Once you carry it, you always carry it.

My usual reaction to a failing product line isn't to give up, but to try to do it better. To try to figure out what I'm doing wrong. The figure out an angle that make it works, at least marginally.

Often, I let a fair amount of time go by once I realize a product isn't working. I'll sell down on the product, giving it marginal support, giving people deals when I get the chance. Sometimes I'll shrink down the amount of space I give to it. This can actually take a year or two. Since I already paid for the product, and am not replacing it, the profits are high enough to keep going.

So I don't get rid of it, at first.

Sports cards, once again, are the best example. For a long time, I could sell enough packs to continue carrying the product. Boxes pretty much stopped selling, sets pretty much stopped selling, singles (both stars and common, old or new) stopped selling. So I let those parts of the hobby fade. I stopped buying and trading singles, boxes, sets....

But I kept carrying just enough new brands opened for packs sales to keep it alive.

I was visiting another store in another state, and they had an interesting stack of boxes. A Stack of Wax, if you will. It looked impressive, and I wondered if I could maybe do the same thing.

My intent was to go ahead and make another try at making cards work. My intent was to keep the pack sales going, but to try to leap forward by ordering enough extra boxes of new product to create the Stack of Wax. I would price the boxes high enough to actually earn a decent profit if they sold, but slightly cheaper than I could've got selling them by the pack. Figured I win either way.

Instead of buying one box, selling through the packs, and buying another, I would buy two or three boxes, put one out for sale for packs, and stack the other two. I knew it would take awhile to create a Stack of Wax, so I was willing to break even while it was happening. Packs would pay for boxes.

An interesting thing happened. Without realizing it, my packs hadn't been selling all that well. What had been happening was, I was selling down half a box before they'd slow to a trickle. But since at the same time, I'd also been busting enough random packs to sell singles, I hadn't realized how slow the packs were selling.

With the new strategy of buying full boxes of cards, I decided I would forgo singles altogether, since I knew they weren't profitable. So the packs started slowing down, and spaces didn't develop for boxes to be opened, and the Stack of Wax grew quickly.

And then --- the boxes started selling. Sometimes I'd have a single customer buying them, sometimes two or three, and on really good months I'd have four or five. I was more or less making a small amount with two buyers, and when you blended in all the other sales, sports cards were profitable again.

My margins were in the secondary tier of margins -- about 20% less than I get for comics and books, but about the same as I get for toys and dvd's.

The amount of work involved in ordering and selling boxes is much less than singles. The amount of space a Stack of Wax takes up isn't a very big footprint -- a winning attribute in my crammed store.

So, on the verge of giving up on Sports Cards altogether, I stumbled upon a way to make them work.

Right now, I've been letting my anime and my manga sell down. I've been cutting back on the space I've been giving them.

But I'm not yet ready to give up. I think I'll keep shrinking them down to a manageable footprint, and then....order and keep in stock the ten bestselling series in both categories. If that doesn't work, it will be back to the drawing board.

Of course, sometimes there really isn't anything I can do. I gave up on non-sport card singles and sets, though I still sell packs. The other day, I was taking a break downstairs and I started eyeballing the non-sport singles.

What would happen, I thought, if I packaged my Beatles singles or my Star Wars singles or my Marvel Masterpiece singles in batches of 20 and sold them for a dollar? Hmmmmmmm....

Truth is, I just don't have time for that. But some day.

Like I said, there has got to be a way.