11:08 – April started out very fast for kit sales but after the first week things slowed down dramatically. We ended up with total revenue for April 2016 at about 92% of April 2015. Not horrendously bad, but not good. In talking with other small businessmen who do their selling on the Internet, it seems that despite rosy government claims things have been generally slowing down over the past year. I’d guess about 60% of the people I’ve talked to say things for them are noticeably slower, with maybe 30% saying they’re about the same, and 10% who are actually doing better in 2016 than for the same period in 2015.
Regardless, we keep plugging along building subassemblies and hoping that our traditional rush period from mid-July through mid-October will be heavy. The stuff we’re building for stock–small parts bags and similar subassemblies–have no shelf-life issues, so if we end up not needing them during the rush period this summer, we’ll have them for later. Today, we’re going to bottle some long shelf life chemicals. Which is most of them. I used to pull sample containers to test years later. I stopped doing that once I figured out which solutions had essentially unlimited shelf lives and which needed to be made up and bottled as late as possible before shipping. So we’ll make up the former ones early and leave the others as long as possible.