In any case, by mid-December Parsons had had enough. He shut down the online store and told the kids to ship everything out by December 24. He brought in a couple of Best Fares employees to help clean things up. PayPal issued refunds to several customers with whom Parsons was trying to settle, an intercession that only confused matters more. Parsons decided PayPal could handle all the complaints. "I said, after December 24, I'm not doing anything. I'm not going to respond to e-mails, I'm not going respond to anything," he said. "If PayPal's big enough to touch the first two or three, they're going to do everybody else's. I'm gonna make them work for their money."
It is possible to trace the decline of Parsons & Sons by scrolling through the thousands of feedback comments posted under Parsons's eBay handle, mrfares1982. Through the fall, negative comments remained rare. It was not until after Parsons shuttered the business that a red tide overwhelmed his green sea, and over the next month the feedback was nearly as likely to be neutral or negative as positive as toys arrived ruined or too late for Christmas. A customer named aarys6 spoke for many when he shouted, "PAID 12/4--NEVER RECEIVED--DELETES MY EMAILS--CAN'T RUN A BUSINESS. BEWARE!!!" Others were more plaintive. "This item showed up cracked and broken," reported kerryelizabeth73, "a big disappointment for a little boy."
Ultimately, Parsons--or rather, PayPal, drawing on Parsons's account--issued about $1,200 in refunds. Goodwill that took months to earn was wiped out. Parsons swore he did not care. "It doesn't bother me. I mean, they have the right to protest, and they have the right to give the negative," he said. "But nobody got ripped off. We've never disputed one payment through PayPal--not one."
Bryan, on the other hand, was as crushed as his customers. "It bummed me out. It made me not even want to go to work," he said afterward. "In the summer and the beginning of the fall, people liked us so much. And you would notice the same people coming back, buying stuff. That felt really good. Then toward the end of it, you'd go and look at how many people bought something from you, and you're like, 'Crap, there's only 20 people."
In the end, Bryan wondered if his dad might have caused P&S's ruin on purpose, to create a teachable moment.
Another Round?
In the wake of the flameout, Parsons decided that Bryan needed the sort of job that Parsons & Sons was originally devised to avoid. He needed, Parsons explained, "to work for someone who's not his father. He's not going to be able to just take off and do whatever he wants, he's not going to be able to just take a break whenever he feels like it. And he's going to find out that working by the hour and under heavy supervision is a miserable feeling." But Parsons's soft spot got the better of his hard nose. He found work for his son at a friend's carpet store, where Bryan has had some flexibility in setting his own schedule, with time off for soccer games.
Parsons, Jean, and her daughter Caitlin moved into the large, airy rooms of Rancho Parsones last December. In March, Bryan, who had lived at his mother's modest ranch house across town, joined them. Tom and Jean established strict guidelines for his residency--during the school year, he had to be home by 8:30 on weeknights. When he did come home, he often found Jean waiting to grill him about the day's homework assignments. His grades improved dramatically, despite the intoxicating allure of the 50-inch plasma TVs in the game room and the poolside cabana and the DLP rear projection TV in the home theater.
Neither Parsons wanted to give up on eBay. Tom still had a lot of toys on his hands--in fact, on a visit to Disney World over winter break, Bryan reported in January, "my dad bought 20 of each antenna ball that they had there." He added that they were debating new names for the tarnished enterprise. "He's trying to make it like 'KoolStuf' or something like that. And I'm like, 'Dad, that's not cool. We can make a better name than that."
But as winter became spring, and spring summer, each was still waiting for the other to make the first move. Tom wanted to bring his brother John, whose own eBay business has completed over 13,000 transactions in seven years, out from Florida to help Bryan start over. First, though, he wanted Bryan to show how he would find the time to keep the company afloat, largely without Tom's help, during the school year--while still punching the clock at the carpet store. If they do try again, Parsons said, it would be a leaner operation--probably just Bryan, at least to start. Though Jean refused to be involved in the new venture, she may have made her point: Tom said that this time Bryan would be paid not in wages, but in profits, after expenses were deducted. Tom decided--for now--that Bryan's share would be 25%, while Tom would take 75% in exchange for supplying his leftover merchandise.
Of course, that's just one of many details that remain to be worked out. If there is one lesson that Bryan is surely learning, it's that business grows complicated when it is not strictly business.
