Went back for some after-hours work, last night, passed one of the green transit buses being towed away.

A couple of people on the Bend Bubble Blog 2 seemed to confirm my guess that some of the units that sold in the Franklin Crossing were 'in trade.' They're arguing over the terminology of 'sale', but if the intent was to make people believe they were sales, but they didn't technically use the word sale, I don't see much difference. The emperor is still not wearing any clothes....though he may be wearing a ribbon or two.

Been finishing up an inventory update, which means my employee Pat has had total dominance over the computer at the store. Makes me very antsy not to browse the net all day. Had to do my weekly reorders after hours; come to find out it takes me almost 4 hours for a light reorder. Since I do this automatically during the day, usually, I'm not at all conscious that it takes this long.

I came in at almost exactly 100.00 over budget, for the second week in a row, which isn't too awful since I'd spent over 2/3rds of this weeks budget in advance. But 100.00 a week adds up to 5200.00 a year, so I've got to try harder. As I said, last week is the beginning of my new attempt to stay within budget, and I'm going to post how well I do at that each week, so that I have a record -- to myself, at least -- on why or how I succeeded or failed at sticking to it. Chances are, you'll hear some amazing rationalizations, but I'm hoping not.

I've done a preliminary estimate of cost of goods vs. sales so far this year. Not a pretty sight in three of the categories; in fact, I spent more than I made. But a couple of the other categories are doing very well. So well in fact, that I may have to retract my statement that business is "NEVER" any good between mid-Feb to Mid-March; if I haven't just performed a double whammy curse on myself for saying it outloud.

I'm committed to keeping the lower performing categories operational, but I'm also going to slowly let them find the level they would naturally find if they weren't constantly propped up.
That is, every category is starting even, and now it's time to see where they settle. I'm doing it by feel, mostly, because that seems to work best for me. As long as the OVERALL budget comes in, I'm fine will spending more than I should on some and less on others; as long as there feels like a good reason.

New books, tecnically, aren't really bringing in much profit -- but they are bringing in people, the people are staying a browsing longer, and sales are much higher in other parts of the store because of it. Sports cards have had a real down time, lately, after doing well for a year and a half, but I have some much backstock, that if could ever somehow get this stuff selling again, I've got lots of profit potential. (All it may take is a new superstar of the Ichiro, or Shaq caliber.)

Anime and manga have both fallen off a great deal, but at the same time Japanese culture keeps making a bigger impact on our culture. I willing to wait and see where it leads.

Several other of the categories have enough really cool stuff offered, and enough opportunities to pick up stuff at reasonable prices, that I'm willing to just coast.

The categories that are doing well -- comics and graphic novels, are already fully supported, so diverting some of the money that I'm spending on the lower performing items wouldn't really help all that much.

The overall mix just feels right, from a marketing standpoint. No doubt, a MBA graduate would think I'm an idiot, but he can go work for IBM or something. What I do is so small and intuitive that I really have to think for myself.