Size Matters !

When you browse through the rocks listed here for sale, you only see a few rocks that are bigger than five or six pounds. There’s a reason for that … and the reason is not that I don’t have bigger rocks. I DO have bigger rocks! Check out these that I managed to get loaded into my truck.

Got Wood?

The reason is shipping.

I bless USPS for flat rate shipping every day. Have you ever asked why it is that Walmart can sell a forty-pound bag of dog food with “free shipping”? Predatory capitalism makes it possible for Walmart, Amazon, and Wayfair to shift the cost of shipping to us little guys. We don’t have oligopoly power over the cost of shipping. This is why I have a “thing” about always charging for shipping. It’s my way of making people aware that the cost of shipping is a major obstacle. Back at my previous store – a victim of predatory capitalism - the vulture capitalists who own the site now are trying hard to force sellers to offer “free shipping”. They’re not helping us “craft sellers” lower shipping costs. They only want us to add the cost of shipping to the price – so it's hidden from you. In other words, they think you’re stupid.

Here’s a rock that I left at the old family home.

I think this rock weighs more than several tons. I’m not sure what kind of agate it is, but I am sure that it’s solid agate. I tried for years to figure out a way to get it moved down to where I live now. I could never come up with a practical (i.e., “affordable”) way to do it. My dad – according to my mother – moved it in a regular pickup by himself. I wasn’t there and when I asked her about it, my mother was not remembering a lot of things correctly anymore. But my dad was amazing. I believe he really could have done it.

(Just so you know where my values are, I was offered two hundred dollars for it and the prospective buyer said he would move it. I declined the offer. I preferred not to get anything for it rather than see it go for a lowball price. I’m not just trying to scrape together a few dollars.)

A couple of the rocks I now have listed are fairly large, but they still fit inside a USPS “medium” flat rate box. My bigger ones won’t. To get most of my really big ones, we would need heavy equipment. That’s how I got them moved to my property. But I also have a few that are “medium large” and could be shipped. Here’s a piece of “medium large” petrified wood, for example. I haven’t weighed it. (I don’t have a scale big enough.) But I’m guessing over 100 pounds. I have big chunks that size of other agate too.

I bought a hammer drill the other day. A solution that could work is to simply hammer these big ones into pieces that I can list and sell!