lot of) three brand new Muji notebooks that I reviewed favourably, and I offered to send them to any Australian forum member at my expense. No takers in the sixteen-day period during which the offer was open.

 

Later, I set up a PIF for a brand new Nemosine Singularity demonstrator pen (which I had many of, because I liked them so much, and wrote favourably about the model in several posts on FPN) that nobody could buy from a retailer any more even if they wanted to, on condition that they pay for tracked postage to wherever they want me to send it. I also noted that postage to a delivery address in Australia is cheaper than what I paid for the pen in the first place. There was basically no interest, and it ended up going to a fellow member with whom I've been having private conversations on FPN all along, and her position was that she'd take it if nobody else wanted it; I had to prompt her to put a post in that PIF thread before the giveaway time-frame expired.

 

So, the whole PIF thing didn't work for brand new products with good performance characteristics, at least in my experience. I'm not inclined to think a half-bottle of ink will attract more interest and be worth my while putting it up as a giveaway. Sometimes it felt as if I have to make more than trivial effort and actually do work to convince others to take the benefit, and there's just no reason why that's preferable (in a rational way) to cut my losses and be rid of the items. Do people imagine I actually benefit from giving things away? (For the avoidance of doubt, no, I don't find giving stuff "to a good home" psychologically rewarding, but if the exercise incurs nil cost for me yet presumably delivers positive benefit to someone else, I'm open to it.)

 

I'll consider leaving the ink bottles somewhere where it couldn't be considered littering, or lead investigators to my doorstep suspecting it's some sort of terrorist threat.

Edited August 28, 2019 by A Smug Dill

[Honeybadgers]

  On 8/28/2019 at 6:53 AM, silverlifter said:

Do you not have a pen meetup near you where you could distribute them without the hassle of dealing with Australia Post?

 

If not, you could approach a local school and see if anyone there is interested in them for their classes. Or a community art group. That sort of thing.

 

Give it away in ink samples whenever you correspond with or sell a pen to someone

[MissCellany]

I have a couple of friends who I've introduced to the hobby, but have significant budget restraints of their own. Whenever I have an ink that I don't like, but is still perfectly serviceable, I just give it to either of them.

[inkstainedruth]

  On 8/28/2019 at 9:16 AM, Uncial said:

How do you return ink on the basis of 'not as described'?

 

I was wondering the same thing.... As long as it's listed as being opened/partially used, is packaged so that any potential links could be contained (i.e., inside a sealed container) and to prevent breakage in transit, and doesn't have any SITB in it it, there isn't, as far as I can see, any leg for a potential buyer to stand on to make such a claim.

But I agree with other posters -- give them away or sell them at a pen show (frankly, for someone who has flat out said "I'm well within my rights to throw pens I don't like away, no matter the cost" in the past, I don't understand why you're being so squeamish about inks).

I gave away a nearly full bottle of ink that I couldn't stand to the guy who runs the mailing list for my local pen club because the color was so awful (Platinum Mix-Free Flame Red, which really looked just like Mercurochrome ). He's a math professor and I figured he could use it for grading; he then gave it away to someone else (and I live in dread fear that it will eventually wend its way back to me... . I've given away ink samples to other people in the club, and have gotten samples from other people. Yes, there will the cost of buying sample vials, but a pack of empty vials probably isn't going to cost any more than the bottle cost in the first place.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[ErrantSmudge]

  On 8/28/2019 at 10:39 AM, A Smug Dill said:

 

Well, I set up a PIF for (one single lot of) three brand new Muji notebooks that I reviewed favourably, and I offered to send them to any Australian forum member at my expense. No takers in the sixteen-day period during which the offer was open.

 

Later, I set up a PIF for a brand new Nemosine Singularity demonstrator pen [...] I also noted that postage to a delivery address in Australia is cheaper than what I paid for the pen in the first place. There was basically no interest [...]

 

So, the whole PIF thing didn't work for brand new products with good performance characteristics, at least in my experience.

 

I would note a few things: obviously, that two data points isn't really sufficient to draw the conclusion that PIFs are not effective. Also, I don't know the exact numbers involved, but even if there is a slight monetary advantage to be had by the recipient, that may not be enough to motivate responses. I think people like to think they are getting a good bargain, and there's some threshold you may have to cross before people will jump at it.

 

I've had great luck with the PIFs I've offered, but I've offered to pay the postage in response for a small token from the recipient, usually a letter from them with written samples of their favorite inks. That way I feel I've gotten something from my effort and expense, for something that's no big deal for the recipient.

 

ETA: I live in the USA, so obviously I have the advantage of a bigger population pool for in-country shipment.

Edited August 28, 2019 by ErrantSmudge

[PJohnP]

Personally, I've gifted folks with inks that I didn't like or need * and even posted them at my own expense to those folks. I'm not interested in "virtue-signaling" on this topic, I might add, but mention it to perhaps stimulate others to PIF more readily.

 

We do have a fair number of people on FPN who are, for a wide variety of reasons, not economically able to purchase inks with any great frequency, but read about inks daily that could be fun or delightful to write with for them. At the same time, we have folks who purchase inks in number and quantity, but find that some purchases simply do not work to their desires or satisfaction. Certainly, there are mechanisms for both groups to write or talk and share their inks.

 

There are a number of very good suggestions in this thread, ranging from distributing inks at pen shows through to setting up some kind of local pick up for others. No one suggestion is likely a "perfect" idea, perhaps limiting some to take action. "The perfect is the enemy of the good" is a useful refutation of that lack of ability to move forward.

 

We have a delightful community here at FPN - let's ponder how to make more useful suggestions, but more to the point, implement some of those suggestions.

 

 

 

John P.

 

 

* Clearly, none of us should move inks on that are contaminated or unsuitable for others to use... but disliking an ink for any reason isn't the same thing.

[eciton]

I had the same quandary. I ended up selling 'mystery boxes' of ink to people on a Facebook group. It went pretty smoothly but was a lot of logistical work and not exactly profitable. I did 14 boxes I think in the end. Writeup here: https://ukfountainpens.com/2019/06/28/why-and-how-i-just-sold-70-bottles-of-ink/

[A Smug Dill]

  On 8/28/2019 at 4:03 PM, ErrantSmudge said:

I would note a few things: obviously, that two data points isn't really sufficient to draw the conclusion that PIFs are not effective.

Sure, I've seen many examples of popular and "successful" PIFs, too. However, I'm not trying (to learn) to be a better salesman or evangelist, or construct better "campaigns"; I'm just giving away stuff as an alternative to sending it to the garbage dump.

 

  Quote

Also, I don't know the exact numbers involved, but even if there is a slight monetary advantage to be had by the recipient, that may not be enough to motivate responses. I think people like to think they are getting a good bargain, and there's some threshold you may have to cross before people will jump at it.

These aren't commercial transactions, though. I wasn't selling the notebooks, or Nemosine Singularity demonstrator, or ink samples I've given away in the past; what I was doing is offering something that the recipient wouldn't otherwise be easily able to get. (Muji doesn't do online/mail order in Australia; buying one or two Nemosine pens without paying expressly and dearly for international shipping from the US was nearly impossible, and the the Singularity was discontinued; and getting Sailor Kujukuri Coast inks into Australia by ordering from Japan proved more costly and difficult than I cared for, so I doubt many other Australians would try.) In a way that doesn't benefit me financially one bit, not that throwing the items out would be any more benefit to me.

 

Obviously, those brand new notebooks, the NOS pen and the ink samples are actually things I can put to "good" use myself if I tried, but then I already have several dozen of those notebooks and a few of those pens all brand new and "in storage". I liked the products, so I was trying to share the user experience; the "bargain" part (getting $5 worth of notebooks for no out-of-pocket expense, or for A$8.55 in postage a new pen that an Australian could not get on its own for less than A$20 from any retailer any time past or present) is not what I particularly cared to satisfy.

 

If that's not good enough, then it isn't rational for me to do more work, throw in more sweeteners, or otherwise make the PIF offers more attractive. Back into storage or into the bin they go.

 

  Quote

I've had great luck with the PIFs I've offered,

Luck?

 

  Quote

but I've offered to pay the postage in response for a small token from the recipient, usually a letter from them with written samples of their favorite inks. That way I feel I've gotten something from my effort and expense, for something that's no big deal for the recipient.

We obviously have different "drivers" and have very different sources of psychological reward.

 

At least I haven't seen any replies along the lines of, "If you've already spent twenty grand on pens and paraphernalia recently, you can afford to pay for postage to give some of your stash away," as if that's an avenue for me to buy more personal satisfaction; because it isn't, and therefore wouldn't be rational for me to do so. Obviously we don't and can't all agree on personal values or what is "right", and I wasn't spoiling for a fight to celebrate my birthday, so I just wanted a discussion (and some "guidance") on what is rational without undue regard for anyone's values including my own, because right now I'm not happy but not feeling detached enough to analyse it clinically.

 

  On 8/28/2019 at 6:03 PM, eciton said:

I had the same quandary. _...‹snip›... Writeup here: https://ukfountainpens.com/2019/06/28/why-and-how-i-just-sold-70-bottles-of-ink/

Thank you very much for that! I'll go have a read now.

 

<EDIT>

WOW. I have nothing but admiration for how you went about it. I have the bloody-mindedness but lack the discipline right now to follow suit, I'm afraid.

 

<EDIT>

Mistakes (of mine!) can't generally be completely undone, but there are usually remedies. However, "throwing good money after bad" is obviously not the rational approach, irrespective of whether it makes someone else (especially faceless strangers) happier or better off.

Edited August 29, 2019 by A Smug Dill

[DrDebG]

If you have the space, you might considered boxing them up and putting them away for a year, or two or three. A few years ago, I purchased a number of bottles of ink that I found at a pen show. I thought I might like them, but when I got them home, I found that I didn't like them all that much. Well, a few months ago, I reopened the box and have been trying the inks again. I have different pens that I had when I bought them, and I am finding that I really like a few of them. The others I am still not enamored with. I will probably find someone to give them away to.

[samfromat]

I once saw a local art store, they had one rack labeled as 'Samples and free stuff'. Inside it, they had free samples of paper, pencils, used pencils, used erasers, used pens etc. The employees working there could use this stuff for their work. Used ink bottles were used as test ink for dip pens or testing the quality of paper. They encouraged little children to try out these things that they normally wouldn't buy or would not be interested. It was good initiative. It was kind of fun too. They had a wall where they would put interesting things created by people. You could donate whatever stationery you want to give away and they would find use for it.

 

I don't find any store doing it in my current area. I don't know if your local art store would accept such things. But my point is, as long as you have that stuff which is perfectly usable ( its just that you don't have any use for it), you may find some use for it.