Free Business Idea: Virtual Reality Saloons

The other day I went down to the mall and happened to arrive during a shift change at the customer service desk. I wandered over to a row of couches and sat down to watch a Microsoft Store employee playing a game using the store's virtual reality set-up. Seeing as I had 15 minutes to kill, I asked him if I could try it out.I believe the system they had set up was this HTC VIVE Pro Virtual Reality System, which involves two ceiling-mounted sensors, two wireless handsets, and a tethered headset (although it seems a version without the headset cable may be launching later this month).If, like me, you haven't used a virtual reality system since the Virtual Boy, it's difficult to convey just how incredible the technology has become. Immersive virtual reality like you see in "Ready Player One" is not science fiction, and it's not 5 or 10 years away — it's here right now.While the technology is ready, the people aren't, for two main reasons: it's too expensive, and it requires too much space. The answer is today's free business idea: virtual reality saloons.

What is a virtual reality saloon?

A virtual reality saloon is a karaoke bar for virtual reality gaming.A fully functional virtual reality gaming setup requires a fair amount of sophistication. The two ceiling-mounted sensors I mentioned have to be mounted on a ceiling, and oriented properly. The gaming area itself has to be free of obstructions. And you also need to pay for the equipment and the games themselves.For those reasons, I don't think home-based virtual reality systems have much of a future for the next 5-10 years. But the technology is already there, which means the obvious solution is for a business to undertake the upfront equipment cost, setup, and maintenance, and then rent the equipment out on an hourly or daily basis to individuals and groups.

Nuts and bolts

While the upfront equipment costs are quite high for an individual, they're quite modest for a business, at perhaps $4,000-5,000 per rig, including all the virtual reality equipment, a top-of-the-line gaming computer, and every currently-available virtual reality game. A virtual reality saloon could start at as little as one room customers could reserve for wedding parties, corporate events, etc, much like "escape rooms" do already.Since only one or two people can play the actual games at a time, the profit center would naturally be the bar. The model works better the more gaming saloons you can put under one roof, in order to keep the bar as busy as possible.Commercial real estate, liability insurance, and alcohol licensing are complex issues you'll want to consult with local specialists about. But if you want to own and operate your own business but don't have any business ideas, feel free to use one of mine. After all, they're free!

You got your tax cut. Now what?

I had an interesting exchange in the comments of this post with reader sh on the subject of portfolio protection. I won't relitigate the question here since you can go read our exchange, but sh got me thinking about public markets and what they are, and aren't, for.I take for granted that the price level of public market equities, that is to say without dividends reinvested, will be flat over the next 5-to-10 years. Far from being valuable insight, however, this conviction is completely worthless. That's because I have not the slightest inkling about the path of public equity prices in the next 5-to-10 years. A "flat" intermediate-term prediction can describe a market that drops 80% and then quintuples, a market that doubles and then drops 50%, or a market that just staggers along for the foreseeable future.And of course that leaves totally aside the fact that my seemingly-precise expression "5-to-10 years" masks a difference of five whole years!

Remember what high stock prices and low interest rates are for

Almost a year ago I wrote about the Federal Reserve's plan to save the American economy: sell everything and start a business. The plan was and is marvelously simple: by buying up trillions of dollars in government bonds, the Fed was able to drive the interest paid on safe securities to extremely low levels. That forced investors seeking returns that used to be available on risk-free assets to buy riskier assets. It forced investors seeking returns that used to be available on risky assets to buy even riskier assets. And, ultimately, it was supposed to make returns so low, funds so cheap, and equities so overpriced, that people would be enticed to borrow money, issue equity, start businesses, hire employees, and get the American economy moving again.

You got your tax cut. Now what?

The Republican party felt compelled, for aesthetic reasons, to include adjustments to individual tax rates in their recently-enacted changes to the tax code, but the overwhelming impact, in both practical and budgetary terms, was on corporate taxes. Those changes mean that in the short term, US corporations with assets owned by international subsidiaries will be able to retitle those assets in the name of the parent corporation at discounted rates, permitting the US company to use the assets to pay dividends and reduce their share count (offset by the shares issued to their executive suite, of course).Whether you think the 2018 year-to-date rise in the stock market's price level was "caused" by those changes to the tax code or not, it has certainly risen, and if you're invested in public market equities, you may have noticed their increased value (even though you shouldn't peek).The question I have to ask is, now what? Still-low Federal Reserve interest rates have now been combined with a shot of adrenaline from Congress to push public market equities to all-time highs. But what's the plan? Or rather, what's your plan?

Imagine the opposite conditions

People even a little younger than me won't remember this, but in the early 2000's it was possible to earn 6% APY, or higher, on a totally liquid money market savings account (mine was with PayPal). People older than me may remember when US Treasuries were paying well over 10% APY in the early 1980's. What would be the appropriate response to conditions like those?Logically, you'd want to get the highest-paying job you could, work as many hours as your boss let you, spend as little as possible, and save every penny you could in the longest-dated securities you could. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities weren't issued until 1997, but if those high-interest, high-inflation conditions existed today you'd probably want to give up a few points of interest and buy 30-year TIPS. Of course, public market equities were also very depressed, so in general saving as much of your income as possible and scooping up as many securities as possible was the right move, and you would have been richly rewarded for it.

Last call for this business cycle

We've reached full employment and employers are having to raise wages and working conditions and lower hiring standards to attract additional workers. Inflation is starting to fitfully show signs of life. The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates off the floor and may accelerate the pace of increases this year.Eventually, these conditions will converge, growth will collapse, and it will be time to start scooping up cheap stocks and bonds again. But we're not there yet. If a year ago the time was right to start a business, today the time is perfect to start a business.So, what now?

Free Business Idea: Made in America Great Again

Yes, it's that time again! Time for me to share a free business idea you can use to become your own boss.After the first entry in this series I gathered there was some confusion over my goal in sharing these ideas. The point is not to give you ideas that will make you rich. The point is to give you ideas that will make you self-employed. I want more people to explore the possibility of self-employment, and you can either use these ideas as-is or as a launching pad for your own business.Some readers seemed to get the impression that I was offering a way to get rich quick, or attract venture capital, or go public with a billion dollar valuation. But getting rich quick is the wrong goal, on the wrong time frame. Most people never get rich, and you want to do it quick?The point of being self-employed is to be self-employed, and my free business ideas are here to help.

Made in America Great Again

If you've ever met me at a Saverocity DO or at one of my subscribers-only meetups, you may remember my hilarious, or at least chuckle-worthy, graphic t-shirts. What you may not know is that they're printed on American Apparel t-shirts, which are made by union labor in a factory in downtown Los Angeles (for now).Clothes made in the United States? Aren't those preposterously expensive, due to our onerous labor regulations and crushing minimum wages? Couldn't you save thousands of dollars buying t-shirts from Southeast Asian sweatshops?Nope. You can buy 12 graphic t-shirts printed on American Apparel for $143.88, plus $10.99 in shipping, from RoadKill T-Shirts (not a referral link, you should just shop there):Now, is $12.91 per t-shirt more than you can pay for the cheapest sweatshop t-shirt on the market? Of course. Does the cheapest sweatshop t-shirt on the market have a hilarious graphic design? Of course not.Moving on from t-shirts, I recently decided I needed a better khaki than the Dockers I've been buying for the past few years. After an hour or two of googling about, I discovered the All American Clothing Co.Think back to the last pair of casual trousers you purchased. Go ahead and pull it up on Amazon if you have to. How much did you pay? My go-to pair of Dockers is currently listed at $49.30 on Amazon, with free shipping as you'd expect.Using a 20%-off coupon code for "new" customers, and purchasing 3 pairs of these khakis to get my order over $100 in order to qualify for free shipping, my all-in cost on each pair of trousers made in the United States was $43.96:They recently arrived and after wearing them for the last couple days I can tell you they are twice as comfortable as my old Dockers. Paying less for high-quality, American-made clothing is a no-brainer.By now you may have gathered where this is going, and what my free business idea is: if American-made goods are much less expensive than you think they are, then they're also much less expensive than other people think they are. And that means you can buy them for the real price and sell them for the inflated price people think they're worth.

Nuts and bolts

The great thing about Made in America Great Again is that it lets you start as small as you'd like and scale up as you go. The prices I showed above are retail prices. To get started, you could order 20 pairs of khakis in a range of sizes, and pick your favorite 3 or 4 graphic designs and order 24 shirts in a variety of sizes and colors (you need to order multiples of 12 to trigger the biggest discount). Then hang out a shingle at your local flea market, people's market, or farmer's market. Selling the trousers at a modest profit margin of $20-30 each, and t-shirts for $10-15 more than you paid will secure you a decent profit you can roll into the next order, and give residents of your neighborhood or city access to affordably-priced US-made clothing.Once you've discovered the designs and sizes that have the most demand, you can reach out to the merchants to secure wholesale pricing and start selling more often, and at larger profit margins. This free business idea offers essentially unlimited potential for growth since most people in the United States don't have convenient access to US-made apparel.Finally, keep in mind that these trousers and shirts are just a starting point. As you expand you should add other great American-made goods, like can openers. It's your business now: what American-made goods do you think people in your community should have access to? Make it happen!

Free Business Idea: Mailstream, Your Home Away From Home

There are lots of people who enjoy their jobs, who find that their jobs give their life meaning, or who think that wage labor is the natural order of the universe and that it's their duty to be employed by somebody else.On the one hand, I'm not in the business of judging other people's priorities. On the other hand, the obsession with "employment," with laboring for someone else, has consequences that I do care about very much: air conditioner factory employees who choose to vote for someone who promises to "bring back their jobs" have helped bring us to the present crisis, while I believe a society of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship might be more resistant to these kinds of reactionary appeals.I don't think everyone should be an entrepreneur, but I do think more people should be entrepreneurs than currently are, and that situation is made worse by the ways we talk about work. When someone is laid off, we have programs to retrain her for a new job, but no programs to retrain her to run her own business, let alone provide startup capital. You can get trade adjustment assistance to go back to school, but not to create your own job.That's why I'm introducing this periodic feature, which I'm calling "Free Business Idea." I have 2-3 ideas for new businesses each week (sometimes each day!), but I already like what I'm doing, and am not too interested in starting a new business. If you don't like what you're doing, but don't have a business idea, feel free to take one of mine — they're free!

Mailstream: Your Home Away From Home

Moving is a pain in the ass. Moving overseas is even worse. Mailstream is the answer.If you've ever lived overseas, you probably know what I'm talking about. None of your banks, credit cards, or insurance companies will deliver to you overseas, so you need to find somebody stateside to have your mail delivered to, or risk missing something important. If you've got an accommodating parent or sibling, you might use their mailing address, and if you know something important is coming ask them to watch for it.But what if something important comes that you don't know to warn them about? A tax notice in a plain envelope, a replacement credit or debit card, a check from a class action settlement, a jury duty summons, the list is endless!And what if you don't have anyone whose address you can use? No parents, no siblings, no address at all in the United States?The solution is Mailstream: Your Home Away From Home.Mailstream is a physical address where all your mail is delivered, opened, scanned, and made available to you online within 2 business days of delivery. When you log onto Mailstream from anywhere in the world, you can view each piece of mail and decide whether to keep or toss each physical item (digital copies are stored indefinitely).Every 30 days, all the physical items you've decided to keep are packaged and sent to you anywhere in the world by your choice of carrier (availability depending on destination country). You can also request expedited shipment of any items that might be time-sensitive.Mailstream has a simple fee structure:

• a flat monthly fee (with a discount when you pay for a year in advance);
• a shipping and handling fee for your 30-day international shipment (waived if you decline to receive any physical mail during the 30-day period);
• and an express shipping and handling fee for any deliveries you request expedited.

Nuts and bolts

To implement this free business idea, you'll need a storefront address and a moderate amount of storage space. To start with you can probably handle all the work yourself and simply use a Dropbox account to upload and share each client's Mailstream, with subfolders clients can drag "keep" and "destroy" mail to.Once you have some more clients you might consider hiring someone to design an online interface for clients and an interface for you to use to easily sort physical and digital copies to make your life easier. You could even license the software to other Mailstreams for an additional source of revenue!Mailstream will be most appealing if you set it up in a state with no individual income tax: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, or South Dakota. That's because the federal government shares federal income tax data with the states, and your clients might be subject to state income tax liability if they use a Mailstream in a state that levies a tax on income.On the other hand, each state should have a Mailstream to help people maintain their state residency, and you'll have plenty of customers even in states that do levy income taxes: students, people on temporary assignments abroad, etc.You should consult a lawyer to draw up your user agreement so it covers a few key points:

• every single piece of mail has to be opened before being repackaged, so Mailstream doesn't find itself mailing contraband internationally. Mailstream won't mail any fruits, vegetables, organic matter, or pornography;
• Mailstream isn't liable for destroying anything the client accidentally elects to destroy instead of keep;
• if a client's payment is overdue their mail won't be opened and will be marked return to sender.

You can surely come up with a few more exigencies you'd want clients to agree to.