Discount isn't everything.

I'm not sure what's happening with my budgeting. The Pokemon product is piling in the door, not that I'm complaining. I think it's going to be a huge seller this Christmas. I'm also ordering just about every book title I want, every day. 

Meanwhile, my new schedule is becoming kind of routine.  

For most of my life I've stayed up past midnight. My routine until about a year ago was to go to bed around 12:30, wake up around 8:00, go into the store around noon a couple times a week and put stock books for four hours or so. Twice a week I'd spend four hours or so in the evenings making orders. On Sundays,  I'd go into work behind the counter, to get a feel for what's happening.

But we have become so busy that I simply can't stock the store during store hours. Too many people! 

Now I'm going to bed around 10:30, waking up at 6:00, getting to the store and putting away book by 7:30, getting it done in a couple of hours, and driving home before the store even opens. Then each night, right after the store closes, I spend an hour ordering the books we sold that day.

I admit I'm a little tired, but I think that is due more to the sleep time change than from the work. The work has become easier and much less stressful. I think this is the routine I'm going to maintain this transitional year.

Last year I was offered a deal from Penguin Random House that I could order all the books I wanted and it would all be returnable. I'd give up about 12% on discount, but I wouldn't be stuck with dead product.  While I was at it, I set up accounts with Scholastic, Simon and Shuster, and Harper Collins, three more of the top six publishers in the country.

It didn't work. Having more copies didn't sell more books. The ordering systems to the latter three publishers was unwieldy, time-consuming, unpredictable, and slow.  Even though I was getting a 10% better discount, it wasn't helping the profits. 

So this year I decided to focus on PRH and Ingram again, both of which have handy ordering systems and are predictable. I gave up the returnability with PRH and regained the 12% margin I'd lost. But PRH was still incredible slow. I was waiting ten days to two weeks for product to arrive: 10% off of product you don't actually have in stock isn't much help, you know?

Then they seemed to slow down even more. So when this summer hit, I decided to focus on Ingram for everything I could. Yes, I was paying 10% more, but they were easy to deal with, they were predictable, and they were fast. There is an warehouse in Oregon that can get shipments to you the very next day if you order before noon. 

As it turned it, it was a major win: with only nine weeks of full-on summer business, PRH didn't deliver most of their product in July and August until three or even four weeks passed. Fortunately, I'd already sent my business to Ingram. At some point in August, I started getting stuff from Reno, a warehouse that I didn't even know PRH had. Turns out the warehouse in NY was over their head. Not only that, the stuff from Reno showed up in a few days.

I've been getting my books from warehouses in New York!  So I get on the phone to my rep and request that I get my books from Reno. 

"You are a comic account, so you can only get it from NY."

"Yes, I order comics, but I order five times more books!"

"Sorry, nothing we can do."  

So guess what? We had a spectacular summer ordering from Ingram. We're having a record year. I'm doing the same thing this Christmas and it's become SO much easier to get books in on a timely basis. 

In other words, I'm selling so many more books, with so much less stress and effort, that the 10% extra discount becomes secondary.  

If the publishers figure out how to get books to me faster, with the information I need to budget correctly, and don't make me jump through so many hoops just to do orders, we'll revisit the situation. Meanwhile, I'm pretty happy with the way things are going.  

 

I'm visibly aging. I noticed big dark bags under my eyes yesterday. I think some of that is due to my new sleep schedule which I'm still adjusting to, if I ever do. (It's not my natural circadian rhythm.) My skin is very thin and spotty. 

On the other hand, I've mostly kept the weight off. I seem to have very good flexibility, super-excellent balance, and I'm still fairly strong. I move fast and confidently. 

Mentally, my memory is definitely not as good as it was. But I can counter that with how well the business is doing, and how often my memory is called into use. We're at least 20% better than our best year ever, so I'm doing something right. Mostly it's experience, luck with the product, and trusting my instincts more than ever. 

I've had a couple of incidents at intersections lately. In both cases, there are reasons and doubts that it may not have been something I did. But even if none of it was my fault, I've always approached driving as if it doesn't matter whose fault it is, what matters is avoiding an accident. I was driving this morning through the intersection of Bond and Greenwood and remembered having an incident 25 years ago when they changed the lane layout. 

In other words, I may just be extra conscious of lapses, which have always happened but wasn't something I attributed to age before. The same holds true of all the memory issues. Is it really so much worse or am I just noticing it more? (Actually, I do realize my memory isn't as good at is was...but how much worse is the question.)

So I'm not going to borrow trouble from the future. I was worried about retirement, but I've can't put it off any longer, so what's the point of worrying? 

The history of Bend that really should be remembered correctly.

One of my ways of practicing retirement is to go along with Linda on her little errands, which generally turn into much longer errands. Sat at Costco waiting for a pizza and chatting with an old couple. Old couples seem to have a club of some kind. Linda said the lady said a prayer for Trump, so I'm glad I wasn't sitting at the time and overtly leaving out the "Amen."

Earlier in the day, we checked out the Backporch here in Redmond which seemed in a very out of the way place but was obviously getting business from the neighborhood. So while we're sitting there we're talking about how big Redmond has gotten.

So I decided once and for all to check the populations of Bend and Redmond in 1970, 1980, and 1990. 

So 1970 was exactly the way I remembered it my entire time of growing up. In other words, the 13K in population hadn't changed much in 15 years.

The 1980 population was a bit of a surprise; lower than I expected: about 17K. This despite having two new big malls built. (One of the reasons neither one of them ever became very profitable.) It did have the effect of emptying out downtown Bend, which allowed Pegasus to find a location for an affordable price.

1990: Here's what I want people to pay attention to. The population of Bend only grew about 3K people, in  a full decade, to a total of 20K. We had gotten a little ahead of ourselves and the Reagan recession hit hard. That's not much growth, and it was a real struggle not only for downtown but also for the two malls. What I remember is almost nothing being built in that decade. Instead, things seemed to get run down.

Flash forward and I'm thinking we're probably 120K by now, more or less, counting some of the suburbs. So Bend has grown by five times. Redmond has grown even faster: from  around 4K in 1970, and 6.5K in 1980, to about 42K today. 

That's the history of Bend that I think people should know. People need to realize how small and struggling Bend was back then. We tend to see it with rose colored glasses, but believe you me, it was hard to earn a living back then. 

As I tend to say now: Central Oregon has not only grown, we're a whole different animal.  

 

What a strange bookstore we are.

First let me preface this by saying that this Black Friday was perhaps the best sales day we've ever had outside of Christmas week. We had well over a hundred customers, which means we had three or four times that many people milling around the store. Let me tell you, that's a lot of activity for a thousand square foot store manned by one person over a five hour active period.

So I came in this morning expecting to restock our "bestseller" shelves. Currently, we have about four bookcases that we can display new bestsellers face out. That's about room for over 100 books. 

We had one blank spot. We had sold one bestseller. One! By this I mean, the books that are on the New York Times lists, and other lists, the books you're hearing about on NPR or elsewhere.

One book.

At the same time we sold several hundred of other books, a huge number of books.  

Now I've been saying for some time that we are a midlist bookstore. I'd already noticed how often we sell certain perennial titles; which I try to suss out as often as possible. If I can assemble a few hundred books that sell regularly, the store is healthy. But to be sure I have full runs of authors and series and quirky books and bestsellers and books that sell regularly, I concentrate on carrying them.

So I will use 80% of my budget for reorders and only 20% for the new releases.  

For the above reasons. 

Don't get me wrong. I am very diligent about carrying the bestsellers. Out of the 150 books listed by the USA Today every week, I carry about 85% of them. The other 15% are books that I'm fairly sure won't sell for us, or books I choose not to carry. (I don't much like celebrity books, and I stay away from outright politically slanted books because their shelf life is very short.)

We don't return books so I order what I think I can sell. Instead, I reorder just about every day replacing what just sold. That way I'll usually have in stock most of the books that I think will sell, but not so many that I need to return them for credit.  

I mean, it seems to be working. We're going to have a record year, after a very strong previous five years: basically, ever since I transitioned into a full bookstore. 

It's working so well that I don't feel the need to change what I'm doing. It's not like I haven't tried.

I've experimented over the last few years with ordering well in advance, of ordering more often from the publishers, of ordering more new titles and more copies of each one. But when the dust settles, we've sold a bunch of perennial books and not so many bestsellers. So unless there is a sudden surge in demand, I guess we'll just keep doing what we're doing.

I like my store the way it is, frankly. It's what I always wanted it to be.   

Watch out, deep thoughts from a shallow thinker!

Woke up in the morning with the phrase, "The universe in a deck of cards."

I recently learned of the probability that no one--everyone--has ever ended up with the same deck of cards. Shuffling fifty-two cards ends up with as many possibilities as there are atoms in the galaxy. (So it should be "The Galaxy in a deck of cards," but I like the sound of the prior wording.)

Either way, from a human standpoint, the possibilities are virtually endless. Just a fifty-two card deck of that you and me and everyone in the world can hold in their hands. Think of all the inconceivably large number systems of the world that include more than 52 different forms. It's mind boggling. 

So what gives us little, bitty humans the idea that we can predict anything with any possibility?  We can't even solve "Three Body Problem." 

Basically, I suppose I'm talking about chaos theory. 

Yesterday, I looked up from my counter at the store and kind of blurted out to a random customer I was serving, "I can't believe this. Look at all these people milling about! I spent probably twenty years waiting for individual customers to come in and now this!"

I think they just looked at me blankly, but from my standpoint it seems like none of this was ever predictable. It simply can't be, because of all the factors. 

Sometimes I feel like there is something close to ESP among customers--that they all come in at the same moment or disappear at the same moment. But when there are endless possibilities, then endless variations that can and do happen. 

So what I think happens is that humans play the odds, that we rely on Occam's Razor to get through life.

Except when we don't. What really got me started on this line of thought is that I came up with a bit of a conspiracy theory that is both possible and improbable. Linda and I are selling the van we bought to travel with our cat. So the local dealer referred us to a dealer in the valley and we're going to drive over and see about leaving it there.

But of course, having driven three hours, the chances that we won't accept the terms of the deal offered are much less. So what if...what if the dealers are exchanging customers, making sure they clinch the deals?

It makes a certain amount of sense except--people are way too unpredictable to pull that off every time and if it doesn't happen every time, the advantage to the dealer disappears. Occam's Razor.

But it made me realize that once you start thinking in conspiratorial terms, there is no end to it, because there are no end to the possibilities. The possibilities are going to be mostly negative, but you can't prove a negative. That's where conspiracies gain their strength-- you can't really prove that something isn't... or couldn't happen. That way lies madness.

So we all muddle through life, attributing results to our own actions or to luck or to other people or to conspiracies. When all we can really do is try to reason out the odds and hope for the best.  

There's a thing I throw out sometimes when talking about business. It's about an article I read that talked about if you took three hundred companies that are all equal at the start, and they have to eliminate each other in competition for the customer, that one of those companies would end up on top.

So the natural tendency is to believe that the company that ended up on top was the best. That they possessed some secret competitive advantage that we can all learn from. 

But I repeat, you get the same results when all the companies are completely equal. All you need is to introduce the chaos of actual day to day business.

So we'll look back at Steve Jobs and think, "Of course he ended up at the top. He was a genius!" But what if there were hundreds, thousands, of people with comparable talents that just never had the chance? It's always easy to go back and look for the factors that played a part, but that's all in hindsight. 

I'm not saying that positive attributes don't play a part, just as I wouldn't say an Ace in the deck is equal to a Deuce. But that's also assuming that we're the one's shuffling the deck. I suspect that randomness and chaos play a much larger role than we like to think. 

For my own part, I feel thankful and grateful for how my life has turned out, because I feel in my gut that there are so many ways things could have ended up differently.  

I hope this has been helpful.  

I've been ordering books from Ingram on a twice a week basis for years now. 

This week I'm switching to once a day, or at least five times a week. There is no reason not to. I can easily fit that amount of ordering into a morning session, meaning I'd get the books the next day. I've also decided to not order from Scholastic, Simon & Shuster, or Harper Collins unless I have some extra money to stock up at the cheaper discounts. They take much more effort to order, take much more time to arrive, and have completely unpredictable fill rates. 

I'll keep ordering from Penguin Random House because of their wide range of titles, including DC and Marvel material. It's also relatively easy to use and easy to keep track of how much I'm spending. But because they take ten days to two weeks for the books arrive, they will be my second choice on just about everything.

If Ingram doesn't have something and PRH does, I'll order from them. If Ingram only has it from the Tennessee warehouse, I'll also order from PRH, since it would take about the same length of time to arrive. I'll also order a quick copy from Ingram and perhaps a backup copy from PRH if the title is hot enough. 

Both our best year (until now) and the best month we ever had in sales I had dedicated to ordering mostly from Ingram and ordering often. I had a feeling that PRH might be slow this summer and decided to go with Ingram for most everything. As it happened, PRH's warehouse had problems and things took two weeks to show up. Because I'd gone with Ingram, it didn't hurt us.

I don't trust PRH not to have similar problems during the Christmas season. My guess is that they took on way more trouble than they expected when they took on Marvel comics.  

The sales were so much better in August, a record month, that I think the discount difference became much less important. So the fact that it's quick, easy, and predictable is much more preferable than the extra 10% or so I get from ordering from the publishers direct.

If the publishers ever get their act together and get stuff to me in less than a week, I might change my mind. Sadly, if I wasn't ordering comics from PRH, I'd get books from their Reno warehouse in a few days. But because I am, I get my material from a Westminster, New York warehouse. Kind of ridiculous that I can't separate the two things, but there it is.  

 

Verbosities

That vast comfortable man is gone,

in his place a slithering gnashing gnat,

instead of curving complexities,

a lumpy straight line,

no longer a blinding rainbow

but a smear of shit.

the vibrating eternal purr

 a postmortem slime

exploding blue skies

a dark quivering mass. 

 

But other than that...

everything is just fine.