TCS: For Want of Hulls

With the changes that have come to Molden Heath and the deluge of new residents into the area, sales at my store have changed and stressed my buying habits. The lease of my Jump Freighter could not have come at a better time. I am finding myself hard pressed to keep up and balance what I need to add or expand upon.

A moment about my life. I know that most will assume I do not have one. However, sometimes  I open the cellar door and climb from the basement into the light (although I prefer darkness being my natural habitat). I'm a daily Eve player, but I am not able to play many hours each day due to my work schedule. I work 12 hour days and on the days that I work back to back I have a 4 hour window between getting home from work (if I am on time) and going to bed. On those days I cram the store in. What I have started to do is I buy items on one day and I move them or ship them down. This allows me to post them the next day during my next block of time. It keeps me only a day or two behind. For the most part this is not a big deal. With hulls, it becomes a more tricky subject.

TCS does not create infinite profit just because it is a market. Most of what I see in my wallet is simply the re-liquidation of what I purchased  A small amount on top of that is the profit the store makes. For modules this is not a big deal. I can buy a stack of ten or twenty to last me through a few days. With hulls, when there are buying frenzies, I can only replace until the profit increases enough to expand.

The sudden changes to the area have left me needing to move more and more hulls into the market to feed the sudden and unexpected demand. I find gaps in my market frustrating  In these moments I have to accept my humanity. It is rather irritating. Hulls are already the area that I am least competitive.

Or, I should say, T1 hulls are.

I have noticed that T2 hulls tend to be over priced on the local market if they are there at all. While it is only in ones and twos I am trying to dribble down a selection of T2 frigate hulls because that is what I can currently afford. CovOps, Assault Frigates, Interceptors, and Stealth Bombers are my main choices right now. They tend to sell quickly and I can normally undercut high sec by a nice margin. Often, because I attempt to stock all four racial variants  I have the market to myself in this area.

I have also had my first unhappy customer. Normally  I'm called an idiot for not setting my prices higher. Sometimes there are complaints when I am not the lowest price. I, as always, point out that I am working off of my Jita prices. So, the person that I do not know but is known well enough to the area to be in my social channels who has spent the last several days commenting about what shit my store is was an unpleasant addition to my life.

Somehow (ignoring him) I managed to struggle through and climb out of my darkness to continue to click "buy" in Jita. I've been chasing down members of R1FTA and harassing other frigate pilots asking them "what do you need?" and "what do you want?" I never thought that it would be so hard to get people to tell me what they'd like to have around but it is much harder than I expected. I feel like an attention whore as I chase people down almost begging them to talk to me and tell me what will make their life easier. I often get, "don't know" or "later" or just silence.

I just try to remind myself that working with people is not always the most straight forward of tasks and I collect the information as I can.

In other news:

With TCS net value at around 12B (only 300m liquid at this time) I decided to give myself my first repayment for 250m. I'm keeping the repayments all documented. I'm not sure what I will do once TCS is fully in the black. I'll figure that out once I get there. Maybe I will start to write myself a paycheck?