Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Complete or delete? Complete or delete?

My finger is still wavering over the two buttons.

On one hand, books are the one bright spot in my store.

On the other hand, its the classic and cult books that I buy at full wholesale which are selling, not these liquidation books.

On the one foot, I can't afford to stock my store with non-fiction except if I get a deal.

On the second foot, I'm not sure that getting non-fiction is necessary; that is, trying to be a full bookstore may not make much sense. Fiction sells. Maybe I should stick with that?

O.K. I've run out of hands and feet, so we'll go to fingers.

On the fifth finger, If I'm going to get these books at all, it makes sense to get them before Christmas.

On the sixth finger, I could wait to see if I actually make money at Christmas, and use actual profits to purchase merchandise, instead of debt (future profits?).

On the seventh finger, while the cheaper books may not sell all that well, the used books seem to sell better because they're surrounded by more books. The more books I have, the more books I sell.

On the eighth finger, not buying anything is boring and I can't stay engaged with the store unless I'm trying to improve it.

On the ninth finger, I don't have to go crazy with improvements. Incremental improvements work too.

On the tenth finger, it roughly takes ten times longer to pay for product than it does to order it. So I can get in ten kinds of trouble.

And so on and so on.

I'm not wishy-washy. (Well, maybe a little....) But these decisions are never clear cut, and you don't really know if you made a mistake until much later.

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