Penus drawing.

So Pat and I are talking about the penus drawing in Superbad. I tell him I used to know someone in school who did that, and that I thought it was a syndrome.

"I know. I'll google it."

"No! Don't!"

Too late.

Among the penus enlargement ads, I notice an entry about a guy who -- you guessed it -- draws with his penus.

"Does he use a paint brush?"

"Hmmmmm.......I don't know....I'm not going there...."

Volatility?

Volatility.

I had some very high peaks in sales in comics last spring -- Civil War was probably 3 times better a seller than Secret Invasion; Dark Tower Pt. 1, probably sold twice as well as Dark Tower Pt. 2, and so on. So I really didn't expect to be able to match those sales.

Nevertheless, in two months of this year so far, I did match last years sales, which means that some of my other product sold better.

But there are three frankly horrible months interspersed.

So my question for all you stock market types -- what does such volatility signify in other markets?

My own take is -- whenever I've seen a spike in sales, within a year I'd be averaging that spike. I suspect the same is true on the downside.

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Article on KTVZ.com of Bend being the 'new' Boulder, with this comment:

"Isn't that awesome?" Alana Audette, executive director of the Central Oregon Visitors Association, said in reaction to the article. She echoed one theme: "A predominance of new business startups here is largely from people who came here on vacation" and liked what they saw.

Oh, my God.

I've told this story before, but it bears repeating. A few years ago, a lady opened a Mystery bookstore in the Brooks Alley, facing Mirror Pond Parking lot. I won't call it Brooks 'Street' because there is no vehicle access.

Anyway, it was a very nice store, especially for us mystery readers. She really knew her stuff.

But I thought it doubtful that she could cut the customers down to such a small portion; and I especially doubted her location.

Finally, I asked her why she had opened on that spot.

"When I used to visit, this alley was absolutely packed. I'd come for the Market."

In other words, she had come on probably the only days in the entire year when Brook's Alley was super busy, and thought that was normal.


Unlike the COVA director above, I don't think luring tourists into opening businesses in Bend is "awesome." I think it's a recipe for disaster.

1.) They most likely visited on Peak days and hours.

2.) They most likely moved from a bigger town for the small town feel.

3.) They haven't lived in Bend long enough to really get a handle on it.

There seems to me to be only three ways to understand local business conditions: either you do a heck of a lot of accurate research. Or you live here for awhile. Or you have extensive experience in the field you choose, and can make educated guesses.

The most important thing a business needs to do to survive is to calibrate as closely as possible what the most likely sales levels are going to be, and to carry the proper amount of inventory to get there and to have overhead low enough to be covered by that level of sales.

How the hell do you know that? Especially if you are from out of town? Especially if the business is a dream business and you've never done it before?

Lets say you open a restaurant that does an average of 50 tables worth of business a night after 3 years. If you opened with 75 tables for peak hours, and you can still survive with 25 tables business, than you guessed accurately. But if you opened with 100 tables, you overreached.

And every business has the same strictures.

The problem with doing demographic research for Bend, it that it will probably mislead you. Bend really is different -- most people have been here for five minutes, for instance, which completely changes the whole marketing dynamic. If, as is likely, you come from a more populated area and you've seen what you perceive as successful businesses and that Bend is lacking such a business -- your conclusion might be that Bend needs such a business. When your conclusion might ought to be -- that Bend doesn't have such a business for good reasons. That if you actually knew any better, you'd know that several such businesses have already come and gone. And so on....

I've seen many businesses open that had great presentation, great inventory, great service-- and still failed, because there just weren't enough customers.

Bend's population is rather dramatically higher during the peak season, when most business opening tourists are visiting. But that's like visiting a restaurant on a Saturday Holiday night and expecting that to be average. They need to come back in February and November. Take a clicker and stand on the street corner and count how many people walk by, something like that.

So by all means, open a business in Bend. But live here for a year or two or three, first.

Staying focused on the negative.

I know, I know. That sounds strange. For readers of this blog, it may not seem like a problem for me.

But you'd be wrong. I've never been under-confident or timid in my business. I've never lacked for ideas or energy. No, I tend to get brainstorms and pursue them. I tend to believe that can think or willpower myself out of any disaster.

So I'm trying to hold back and say to myself, "Why go there at all?" It's as if I'm in the batters box and I see a flaw in the pitcher's motion, and I say to myself, "I've got a good chance of knocking the ball out of the ballpark!" But the game situation calls for a bunt to advance the runners.....

I'm not above looking around myself and seeing negatives in the local economy and still thinking, "Yeah, but I can do better than that." Then arrogantly ignoring my own advice and pursuing some plan or another that will cost every available resource. And the most likely result? Higher sales and an improved store -- and a zero bank balance.

So I look at the way my brother in law Ernie loses his job at the age of 60, and tell myself -- hold your horses. The future is now. You need to prepare.

I suppose I just believed that things got more predictable and secure as one got older. Instead, I'm seeing the opposite. Friends and family move on, or run into difficulties. The market gets tighter and tighter and it seems like you've got to work harder just to stay in the same place.

I had a guy in his mid to late thirties come in and say, "I used to come in here when I was a little kid and buy baseball cards!" His mother was with him, and started asking my how I had planned this little venture, and I found myself blurting, "I never thought it would be a freaking career!"

Which they thought was pretty humorous.

I still feel like the outsider, the underdog; and yet, here I am -- an 'institution' in this town (or maybe just in my own mind), nearly the last man standing downtown. And it still seems like a day to day proposition to me.

So I'm trying to be 'adult' about this, and take a step back, and try to wrangle some money out of the store.

Temptation is everywhere. More new books, more games, more cards, possibly Warhammer and so on and so on.

So, staying focused on the negative keeps me in check.

If you take out all the extraneous information, it seems pretty clear to me that Bend is dramatically overbuilt; that way too many of my customers were making their living from that growth; and that tourism is at least iffy with gas prices.

Stay focused on that, bucko.

But I'm having a really good month in sales. I had a really good month in sales in February. If I take the huge drop in January out of the equation, I'm really not doing so bad.

But that isn't the point. The point isn't the local economy, or the sales level, or anything like that. The point is to make this store profitable in a cash sense. It is a relatively short period of time I'm trying to do this -- I hope to be able to look back on this time and say, "There is where you finally got ahead."

Part of it is, taking the credit cards down to zero just isn't all that satisfying. (Linda is amazed by this, but I just don't get a frisson out of it.) Not going into debt in the spring is not exactly the same thing as actually making money. (Though, by the end of summer, it will mean more savings.) It's such a slow process, with such little emotional payoff -- that I can only do it by staying focused on the negative.

So much more fun to buy a bunch of 'good' product, and see it sell, and watch the happy customers and humming business.

So, every bit of bad news is savored. I add it to my little motivational talks to myself every morning. "See! Look at That! Be careful, don't be a bozo!"

I only have one more month of this, and then I had planned to loosen the purse strings for summer, as long as I stuck strictly to a budget (which Paul-doh immediately doubted I could do). But the latest news has got me thinking again, and I've decided to raise my spending by 50%, instead of doubling it like I planned.

And just keep reminding myself to be careful.

Step Two complete.

The basic framework is in place. I'm stocking the shelves a bit willy-nilly at first, and I'll refine the display space over the next weeks and months.

It's never as dramatic as I hope, and it never clears quite enough space, but it's a definite improvement. Necessity really is the mother of invention. There is a temptation to want a bigger space, as if that is the answer to all the problems, but I'm convinced I'm better off staying the same place for year after year, decade after decade. Literally.

I'm always amazed by how one can achieve subtraction by addition. I lost almost no display space, and gained a bunch, but it looks as though I have more empty space. Several people asked me if I had brought in more cards -- because they are now in one place instead of spread throughout the store.

As I said, the rest of the changes will be by osmosis, by feel, by mulling it over and sleeping on it. I have some space I can use to display books, and I have to decide how I want to go about it. I simply don't have enough space to do a complete bookstore; maybe enough to warrant regular visits by locals, but really it is more designed to catch the visitors. So it's going to more along the lines of what I was already doing, with better displays.

Scapegoats?

First I should probably tell you my -- as of last month, former -- brother in law is Ernie Pool.
I've always used him as an example of someone who could start working in a lowly position at a young age and work his way up that ladder. Until he gets around 60 years old, that is, and possibly eligible for benefits and other such inconveniences.

That may be a cheap shot, because I should make it clear that Ernie never talked about business to me -- he was a loyal trooper. So everything I say is pretty much conjecture. This is going to affect my sister at an already difficult time for her, and Ernie is good guy.

Still -- this is the sort of thing you can almost guess was going to happen when Mt. Bachelor goes from a locally owned operation to a national corporation. I always say, when the Corp. says that the only changes will be positive, hold onto your wallets.

So....at a guess, the people at the mountain were given less money to work with, higher ticket prices and shorter seasons, a stretched work force, and aging equipment without adequate replacements.

And at a time when almost all the other ski resorts in Oregon numbers are up, Mt. Bachelor is down.

What to do?

Fire top management. (Local management, that is, I'm sure the corporate heads are safely attached...)

Something tells me that not much will change next year. Probably a stronger public relations effort -- never mind that broken chair lift, look how we painted it a new color!

Like I said, I have no inside knowledge. But I think we just saw a great example of scapegoating.

Cha,.cha....cha...Changes......

I feel as though every muscle in my body did 50 sit-ups yesterday. My lower back, has stiffened to the consistency of particle board. I went back to work last night and finished off the last 5 bookcases in preparation for todays switch. Good thing, too, because I was there till midnight again.

I didn't realize what a huge favor my wife had been doing me by making the other 8 shelves. The first one took me an hour, and was a botched job. The second one took me half an hour, but also wasn't pretty. It ended up taking me an average of 45 minutes per case. That, plus the eight trips transporting completed cases and boxes, which was about half an hour each, means I spent about 14 hours just wrestling with bookcases.

I'm hoping that the changeover will go smoothly. I decided that rather than try to move one massive bookcase I'm replacing, I would just take a hammer to it. Take it apart. It's 30 years old, and I doubt it will hold up under another move anyway.

By tomorrow, the basic outline will be complete. That actual stocking is almost as important to the actual look, and that is a more day to day process. So, by around this time next month, the store should look the way I want it to.

I'm also hoping everything fits. I've measured and tried to visualize, but sometimes the actual results just look so wrong, that I have to change it. There's even a possibility of 2 more bookcases, but that's being optimistic on the high side, and usually I have to actually do less than I planned, not more.

The whole point is the streamline the look and flow of the store, and I don't want to wreck that by trying too hard to fit more cases in.

I know I'll be glad when I'm finished. I just don't have the zest for changes that I used to have. But I think if you see a way to dramatically improve your stores look with minimal cost and you don't do it, it may be time to quit. I'm not there yet.

Step One complete

Had five good people show up to help, and Patrick. It wasn't as difficult to move stuff as I thought it would be -- but maybe that was because I had enough help this time. So, that part went relatively smoothly.

Then, as promised, kicked my helpers out. Was there until midnight putting it all back together again. It's still in an uproar, and I'm going to have to leave it that way for another day, and finish it off Tuesday night. As usual, things didn't quite fit, and as usual I had to move a few more fixtures around that I originally envisioned. Changed my mind a couple of times. Just tried to get enough done to leave the store functional for Monday.

I'm not going to get the five shelves around the pillar I hoped, only four -- it blocked off the cash register counter a little too much. Also, it's looking like the way things configured, I'll be adding 3 shelves to the Used Book section, which wasn't my original intent. But, now that it's there in front of me, I can see how that might be even better.

I had a can of flat white acrylic paint and thought I'd give the sport card rack I brought up from downstairs a quick coat. But, it was as if the paint was invisible. It hardly covered anything. Mystified, I gave it a quick coat, came back later and gave it a second coat, but it still didn't want to cover much. A final third and as thick as I could make it coat made it presentable. Next time I go with enamel paint and be done with it!

In the midst of chaos, it always looks worse. I'm always horrified by the dust and dirt and grime in all the nooks and crannies that were invisible before. Always aware that the fixtures are a bit beat up. When all the merchandise is back in place, and artfully displayed, it covers a multitude of sins.

There is always that moment of doubt. But I can still visualize how it will eventually look, and I think it will be a vast improvement. I gain display space, while actually making it look less crowded. Always amazed by how -- if you mull it over long enough, it's possible to have subtraction by addition. Consolidation often not only conserves space, but actually makes the product more impressive by all being in the same place.

It'll take another month or so of moving merchandise around and experimenting before I find best use. The point is to create more capacity, and then figure out how it all fits later. One thing that has made it easier but also more stressful in the past is that I was buying new material to fill in the new spaces. This time, the point is the display the stuff I have a bit better. Less urgency to finish, in some ways. But....well, I'm on my way. The hard part is done.

The most dramatic visual change is yet to come. But, by Wednesday morning, I should have something approximating my vision.