Monday, March 21, 2011

Bring on Spring Break!

I'm getting $4000.00 worth of retail reorder product coming on Tuesday. Completely restocking games, cards, and new books.

Last week, I completely restocked on graphic novels.

I'm also getting $3000.00 worth of regular shipments from Diamond.

And probably $1000.00 more in reorders by the end of the week.

That should be enough to satisfy even a spendaholic like me. That's about 2 to 3 times more than I should probably be getting on any one week, but it seems to be where and how the schedule of restocking fell.

Partly, I'm ordering the bulk of my material in the first quarter of every billing period, so I have most of the billing period in which to make sales.

This means, that if I sell something right away, it could be as long as 3 or 4 weeks before I get it back in, because I have to wait for the next billing period. Spot shortages, I call them, and they are the bane of my existence.

If I ordered a more equal amount of the budget each week, any spot shortages would be more quickly filled.

Still, I'm more comfortable with allowing the spot shortages to occur (and for the vast majority of product that doesn't happen) because the store is so full of other good stuff that I don't think I'm usually disappointing the customer. Eventually (actually it's already starting to happen) I save enough money by doing it this way that I can start ordering more than one copy at a time.

And there are the shipping costs to be considered. I have to order a "minimum" from each publisher, to save on postage -- so I couldn't divide my orders into four equal weekly shipments even if I wanted to. And for those distributors who don't have minimums (which cover shipping costs), it still saves to put most of the orders into one shipment.

This is wonky, I know, but it's nearly the essence of running a retail storefront.

What, when, and how much product -- and how much you pay, and how much the shipping.

Nuts and bolts.

4 comments:

H. Bruce Miller said...

Do you have any sense of how the spring break tourism trade is doing? I haven't noticed more than the usual number of out-of-state cars. Shitty weather is not going to help, for sure.

Duncan McGeary said...

I don't expect spring break to provide much of a boost anymore.

Unlike summer tourists, the spring break tourists don't seem to spend money in my shop.

I think it's because they tend to be more local, and less loose with their vacation spending because they're here for shorter periods.

Anonymous said...

What a shitty spring? I mean the kids want to be warm and booze up. Bend has the booze, but where in the fuck is the warmth & sun? "I want to go to MY-AMI"

This spring, you can just call it an HBM-SPRING, and leave it at that.

Anonymous said...

I haven't really made a comment about Libya. So I'll just say this ...

1.) Libya has the cleanest and best oil in the world. Lowest natural sulfur content. AmeriKKKa's stealth fighters need Libyan Crude, like Bend Vultures need corpses. Like Bend banker HO's love fraud. Like Bend cops crave drake-park geese shit.

2.) OREO-OBAMA just approved a TRILLION dollars worth of new spy-planes aka Lockheed-Martin. A big part of his trip to SO-AMERICA is to get them to order some and the Austrailian gub is being pushed.

These new spy-bombers allow the USA to fly anywhere in the world un-detected and drop bombs, they fly at twice the speed of sound. Where the past century was battleships and aircraft carriers, this ameriKKKan century will be spy-plane-bombers. What's interesting is that the new TRILLION dollar budget means that the USA will have 20X more bombers than CHINA, and 18X more than RUSSIAN. Once again proving that the USA can kill everyone in the world 10X+ anytime they wish,...