There Really is NO "Free Lunch"

I sure hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, ladies and gentlemen, but… Drum roll please…..

There Really is No Free Lunch!

 I’m so sorry to break it to you like this, fellow quilters, I speak the truth. Lunch isn’t free.

“Say it ain’t so, Mama,” weeps the little lad. “Say it ain’t so.” Well, you might say that it is not true, but the fact is, that no lunch is free.

What prompts this discussion about food? You ask. Well, I’m not really speaking about food here, friends. I’m talking about pricing of fabric and shipping and everything else in life.

We get asked regularly, “I thought you had free shipping at $50” or “When will you give us free shipping?” Or “Can I get a discount because I’m buying to give it away?” Or, “do you have anything marked down?”

Well, my dearest friends who love to save money  (and don’t we all? ) someone has to pay for our habits/hobbies and loves. And we here at Quilted Twins are doing our very best to help you to save a fortune! I mean it. A real fortune. We want us all to be able to continue to enjoy our love of fabrics!

However, we need to break this down.

I’ve studied the top few websites out there, and the ones that offer free shipping start at a minimum order of either $70 or $100. However, we don’t offer it at all. We offer a flat $7, no matter if you order 1 yard of fabric or 500 yards of fabric. It was the simplest and easiest method for us, we found, and by far the best for you!

So, let’s break it down.

Most other sites start at their name brand fabrics at $10.50 per yard. The lowest one that I saw quickly with name brand fabric in the $10 range required a $70 order to get free shipping.

 So let’s do the math. You have to buy 7 yards of $10.50 fabric to get your fabric shipped free. So, that’s 7 x $10.50 = 73.50  “out the door.”

At QuiltedTwins, the same fabric would be $5.99 per yard. So 7 yards x 5.99 = 41.93 plus $7 shipping = $48.93, a savings of $24.57. WOWsers… That’s a lot of money to save, even though you paid shipping.

I’m hoping that this shows you the breakdown of buying from us over “the big guys”.

 Now, if we are forced to “give” free shipping, we’d have to up our price at least $1.50 to $2 per yard in order to be able to “give” free shipping, since most people order 10 yards or less. Even a small panel generally costs us in the $4 range, and upwards of $4.50 for shipping by the time you count that we have to buy the gray Tyvek bag. This, of course, isn’t adding up labor, ink or any overhead costs. By overhead, I mean building rental, shortages, cost of receiving a payment, cost of using a shipping service, the a/c and heat in our building, the tape to tape your package together or anything else at all, plus labor, of course.

So far, no one has offered to come and work for free. (Well, maybe one person.) Even those who say they’ll work for fabric are working for money, because money was used to buy the fabric. (No one works for fabric here, but if they were, it’s still costing us money to buy that fabric.)

 No one has donated the tape. No one donates the plastic Tyvek bags. Certainly the electric company has to get paid and our vehicles operate on fuel, which has to be purchased.

Free shipping isn’t free. You are paying for it somewhere else.

By now you can see that “giving you free shipping” isn’t really a gift. It’s something you’ve bought with your purchase. Due to our low pricing structure, we can’t give it away, because we never took it from you in the first place.

So, even Amazon, which says “FREE SHIPPING,” Should re-word that to say, “Shipping included if you have PRIME,” because PRIME isn’t free! You pay for it each year! In fact, the last time I checked it was up to $120 or more per year. (By the way, in case you didn’t know, PRIME has a deal with the post office to pay them ONLY $1 per package to deliver your package, so lest you think the post office has a great deal with them, they do NOT!)  And, yes, I do have PRIME, because 5 of us are sharing one account. I figure between all of us, we come close to making it a break even proposition. Plus, in this business, there are lots of times that I need something super fast, and having it pre-paid is advantageous for this business!

But, I just needed to remind us all that there really is NO free lunch.

Even if you got it free, it was paid for somewhere by someone, somehow.

Most likely you paid for it, with something else you did or bought. Sometimes there is a benevolent benefactor who donates lots of money so someone else can get something “for free.” That is wonderful and usually greatly appreciated, but the benefactor had to cough up the cash somehow, some way to pay for that widget or service.

So the next time you think about saying, “Rachael, you REALLY should consider offering FREE shipping,” please realize that that “free shipping” will mean that the prices have to go up. Because, as I started out this blog post, “There really is no free lunch!” This is a business and because it is, we must operate in the black. If we operate in the red, we go under and there is no fabric at all, much less anything else at all!

 Thanks for listening! We did need to explain how “NOT free” most FREE shipping is.

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

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