In an era of expensive groceries, Amazon Prime, and Chipotle shrinkflation, college students need money, fast. Out of pure curiosity or already strong business backgrounds, many of them have begun side hustles. I saw a few Tiktoks from college students from around the country with niche, self employed jobs, such as jewelry-making or waxing, but I wanted to know how prevalent this is at UVA, so I took it to my own hands to find students who juggled work and studying. Here are a few jobs fellow Hoos do to make a quick buck:
Haircutting
In desperate need of a freshening, I scrolled through Instagram to discover that a girl I met at a party cuts hair. Since she lives close to Grounds, there was no need for me to research Charlottesville’s best salons and book a $16 Uber to the downtown mall. It was convenient for both of us since we both rolled out of bed shortly before our morning appointment.
My hair stylist, a second year student studying computer science, started her business as a “bit.” During her senior year of high school, her friend joked to her about cutting her hair, which “turned out really good”. More requests came, and eventually, she began to watch Youtube trimming tutorials. After some time and patience, she said she grew more confident in her skills after each cut. In college, she learned a variety of other services, ranging from perms to raccoon tails.
Rare Coin Trading
I met up with a third year student over breakfast to ask him about his passion for coin collecting. Before the interview, my only exposure to coin collecting was my brother’s state quarters folder, which took several years to fill. My interviewee’s coin collecting, which started as a simple hobby, has developed into a full-on business.
“My sales pitch,” he said, “in essence, is that my business has less overhead, and I am able to pay more per collection.” The northern Virginia native started at the age of 10, first collecting “wheat cents” (pennies made from 1909 to 1958) due to them being relatively inexpensive. His inventory grew to include “Morgan Dollars,”dollar coins minted from 1878 to 1904, with the current values ranging from $30to nearly a million. By high school, he started selling coins to his peers. “Rare coins are similar to sports cards,” he stated. When finding memorabilia, you must be able to sell it at a higher value to make profit.
While attending college in California, he had trouble finding buyers as fewer people have collections on the West Coast. After returning to the East Coast to transfer to UVA, however, there was a much more prominent coin community. He doesn’t conduct transactions on Grounds, as all of his sales are made via mail since the average age of his customers is 60. Instead, he drives to northern Virginia every week to buy, as well as attend coin conventions. Forty percent of his sales are on Ebay, the rest wholesale. The process of selling and verifying coins includes frequent third party involvement, first by sending your currency to an expert to verify its authenticity, then grading the coins’ conditions if they are on the more valuable spectrum.
While my interviewee has a pretty general inventory of coins, he met with sellers who specialize in niches, such as Spanish shipwreck currency or ancient Roman tetradrachms. Engaging with the public has transformed him into a jack-of-all-trades. Over his decade-long pursuit, the most valuable outcome has been not the coins itself, but “learning by doing”.
Selling Fake Designer Clothes
My last interviewee, an international student, started his business in his last year of high school in Europe. During his senior year, he and his friends began reselling counterfeit designer brands from China. The side hustle first started on Panda Buy, a Chinese e-commerce website well known for selling replica sneakers at a low price. Then he directly contacted producers to manufacture and ship the clothes to his home country.
Contrary to popular belief, reselling fake clothes is not a piece of cake since it requires strong connections to be formed. The interviewee admitted to “being lucky” during the beginning: his parents’ friends ran the same enterprise at a larger scale, gaining him access to more resources and insider knowledge. Furthermore, Chinese friends from international schools were able to help him gain experience and access to Chinese platforms. He also needed a referral from a Chinese citizen in order to gain access to WeChat, a Chinese social media platform that would help him establish contact with factory producers.
At first, reselling fake clothes felt risky. He wasn’t getting the best deals, but also felt bad for overpricing items. Compared to companies that had thousands of shipments a day, he sold a mere percentage of that amount, which heightened the possibility of lost packages. “But that’s how business works,” he stated. You take risks, and learn to adapt to them.
Eventually, he gained a handful of customers from his social circle. Although the clothes were advertised as fake, he decided to sell only to acquaintances and friends, ensuring they wouldn’t be upset for receiving counterfeit items and potentially reporting the friend group behind the scheme. The demographic of his customers were teens, families, and “students who loved flexing and causing trouble.” Across this group, they didn’t have the money to buy designer clothes, but wanted cheap replicas of the same quality for personal enjoyment.
Regarding the ethics of supplying fake clothing, he feels he does the right thing to inform his customers about the legitimacy of products. “On the other hand, it’s scummy to scam people by lying about selling real items, because some of them are collectors,” he stated after. I asked if he thinks about what happens in the factories where he supplies from, to which he responded “it’s maybe immoral because of the child workers. But I don’t feel bad about the actual companies losing money, as they profit off forced labor.”
After moving to the U.S. to attend UVA, my interviewee stopped reselling, as he does not know the country and its views on counterfeit items that well. “Due to less regulation in Europe, I was able to do this in my free time, but in the U.S., it’s not worth taking risks, ” he said. As a student in the school of Data Science, he initially wanted to study computer science, but after learning how to operate a business, he now appreciates the aspects of commerce. In the future, he hopes to start a legitimate business, and his experience in senior year was regarded as a great head start.
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