Friday, October 31, 2008

What about books?

What about my wife's store, which carries nothing but used books? You might ask.

Bear with me, as this will require explanation, and perhaps some quibbling over terms.

I think there are two different types of specialty stores.

The first kind is the store that carries a product that only a small fraction of the population is interested in. This is more or less the kind of store that I was talking about in the previous post, the kind of store that I am and am accustomed to.

The other kind of store is the kind that carries a 'commodity' but carries a specialized selection of a commodity.

A commodity is a product that has a wide appeal -- say more than 20% or 30% or 50% or 100% of the population will buy -- bikes, shoes, pants...and I would maintain, books.

The higher the percentage of the populous buys a commodity, the more ways specialty stores can slice it up.

It's different dynamic and one I admittedly don't fully understand.

But based on my wife's store experience, it is a bit easier to maintain a small percentage of a larger group, than a large percentage of a smaller group.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes the 'books' what about the city's off budget DEBT books, good point dunc for mayor.

BIG BEND City of BEND SPENDING... Lets see...

(1)
Hollern gives allegedly $10M property to BULL ( Bend name for Bulletin newspaper ) for free (1998), by allegedly I mean the public-record says it was worth $10M, but is a number someone pulled out their ass. The city buys same property from BULL for $5M with real City of Bend taxpayer DEBT.

(2)
Last year out by Boyd Acres city of Bend again bought a $4M lot with a building from Hap-Taylor, again hidden as debt.

(3)
Last fall city of bend spent over $10M in making the LesSchwab Campussy 'shovel ready', at a cost of $800k/acre. All funds were payable to Knife-River(HapTaylor),aka NW-TAYLOR.

(4)This fall in secrecy an emergency city does same deal for Suterra, this time ten acres, shovel ready, paid by city at a cost of $8M, ok the city allegedly made $2M on the sale, so only lost $6M on the deal. Again all payables to Knife-River ( Hap-Taylor ).

Who does ALL the fucking excavation for HOLLERN? Taylor-NW aka Knife-River.

Above is $25M just the tip of the iceberg during the last year, where is this debt hidden? Where the fuck do they hide these payments??? We know they haven't even yet issued bonds for the LesSchwab.

My humble opinion is what they're doing is using real cash on hand to pay all these 'costs', and NOTE all this Hap-Taylor/HOLLERN, and as Bruce has pointed out here all along a member of Hap-Taylor family sits on council. The rest of the Birds are RE or HOA.

This city can't get loans, on the original loan that KURATEK put together in 2007 for Juniper-Ridge, the best deal they could get was $20M at 20% from UBS, mafia loan rates, this city's credit is fucked.

So now we're sitting on $25M just from this year of debt, where the fuck is this debt??

We here that reserves are low, we here that building&planning is low, but hell SDC's are now deferred and were too fucking low during the bubble to make HOLLERN rich, and of course the low SDC's enabled folks from the valley to come over and build STD's which made even more business for hap-taylor.

Today we have a Hap-Taylor & Brooks Resource crisis in the city. The city was fine, the county was fine!!!

But in the attempt to float cash the city has bankrupted the city to keep hap-taylor and brooks resources afloat with fraudulent land purchases and public works projects that enrich some of the richest companys in the USA ( Suterra is owned by a BILLIONAIRE, and L-SCHWAB ain't hurtin ).

I keep going back to Deschutes County, they're doing fine, they didn't do any stupid shit!! Why cuz the county board isn't beholden to excavators&developers.

The County saw this recesssion coming and planned. The City saw this recession coming, and shuffled as much CASH as DEBT as they could with a straight face in emergence executive secret sessions. Since the BULL is at the epicenter of the WHOLE fucking chinese-pocket-dollar shuffle, complete fucking silence.

Who would have guessed??

Then we have our SORE ( Bend name for the Source weekly newpaper ), complete fucking silence, as they're effectively by advertising revenue owned by Brooks Resources.

Never fear citizenry, the city just budgeted this summer $400k of taxpayer cash to have in a reserve fund payable to a local law firm to defend city council from lawsuits wrt due diligence.

Who would have guessed???

This town has been looted before your very eyes, and not a chipmunk in this town has the balls to talk about it or even run and hide. Like a deer in the headlights, The City taxpayer in Bend is about to get bitch-slapped like you could have never imagined.

Anonymous said...

Never fear citizenry, the city just budgeted this summer $400k of taxpayer cash to have in a reserve fund payable to a local law firm to defend city council from lawsuits wrt due diligence.

Who would have guessed???

This town has been looted before your very eyes, and not a chipmunk in this town has the balls to talk about it or even run and hide. Like a deer in the headlights, The City taxpayer in Bend is about to get bitch-slapped like you could have never imagined.

Run, hide, leave, those who are still here will get stuck with bill of epic default.

Homer calls it 'drinking your own kool-aide'.

Kuratek like Rasputin enamored city-hall with great vision, COVA/COBA, ... et-al convinced city-hall it was just around the corner deja-vu 2004 return in easy-money. So Hap-Taylor & Brooks got the city to do ten's of millions of dollars of debt financing to ride them over during the storm, trouble is now the storm has no fucking end, the city is broke, and hap-taylor & brooks resource are broke.

Like I have said for 2+ year here, Brooks is going down, but its going to bring the city down with it.

I had a very rational talk about this subject this summer with the Deschutes County Controller, and specifically asked if they had done any of this stupid shit that Bend had done, and they said 'NO' a big NO, they had seen the recession coming and planned, and cut back.

Instead the city of Bend, tried to SPEND its way out of the fucking mess, but like all good PUG (rePUGlican ) CORP WELFARE schemes city-hall made sure that ALL the spending ONLY trickled to HOLLERN or Hap-Taylor, and then I guess it was supposed to trickle down???

As people in business know, when you see a financial collapse coming, you don't SPEND, you cut back and survive, this city will not survive, the county will get stuck cleaning up the mess, as they have the deep pockets.

Who would have guessed??

HOLLERN ain't a stupid man, and neither are the Hay-Taylor heirs and family. All of on BB2 saw this coming 3+ year ago.

Bruce is only quoting Sonia the fucking city-financier, this woman is a professional fucking liar, and bruce doesn't ask the right questions, cuz he's always running for office ( but TOO stupid to put his name on the ballot ), his attempt to make all people like him, and always agreeing with everyone means that he never forces anyone to admit their mistakes.

Deschutes County is ran by rational people who deal with truth, the City of Bend is town of liars, cheats, criminals, and common thieves, the trouble is that is 100% of Bend, there is nobody to fix the problems, the kool-aide has permanently disabled the brain.

All these people like sonia & aber-pussy(mayor), have no where else to go, and are not employable in this recession, so they hang on and do their bidding for the owner of Brooks, Hay-Taylor(knife-river), and Bend Bulletin, ...