Thanks. I understand the “set” idea better. I still don’t really understand mixed lots. Take this lot of 80 beads you mentioned. I’m not talking about selling them separately in 2 transactions of 1 bead and 79 beads. I am talking about selling a mixed lot of 80 beads for $140. If I bought them for $1 each and don’t have the time or inclination to look up the current value of each of 80 beads so I just put them all together in a lot, and someone sees one in my lot they could sell for $500 so they offer me $140 for the whole lot and I take it, I wouldn’t even know to pull out that one bead to report the gain on it. From the buyer’s perspective, they might be buying one bead and throwing out the rest, but from mine, I’m selling 80 random beads that cost $1 each and selling them all for $140.
I had literally a million beads in my ot I’m sure and probably 5,000 kinds of beads. Some were bought at retail, some given to me, some traded for. It’s just a big ole lot of beads to me. I have some receipts for parts of it, but even that is mixed. I might have a receipt that says $100 for 1000 glass beads, but I may not know which 1000 beads that was in the lot, just that they are somewhere in the lot.
Imagine your average crafter who buys a ton of different kinds of fabric over 20 years. People also give her fabric and she trades at swap groups and tears old clothing apart and keeps the fabric from that. She sorts it all by color because that’s how she likes it so she has no idea which of it came from where. She tells her daughter, put this all on FB Marketplace for me. The daughter takes pics of it all, lists it and sells it as one big lot (it’s not a set obviously) for $1000. How does this woman go about reporting this lot? Assume she has $3000 worth of receipts for some of what was in the lot. Is that one loss?
