THE ROTTING POLAR BEAR

Lots of interesting news this morning, from the city of Bend suing the broker for the BAT buses, to local housing prices dropping, to the lovely little article about my friends Aaron and Char's keeping romance in a marriage. But what caught my attention was the rotting Polar Bear, and the headline, "Everything has a shelf-life."

Ain't it the truth.

When I first bought Pegasus, I remember making 5 year plans, even 10 year plans. Nowadays, I think making a 3 year plan is pretty daring.

When I first watched some of my competition giving up, I thought I had won. Then I realized they may been the smart ones. No sense being the best 'buggy-whip' maker in the world. I'd watch businesses pop up at the peak of the fad, and then die out at the bottom. Then I realized that for at least a few smart retailers, that is all they intended to do.

When I first started renting, I thought the spot was mine forever, as long as I paid my rent on time. Now, I wonder if even a valid lease is enough if they want to tear the building down around your ears.

When I first started selling comics, it never occurred to me that comics might become obsolete through technology. Or that I'd buy thousands of dollars in anime videos, only to have them become useless.

When I first started selling comics, cards, toys, etc., I thought they were such tiny little sidelines that the big mass market chains would leave us alone. I carried baseball cards for five years before they really entered the mass market, but when they did---they trounced us. For pogs, we had all six months of the fad to ourselves -- I remember walking by KMart and seeing that they had literally reproduced our display right down to the same products on the same shelves, and chuckling to myself because the fad had already died.

Nowadays, we seem to get very little time to ourselves for a new trend. Every year, they seem to be making deeper inroads into my territory. Amazon just announced a huge increase in sales, and at least part of that was graphic novels, apparently, enough so that my wholesaler announced that Amazon is the biggest comic retailer in the world.

So, yeah, I worry about my store becoming a big rotting polar bear. I'm not quite in the same spot as say record stores, or toy stores, or even bookstores. No major 'comic book' chain has opened, for instance. No, it's more like being nibbled to death by ducks. A little nip there, a big chunk here, and so on. Another reason I'm so intent on diversifying, and another reason I try to find offbeat and unusual material.

It's why I don't sell video games, or DVD's (except for anime), and why I'm quite content to sell new books as a sideline. It isn't possible to BEAT Walmart and Barnes and Noble, or even really compete in a meaningful level, but you might be able to find enough funky, strange, and unusual items and stick the best-sellers in the middle of them, and scrape enough business to get by.

Early in my career, I met a guy who's job was to service big main-frame computers. He said, he had two partners, one of which had already retired and the second was about to retire, and that when the last mainframe has weezed to a stop, he would retire. His entire job was predicated on becoming obsolete. But someone had to do it.

My own personal sense of the time line is, that the nibbling has only begun, but I have enough experience and savvy by now to keep avoiding the complete obsolescence of my business. I think that I'll be able to finish my career as a pop-culture retailer.

But my advice to anyone starting out would be to be very, very nimble. Don't get locked into any one product line or way of doing business.

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I'm beginning to see a pattern, here. I'll be doing this blog in the morning, and probably try doing work on my Daily Novel blog during the day and evening.