Philippines Books

Archive for January 24th, 2009

Ukay Ukay is the Visayan term for second hand, specifically clothes. People make a decent living sending boxes of second hand clothes to relatives in the Philippines from the USA and elsewhere for resale. I have several pairs of Ukay Ukay shorts as trying to get large enough anything on the local market is a trial. Hell, it is hard enough in Australia where the average person is closing in on the average sized Amurricun with every bite of their fast food!

A Balikbayan Box as they are called (Balikbayan means returning citizen, basically) sent from the USA via LBC or one of the many private freight forwarders that handle USA-Phils business, costs around US$100 or so. That box is a tea chest sized carton that can be stuffed with hundreds of dollars worth of second hand clothes. Stock you can collect by asking around the neighborhood or raiding the charity dumpsters! If you assign a value of fifty cents to every item you can quickly figure out the break even point of the exercise.

For those with access to larger shipping containers at better prices then you can be even more profitable. For us though, we feel it is simpler and more effective to send our relatives cash they can convert into stock for their tempura carts and then onsell that. But that is another article for another time.