About "Golden_Valley"

Welcome!

We're a Mom & Pop type shop working out of our home in northwestern Arizona - about 100 miles south (and a little east) of Las Vegas, Nevada. We're at that awkward age - a little too young for Social Security but too old to want to go to work for anyone else - and when our employment status changed a few years ago, we took the opportunity to move out here and start this business.

The "town" we live in, Golden Valley, is more a state of mind than an actual town or village and is sprawled out in a desert valley between two mighty dry mountain ranges. There are advantages and disadvantages to living anywhere; the advantages lured us out here and the disadvantages haven't driven us off... yet.

Our business philosophy is pretty simple:

Honesty, Communication and Service.

We aim for honesty - in our ads and in our communications - no distortions or evasions or tricky little added-on extra charges. And we shoot for communication at every step of the process - let folks know what's going on, and why. Service means several things to us; putting the customer first and doing what we say we'll do as soon as we can do it. Patience is also a part of it, as is understanding. We understand that not everyone will be pleased, that folks will read more (or less) into our ads than we intended and that we (and others) will make mistakes. Life has an annoying habit of getting in the way of living and Murphy's Law still rules, but we strive to practice our philosophy. We guess the bottom line is that we try to treat folks the way we'd like to be treated - sort of a modified Golden Rule.

Shipping/Mailing:  One of the disadvantages to living on the edge of nowhere is the poor mail & shipping service available. The USPS won't deliver to our home, so our choices are a P.O. Box or a rual mailbox one mile down the road (NOT a good choice when sending & receiving other folk's money). So: a P.O. Box. And our P.O. Box is in a Postal Sub-station (read: the rear of a convenience store, staffed by convenience store employees), so all our out-going mail goes through the closest Federal Post Office - in Kingman, Arizona, about 20 miles from our home. And that's the good news. Our local UPS office is open one and one half hours per day (3:30 to 5:00 PM) Monday through Friday - it's near our local airport (Andy Devine Intergalactic, I believe it's called) 27 miles away - and there is no FedEx office in this part of Arizona.

Despite the disadvantages, we mail every day. It's so rare as to be exceptional that we don't send out a customer's order within 24 hours of receipt of payment - if the mailing/shipping folks will open their doors and let us! Also, our shipping & handling costs are just that: actual shipping cost plus a little for materials (boxes, bubblewrap, foam peanuts, tape, labels, padded envelopes, and so on). Our goal is to break even on shipping, and we come pretty close to it.

Feedback:  We do feedback - on every sale - period. We think eBay's feedback system is a wonderful tool the way it was designed and we use it that way. When we receive payment, we figure the customer has completed his or her part of the auction and we leave positive feedback - we don't wait to see if the customer will leave us feedback; that's not a part of the eBay auction. Do we leave more feedbacks than we receive? Sure we do. But fair is fair: we do what we know is right and other folks will make their own decisions about how they want to do things. We also leave negative feedback for defaulting bidders. That results in retaliation at times, but, in the words of the immortal Duke, ... "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do!" (even if she's a woman...) and we feel strongly that auction winners should get the feedback they earn, if the system is going to function as it should.

Personal Stuff:  Personal stuff? Well... We enjoy the privacy and isolation where we live. Our shopping city is Las Vegas, Nevada (eat your heart out!) and we make it in every month or so - by driving across Boulder Dam - both ways - usually. We have His, Hers and Ours computers, networked together. And we use a high speed wireless system for the internet, as our local phone system is so poor as to be almost worthless for computer communication. American English is our native language, although one of us is more fluent in Texan, and we each have a smattering of foreign languages - mostly from an extensive (and compulsive) life-long habit of reading anything that has type on it. That's enough personal stuff, right?

Our Auction Ads:  We strive for a distinct "look and feel" in all of our ads - one that reflects who and what we are. To that end, we taught ourselves html and we design and code each of our ads by hand. It's really not all that difficult and it satisfies an urge to be creative - adds pleasure to what could otherwise be drudgery. Also, that makes it an ongoing project, since our ads change over time to reflect our personal changes during that time.