u/pleasetowmyshit

This was in the basket that they were wheeling out from the back room as I walked in to look at everything but typewriters, already priced at three dollars and I wasn’t about to wait for it to get any cheaper so this little Underwood came home with me yesterday.

It is very seized up and rusted, but there are plenty of things on it that do work like the carriage and platen move freely and the space and shift are doing what they need to do. I don’t know why there’s another space bar shaped key up top, but it is frozen.

This thing is about twice the size and not much heavier than my Facit TP2. Pretty sure this was stored at one point with Christmas decorations because there’s a bunch of white gift wrapping yarn jumbled up throughout the insides.

I have a lot of work ahead of me if I want this to be able to type again, but that’s the whole point of rescuing these machines from the thrift stores, the estate auctions, and the yard sales. So they can be functional again.

Three of these were grocery orders, total was 57 items 92 units or something ridiculous like that. $1.40 in tips, 70 cents of extra earnings. Look, I'm not the paper route kid from that John Cusack movie, I don't want any of these at about two dollars an order. Better things to do with my life than trip over orders this silly.

Six orders and twelve miles, dozens of items, this would have to be at least double to consider, triple to accept. It popped up once more at $14.10 and I haven't seen it since. Which means someone took this for that much or maybe $15 at most if it blipped on my screen and I didn't see it.

I get it. If you're bad at math and/or car maintenance, $15 for 40 minutes of work seems like an okay amount of money. If you did that all day with no downtime for eight hours you'd bring in $180. Do that five days a week and it's $900, and match that energy all year long for a whole $46,800 for the year. But you'd have to put 40,000 miles on your car to do it. That's at least a set of brakes and tires all around, eight oil changes, a couple air filters, and assuming nothing else breaks, now your car is worth a lot less too, unless you were smart enough to buy something that was already a piece of hot garbage and have a couple more sleds as backups for when it's down and out.

Walmart should be ashamed of putting out offers like this. But they aren't.

Walmart knows people are desperate enough to take offers like this out of fear. People are struggling to pay rent, put food on the table, keep the water and electric going, have car insurance and a cell phone, and they know they have to hit their mark each day they work in order the keep above water. And when you're in that struggle, $15 for 40 minutes looks good enough, but it's hard on your body and on your vehicle.

Let it sit there. Let it cook. Don't grab the first thing that comes up without looking at the details. If it disappears right away, enjoy dodging that bullet. Somebody else will take that order and a hundred more just like it, and then their water pump will eat itself and they'll be out of the running. They might take that repair as a sign that they should choose orders more carefully, but more than likely it will just make them more desperate. When their transmission takes a nap and they're stuck in an apartment complex with two more orders to drop and that gets them deactivated, then maybe they will realize it.

Betcha can’t own just one.