Is This Any Way to Run a Family?

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Listing the stuff was easy, especially with the automatic services available online. Pricing was trickier. Parsons had bought something like 10,000 pins--mostly in bulk from other eBay sellers--but because he refused to take inventory (a fact that would soon become an issue), he didn't know exactly how many he purchased or what he paid. Nor did he have more than anecdotal knowledge of the sales history of any pin style to harvest for guidance, though it might not have helped much even if he had. "I've discovered I have not the slightest idea what a pin's worth," he said. "One day you can put a pin up that will go for $18. The next week you put the same pin up, it'll go for $4. It has no logic."

When they took a stab at opening bids in the $5 to $7 range, they found themselves lucky to sell half the lot. So Parsons decided to start his pin auctions at one cent: "I figured if I put it up for a penny, there's a 99.9% chance somebody's going to bid on it."

The kids got the psychology of the penny pin. Bidders see the listing, Jorden told me one Saturday night, and "they think, might as well just go for it."

"And it keeps building up," Aaron chimed in.

"And then it'll end up coming up to, like, $5."

The kids had scaled up the learning curve, and Parsons was pleased to see the business run so smoothly. All this was prologue, though; the real test lay ahead. As the nation girded for its holiday shopping spree in the fall of 2004, Parsons & Sons geared up to sate what Tom Parsons anticipated would be an enormous appetite for discount treasures.

The thrill of the kill

On a sunny Sunday, Parsons took me on an impromptu tour of his supply circuit. We started eight rows behind home plate at Ameriquest Field, the new-old red-brick baseball stadium in Arlington where the Texas Rangers play. By the bottom of the eighth the Rangers were up 6-2 over hapless Tampa Bay, so we got up to leave. While we waited for his black Lexus (valet parking), Parsons took a call from his ex-wife, Suzanne, who was out with Bryan shopping for the new school year. "Make sure he looks presentable tomorrow," he barked. "I told him to shave that stubble shit off of his face."

Joining us was Stewart Chiron, who is known professionally as "the Cruise Guy." He and Parsons have been friends from the time Chiron worked for the firm that handled Best Fares' cruise bookings. When Chiron struck out on his own, Parsons threw him some work and some all-important radio and TV gigs. Ostensibly, our destination was Rancho Parsones, as Parsons bemusedly called the chateauesque house he was building, but first we had a few errands to run.

Arlington, halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, was a sleepy little town until World War II, but it has expanded to fill the space between its neighbors. The city's east side is dotted with pawnshops and a surprisingly large number of discount stores, the source of much of Parsons & Sons' merchandise. Indeed, the SuperPages listings show 36 "dollar" stores in Arlington alone, one for every 32,000 residents. We stopped first at Sam's $1.00, an emporium of cheap plastic trinkets in cheap plastic packaging. "Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the stuff here I wouldn't touch," said Parsons.

He sought name-brand goods and products tied to popular trademarks. "One time I found Star Wars pins--a set of five for a buck. They sold for $20 or $25," he said. "But we only bought 15 of them, and by the time I got back here, they didn't have any more." Today he was looking specifically for Spider-Man watches, and finding none we returned to the Lexus and drove six miles to another Sam's $1.00. The young clerk there recognized Parsons immediately and shook his head.

Back to the car and on to Big Lots, which is in a strip mall that just might represent the densest concentration of discount stores in America: There are four in this shopping center alone, and across the street is a Family Dollar. After a quick walk through the toys, Parsons headed to children's accessories. In the past, he said, he had bought Tinkerbell wallets here for $2.99 and resold them for $14. We found $2.99 watches bearing the face of Winnie the Pooh, Cinderella, and characters from Toy Story. But Parsons was unmoved. This was a typical Sunday. He normally visited five stores twice a week, occasionally calling Chiron from the field to seek a quick eBay price check. "The amazing thing is that he doesn't have a camera on his cell phone," said the Cruise Guy. "Then he'd truly be dangerous."

Though Parsons's friends, employees, and even kin questioned the logic of his business plan--didn't he have better things to do with his time than trying to squeeze a dollar in profit here, a dollar there?--they all understood where it came from. They remembered that in the late '80s and early '90s he would track down scores of special offers issued by the airlines and their partners: $25 off a Continental roundtrip with dinner from the Olive Garden, a $75 discount on TWA for a bottle of St. Ives Apricot Scrub. Once on a Sunday morning, Parsons went to Burger King and bought 400 Whoppers for 99 cents each because they came with travel coupons that he could give to his subscribers. (The burgers--most of them, anyway--went to a homeless shelter.) This mania transcended business. Chiron recounted an instance--everybody who knows Parsons can tell a similar story--of shopping for food for a barbecue. "We had been to both Kroger and Albertsons," Chiron recalled, "but then we had to drive across town 40 minutes to get peppers and wait in line for an hour--just because they were 19 cents cheaper."

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