Telling a whopper, to someone who knows better...

Linda and I have returned from one of our periodic 3 day bus man's holidays, visiting bookstores along the way.

We hadn't been to Klamath Falls in ages; the last time I saw the downtown area, it looked as though a neutron bomb had gone off. This time -- it was better, looking more like La Grande or Baker City's downtown, still struggling but slowly improving.

We found a used bookstore on the outskirts and had a long talk with one of the employees. She mentioned that the owners had just bought the store, and that they charge a dime with every transaction.

Linda and I can't help but tell her about our policy -- but in the middle of the conversation she tells us a bombshell that leaves me speechless.

"Oh, yes," she says, "We made $$$$$ last month."

I stop talking and stare at her. "Never mind anything we said," I said. "Keep doing what you're doing."

This happens to me quite often. Someone tells me something that simply can't be true. Sort of like, "Yeah, we took our pigs out to the airport so they could do a flyover."

But what you going to do, call them a liar?

With that kind of money, the previous owners could've hired a full time manager and a couple of employees and gone on constant vacation and still had money left over -- which begs the question of why they would sell.

Usually it's a customer who tells me one of these whoppers, and I always just nod my head, figuring that something got lost in translation. And I think that much of this kind of information comes from employees who overhead something and just misunderstood.

Or, possibly, sadly, owners who simply aren't telling the truth.

It was a pretty nice used bookstore, but on the outskirts of a economically struggling small town. Every bookstore we went into had rents that were roughly a third what Linda and I pay. And none of them had anywhere near the drive-by or foot traffic. Nor were the customers anywhere near as prosperous looking as those in Bend.

More on that later.

So we get to Grants Pass, and find a very nice new and used bookstore there. We have another long conversation, and again start talking about our bookstore and again the manager lets loose with a statistic that stops me cold. Again, I nod my head and congratulate her.

And again, we walk to our car shaking our heads.

Both figures that both stores gave us were, quite frankly, impossible. And completely unbelievable. But most people would probably accept them at face value.

This has happened, like I said, many times over the years. And almost always, the store that told me the whopper was gone a short time later.

Why do they do it? I mean, I've told them I've owned a store for 25 years, so surely they could come up with an inflated figure that was at least believable.

I think it's mostly just sloppy talk and sloppy thinking and sloppy information gathering. Or they are just trying to one up us.

But they don't have to tell us something that makes me want to roll my eyes up into my head and groan.

Every time I'm in my wife's store, she has 5 or 10 or 15 people walking around, most of them bringing in bags or boxes of books. Her store is twice the size of any that we saw on our trip, and much much busier. Both her and my store are hopping and prosperous and usually better inventoried than the stores we were looking at.

Seriously, the store we first went into, would have had to do, oh, I don't know -- 30 times the business we were seeing them do. And at a dime per transaction, more like a 100 times.

And none of what they were saying was in evidence in the stores themselves. They were all pretty bare bones compared to our stores, and the usual neglect in straightening and cleaning.

Nice little fairy land they live in.

Basically, to do what the second store said they did, they'd have stacks and stacks of books around the counter and one or two employees doing nothing but filing books. And a constant line of customers at the counter buying, buying -- to possibly reach the numbers we were told. Or twice the size of store or twice the sales price of
any store I know about. (When in fact, their trade policies were such that not much money would change hands in each trade.)

Remember...these are quiet towns, small towns, small amounts of money per transaction. Bend is a boom town compared to any of these places.

So...well, I always want to say, hey, we know what's in the realm of possibility. And what's just a whopper. Try telling it to someone who doesn't know better.



Anyway, more on our trip, later.