After years of more or less ignoring back-issue comics, we've reversed course since Covid and are trying to collect as good a back-issue stock as we can get. Part of it is the change in the market and part is because we've been given some collections relatively inexpensively. They're a chore to make salable, but it's also fun to do. Giving each comic a fresh bag and board really makes them look nice. 

Some former customer (and current friend!) donated a few boxes to the store a couple days ago. I took them home yesterday and started to work on them. About 600 of them were titles worth working on (the other 200 were fine, just not immediately salable. These we leave out for people who might want them for very low cost.)

Linda and I put on the extended versions of LOTRs. They movies are so comfortable that in some ways they've become background noise. At the same time, I noticed more than I had before how many changes there were to the books, and how well placed the changes were. They made the movies work, frankly. But they also aren't the books anymore. 

Fair enough.

Still have Return of the King to watch and taping and pricing the comics. 

It's a very satisfying and enjoyable process.  

More and more I find myself not knowing about something that the general public is aware of. This is something that has always bothered me. I seek information, I want to know what's happening. But I've lost or eliminated a bunch of news sources that I used for years. I can no longer get the paper versions of either The Bulletin or The Oregonian. I dropped the New York Times because I felt they were pandering to the MAGA, softening the news or outright slanting it. (I know, I know, the news has always been slanted, but I felt they were going too far.)

So I've been reduced to some left-leaning online magazines that are irritating me more and more. Click bait headlines and amateurishly written essays that lose the lede more often than not. And talk about slant!  It's wearying.  

I was startled to read the Business Insider recently and find zero evidence that they think anything is unusual. Which is just weird.

It seems like the two extremes are Click Bait screaming or normalizing horrible behavior. (Not counting the MAGA press which is doing what the leftist press is doing by ten times more and also lying shamelessly. 

AP isn't doing enough stories for my taste. USA Today has been hiding under the news label while being a rag for a long time now. I'm thinking about bringing back the New York Times so that I can at least get a general overlay of the news. They gave in and called the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, which is pure cowardice. But they do cover a lot of information, more than anyone else.

I know that there are other sources, but they are mostly behind paywalls. If I have to pay for one of those the NYTimes looks like the best of them. 

Had a swollen gum last night and it really worried me. I thought I'd have to go to the dentist and have them tell me, "Told you so!" Washed it with salt and woke up this morning with it feeling normal. We'll see how the day goes, but I am relieved.

 

Dreamed Michelle Obama came into my store and asked for any 2000AD comics I might have. I recommended a Judge Dredd graphic novel. I tried to interest her in European artists, but she was only interested in Judge Dredd.  

 

Getting up early and getting all the work done before opening is still the way to go. I kind of enjoy it, frankly. I can just dink around the store straightening and cleaning. We're at maximum capacity right now. Not sure I can squeeze anymore in. Then again, I've been saying that for years. I guess more to the point, I'm not sure if I should squeeze anymore in.  

 

We were offered yet more Pokemon from our distributor yesterday. Up until now we've had to try to stretch our allocations as best we can but I think we might be finally catching up to demand. Prices haven't moderated much, but the demand seems to be down. At some point the two lines will cross and I'll need to be more careful.

I'll continue on ordering full allocations until the end of the year but I'll need to be careful about the slow months of next year.  

You don't hear me bitterly complaining anymore about the street closure events downtown because it is no longer killing us. We have enough mainstream product in the store now to at least approach average sales. When we were a "specialty" store it used to kill us.

Yesterday I worked extra hard trying to respond to the hordes of people coming through the door, and ended up at slightly less sales than the previous Sunday. The same thing was true on Saturday. I came home utterly exhausted with the song "Too Many People" running through my brain:

"Too many people going the Fall Fest
Too many reaching for a piece of cake
Too many people pulled and pushed around
Too many waiting for that lucky break"

 

I still feel sorry for any specialty stores downtown, especially service businesses. But I also feel that when I was trying to get the Downtowners to slow down adding new events there were very few if any store owners willing to speak up, though many probably secretly agreed with me. All it did was make me look like the bad guy, as if I was trying to keep people from having their fun.

 

So be it... 

 

 

I woke up in the dark and drove to the store with the car lights on and I felt fine. 

I've been a night person for as long as I can remember. But over the last few years, I've found myself wanting to go to bed earlier than my standard 12:30, but every time I did it I'd wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back to sleep.

This summer, business was so strong that it simply became impossible to put away books while customers were in the store. I started going in early, before opening, but I was only getting a few hours of sleep. So I set out to change my schedule.

It took over two months, but I think I'm finally there. I went to sleep at 10:00 last night, but 11:00 is fine too. I usually wake up at least once, but I've learned to just wait to fall back to sleep, which seems to happen if I don't panic. 

I'm going to keep up this new schedule if I can. There will be another challenge when the hours fall back in November, but I'm going to take whatever time it takes to get used to that schedule as well.  

I'm turning yet another toy shelf over to books. Toys have always been part of the mix for the store because I couldn't figure out what to put on the walls over seven feet from the floor. 

Turns out, I can put special editions books face out, as well as sets of books. Yes, it's a little inconvenient, but they sell at least as well as the toys have been doing over the last few years.

I stocked up on toys while Diamond, our comic wholesaler, was still in business. But they're gone and I have no inclination to try to open accounts with toy wholesalers who are notoriously unreliable. We have enough toys to last us a few years, while we transition those spaces into books and graphic novels, probably keep about half of them, which is fine. We're doing the same thing with board games. There are a stupid number of board games coming out, so we're sticking to the tried and true, even though games like Catan and Ticket to Ride are selling in the Targets of the world.

 

We've transitioned our retirement account from 70% equities (that's the stock market) to 30%, which is safer at our age. The rest is fixed income of one kind or another, or cash. I simply do not trust the stock market anymore.  

 

I've finally settled into the new sleeping schedule. Usually in bed by 11:00 now, instead of 12:30, and usually up by 7:00 now, instead of 8:30. Gives me enough time to drink my coffee, peruse the news, and then drive to the store by around 9:00. Spend two hours putting books away in a quiet store and leave at 11:00 before I get a ticket and the customers arrive. Usually get home by noon. 

I'm not looking forward to the time change. It's going to be starting all over again.  

Finished the 2024 taxes. 

What a mind-draining activity. Make one computational error and I have to start all over. The longer I do it, the more mistakes I make, even when I try to take breaks. It could be done in one day, if I measured by hours, but takes two days measured by energy and probably should be three days to be sure. 

Rough estimate of the operational profits from the store is pretty close to 2023.

I've always played it conservatively, not trying for any questionable deductions. I've never claimed travel, entertainment, or home office expenses. The store is pretty much self-contained because that's the way I made it. 

This year I seriously considered including home wifi and streaming services. Pegasus Books by any measure is a pop culture store and I need to keep up with what's going on in the entertainment business.

In the end I decided not to fight that battle since we are so close to the end of our tenure as store owners. 

That will be Sabrina's decision when the time comes. 

Last year, I tried to be careful in my purchasing, looking for the best margins. Our sales were down from the previous year, but not outrageously. I just figured we were experiencing a slow decline from the Covid peak of 2022. 

This year I decided to quit chasing margins and concentrate on what was selling and being aggressive about keeping it in stock. So far, we're up by 20% over last year, and we'll almost certainly going to have a best year by more than 10%. 

A few percentage points in margin pretty much gets washed away by that much of an increase in sales.

I always seem to come back to the conclusion that I should just order what sells and keep ordering what sells and pay whatever I have to, within reason, to keep it in stock. 

Lesson learned once again.  

A customer asked me if we carried used books. "The reason I ask is that you have a much broader range of titles than most bookstores."

She gave us an unintended compliment. Because that's exactly what we do. Because most people don't come in on Tuesdays to buy the latest bestseller, or reserve books in advance, or join a "book club," or any number of other things most regular bookstores do, we've arrived at a different process. 

We concentrate on "midlist" books. Oh, we get the new bestsellers, but we don't get stacks of them. Because the Oregon warehouse for Ingram books is just two days away, we don't really need to. All we really have to do is keep track of what's selling and reorder immediately, which we do. Because we don't have money tied up in stacks of bestsellers, we can buy more titles. 

I focus on perennial sellers. Books that continue to sell, even if their bestseller status has faded from the national lists. Part of this is because we are very oriented toward tourists. This summer has really proven that. Our sales have dropped almost in half from our pinnacle of sales in August (not to worry, sales are still really good, but sales reached a record level last month). So...well, I guess something like 35 to 45% of books that sold were to tourists.  

It all seems to work for us. Each store has to adapt to their own circumstances, and we seemed to have stumbled on a formula that works really well for us.  

Boycott Disney?

I think about half of my shop is tied up with Disney. All the Marvel, all the Star Wars, the DIsney books and the shipping of Marvel comics from Penguin Random House. Take those away and there is a huge hole created. 

Simply not possible.  

The original sin was allowing these companies to grow so big. Monopolies, basically. Now my very life's blood is tied up with them. Whenever I've had the chance I've tried to diversify, but eventually, the Big Fish eat the Small Fish. 

It's pretty fucked up and probably too far along to ever be reversed. Which then begs the question: is our society, politics, and economy too far gone to be reversed? 

Put that way, the answer if pretty obvious.  

I need to do something. I think I'll have to take up writing again. The big fantasy world. 

How do I make it different? How do I escape the Tolkien trap? Do I want to escape the Tolkien trap? How do I write a book like LOTRs without copying LOTRs? 

Is the template so rigid and inviolate that it can't be altered except by simply putting each important piece with something equal? If you do try to escape the trap, do you simply destroy the trap and make it something completely different?

I've seen authors make LOTR's more violent and brutal, I seen Frodo replaced by a rapist and murderer, I've seen all the background elements simply made bigger or more complicated. I've seen settings in every conceivable historical parallel. I've seen the characters' gender and race changed into every gender and race. I seen every kind of religious and political construct. 

But at the base of it all, it's just switching one thing for another same kind of thing. 

To write the grand fantasy, you still need the quest. You still need the talisman. You still need the innocent hero's journey. You still need the companions. You still need the great evil. 

Change any of these things and they become what? Something other than heroic fantasy. Steampunk, cyberpunk, urban, romance, SF, magic realism, whatever. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it isn't any longer LOTR's. 

I know. It's stupid question. You can't do a LOTRs without doing LOTRs light. You'll never have the breath of background in setting, language, knowledge of mythology that Tolkien had. Everyone who tries it comes across as a shallow reflection.  

The Westminster warehouse of Penguin Random House has finally, this week, caught up. They've been dreadfully behind on their shipments for most of the summer. Fortunately, I decided in July to buy primarily from Ingram, though my discount is lower. At the time, I thought I was saving 10 days of waiting. As it turned out, I probably saved myself 20 days of waiting.

I have to wonder if taking on Marvel and the hundreds of titles they represent didn't overload the Westminster location. I've thought from the start that PRH probably didn't fully understand what they were taking on. 

I tried to get transferred to the Reno warehouse, but apparently as long as I get comics from Westminster, it has to be my primary warehouse, even though Reno is only three shipping days away. Their loss. I will continue to order from Ingram first and PRH second, though I'd flip that if I had Reno. I pretty sure PRH doesn't care. 

 

We met our goals for the month. I worked a long Sunday at the store, came home and went for a nap at 8:00 and woke up the next morning at 8:00.  I don't know if I've done such a thing since childhood. 

What it was, I think, is a collapse from a self-induced extroversion overdose. My store persona at full speed. 

I can relax now. We've done what we set out to do for the summer, now I expect that the store will turn back into a pumpkin. (Though I have 25 full pages of reorders to do...) 

The weather has turned, so we're probably in for some slower days. I'm not going to order as much unless we have at least average summer days if not better.

But it will still be a record, just not as much as I'd hoped. We'll still be caught up on all bills and with the amount of savings I expected. Mid-month, I was hoping for more, but changing the goalposts because we were doing so well wasn't really fair. 

We could have saved more, but we'd be out of some valuable inventory and we'd probably have had make bigger orders to replace product in Sept., so this is more realistic.

We have to reach normal "fall" sales this week to break-even, which should be easy enough. If we can do a little more in savings, I'll keep it. I'm not going to make any orders until next Tuesday morning. I'm going to just rest on my laurels. 

I've done the job. As I said, we could have saved more by not buying so much Pokemon and Magic, but that stuff is going to sell over the next year and I'll be very glad to have it.  

 

So next year. The project will be to maximize profit, while not going backward on inventory. To do so, I'll have to pay a lot of attention to which books I should be ordering quickly from Ingram and which books I should be ordering for more discount from the publishers. 

I'm now fully convinced that I am better off ordering from Ingram at 42% margins, but getting replacements within a couple of days than I am ordering from the publishers at anywhere from 52 to 55% margins but not getting them for more than 10 days. 

But what I can do is both. A hot title reordered from Ingram every time it sells, but also ordering from the publisher at higher margins as back stock. It's a completely intuitive process and not completely predictable, but I feel as long as I'm paying sufficient attention, I can do it.

This works especially well when we have a long series or an author's full bibliography. That is, I can order to fill holes and wait because I've already got a large selection for the customer to buy from.  Other than the occasional customer who needs a specific number or title, that works fine. And if they request it, then I can order from Ingram then and there. 

So, for instance, we have about 15 PKD books in stock. We could probably add another 15 books of his we don't have, but there is already a good selection of books for the customer to choose from. I can take the extra time to order from the publisher for the higher discount.

This also takes care of the space problem. Money and time aren't as big of problems for us as space is. So I'm constantly having to figure out ways to fit things in. What to let go of and what to add. Adding titles to space already dedicated to a series or an author makes all kinds of sense.

No more time for experimenting or for long-term projects (which I have always done over the last 42 years). I'm quickly coming to the end of my tenure and then it will be for Sabrina to do as she sees fit. A year and a half away, but time is moving so fast... 

 

 

Apparently, I (Pegasus) did make the news. A short clip where I say the tariffs haven't had much of an effect on us, that I could see. I did get to say my favorite phrase. "I've owned the store for 42 years and we've been here for 45 years." I sounded calm and reasonable, which was what I was striving for.

 

I've been saying for awhile that a good portion of our customers are passersby. Yet...when I open early or stay late, there is a constant stream of people walking by. I hit the officially open hours and people start coming in.

Could I have been wrong about this? (Interesting concept...nah.)

"This store was made for me," a customer says as he saunters out of the store empty handed except for the coffee he came in with.

 

 

Guy says, "The word Nazi is used too much."

I turn and mutter, "A Nazi is as a Nazi does..."

I think he might have heard me. 

 

Seven hours. I'm just not used to that. Usually Sunday in the winter is 4 hours, I lengthened that to 5 hours officially in the summer, and I've added two more hours while business is booming. But it seems like a big difference. Add in the hour an a half before opening and the hour of commute. 

 

 

 

Even getting here early, it's taking me four hours to get the daily shipment put away. Also refreshing the Magic and Pokemon and doing some cleaning and straightening. 

That seems to be about average now. Considering I'm coming in every day and the extra hours on Sunday, I'm at the store 30 hours a week.  I figure I spend another four hours per day making orders, say five times a week, and I'm suddenly working 50 hours. 

So much for practicing retirement.

But what is happening right now is unusual and it won't continue for much longer. Not sure what sparked it, but I'll take it.  

We're so busy, it's almost scary. I think I can safely say that this past week was the busiest we've ever been outside the weeks before Christmas. We've kept up the quality and stock, but only by upping our hours at the store. Turns out, you do more business---you do more work. 

I spent a ton of money on backstock in Magic when I realized that all the old stuff is starting to disappear. Our competitive feature is that we have a whole bunch of different releases of Magic going back years. They sell slowly but steadily. But once they're gone, they're almost impossible to replace. 

I checked all over the internet to see what kind of prices were happening and discovered I was slightly too high on a few releases but far too low on others. I just wasn't paying attention. Today I'm going in early to adjust prices accordingly. 

I'm certainly glad that I went on a Pokemon splurge. Everything I was offered and everything they would allow me to buy. I bought from a whole lot of places I've never bought before. 

We've been rewarded for our efforts. 

Same thing with books. I'm not even hesitating to buy books that sold or books that look interesting. I'm ordering almost everyday now, and getting them in fast. I'm going in early almost every morning to get them put away. 

Again, we've had a good response.

It was very possible that I could have spent too much money--way too much, at that--but I could sort of sense the trajectory of sales and trusted my instincts. (My experience...)  

I know this probably won't last more than a week or two more. The moment there is a whiff of Fall in the air, people switch thinking from vacation buying to school preparing. 

I'm not sure it being a little slower will be a bad thing, as long as I control the budget. 

Oh, and this is fun and energizing to see. Very gratifying to see the results of all our efforts.  

This may be the best 7 day stretch, outside of the week before Christmas, that we've ever had.  I think we might be able to maintain that average over the next four days, Thurs, Fri, Sat, and Sun as well. (Yep, today on Thursday, we are well over our best average.)

Did I save oodles of money? Actually, the opposite. I spent most of it. I've ordered books every day and I've ordered as much Magic and Pokemon as I can. So if you count the inventory, I did actually make a lot more money, but it won't appear until later. 

It's the way I've always done it when things are going well. Spend to keep the momentum going so that when it drops you still have enough to last you through the lean times. It seems to have worked so far. 

Right now we've gone from struggling to keep two viable Pokemon booster products in stock to having nine viable booster packs. We've gone from about four total sets to more than twelve. I've also bought every box of older Magic that my main supplier has. I am starting to use a couple of large online outfits to order more Magic and Pokemon, which I've never done before.

A bubble? Maybe, but it's still summer and Christmas is coming. 

My sense is that the current demand for these cards is drying up the back supply that was always there. My main supplier has maybe a quarter as much as they used to have.

I'm basically not even trying to make savings goal this week. I'm going to try to make it up in the fourth and fifth weeks of summer. (I'm attributing the first Tues. in Sept. to summer, which still leaves the usual four weeks for Sept.)  

 

Meanwhile books pile up with every shipment, but by the time the next reorder comes in, there is space again. A really healthy trend. We get tons of compliments. (I think probably all bookstores do....)

 

I happened to check my main supplier again after writing the above to see what kind of boosters of Magic they had. They only had about 20 or so brands, most of them newer brands and/or brands no one wants. This is different even from a week ago, when I know I could have ordered at least a dozen brands that have now suddenly disappeared.

This supplier is the canary in the coal mine. They've always on top of things and if they're running out, Oh, Boy. When this happened with Pokemon, I immediately started scouting for product and accepting all allocations and weekly specials and that has proven to be a hell of thing.

This spurred me to check online to see what was available there. Long story short, I ended buying a huge amount of Magic from the three places. Every brand I could find that still fit into our pricing scheme.

Wow.

But when you see product dry up my main supplier, it means it's going to dry up everywhere else too. Most stores only carry maybe ten releases of Magic. With this latest batch, I wouldn't be surprised if are near 100 or so.

It's the one thing that works for us. We can't sell boxes and make money. We don't do tournaments or have play space. We don't do singles. Booster packs are what works for us.

It's the same thing I did with Pokemon, and I think that has really paid off.

I want to be a store that everyone comes to because they know we'll have it. And this summer has been so good, that even this big batch of orders is well within the budget. 

Can a store get too many customers? 

I think this answer is yes. We have been absolutely swamped the last four days or so, this after an already very busy month of July. (Third best in sales ever, but without a doubt the month we've had the most people in the door.) It's fun and exciting and....exhausting.

The usual reaction would be to expand the space and hire more employees. But that ain't going to happen. The reason we have so many customers is because of the space we have and where it is located. As far as hiring more employees, I've been adding hours for Dylan as fast as I can. 

Thing is, it's seasonal. Taking on more overhead now will backfire for the half of the year that isn't so busy. 

What a strange problem to have.  

I believe we've managed to keep up the quality, mostly by increasing both Dylan's and my hours. I'm grinding it out by going in early and more often and then spending most of my time at home making orders. Luckily, this is the week that Linda is off to church camp so I'm spending as much time as I can muster in the store.

Budget? Gone with the wind. I've never been one to let a moment go to waste. So far, the biggest cost, beside wearing me out, is small inefficiencies that would normally really bother me. I've always gotten stuff out in front of the customers as rapidly as possible. I've always tried to made sure I didn't duplicate orders. I've always tried to keep series complete. And so on.

These things are slipping, though probably not in such a way that the customer will notice. In fact, I'm ordering more stuff not less, it's just not quite as targeted as before. (Which can have some unexpected benefits: if I always do things the same way, how do I know that doing it different might not help?)  So things sell a little more unexpectedly.

The goal is to keep this momentum without taking on too much work or spending too much money. But we're so busy it's harder for me to take a step back and take a measure of what I'm doing.

Like I said, a nice problem to have, and one that will soon solve itself when school starts and the tourists slacken.  

This will be our third highest month in 45 years of business. It looked for awhile like it would be our best month ever, but sales on card games fell off in the second half of the month. It's turned into a bit of a stalemate. Prices are so high customers are hesitating, but the replacement cost so high that I can't lower prices. 

We're on course with the savings I was shooting for. I've spent a bit more on product than I originally intended, but this will set us up well for the rest of the year. Our store has always tried to have more variety in card game boosters than anyone else and that supply is drying up in the wholesale market so I'm making some investments now. 

Going with Ingram has been much easier than ordering direct from the publishers. Of course, the publishers are now suddenly offering even higher discounts promos, so instead of foregoing 10% in margin, it's more like 15%. Still, until I've gotten clear statements from all the publishers, I'm going to keep ordering from Ingram. Not to mention, I love getting replacement product so quickly. 

When I try to fudge the difference by buying both from the publishers and Ingram, we end up with a lot of duplication. Which isn't totally bad if the books are perennials, just not as efficiently "Just In Time" as I'd like.  

As I suspected, once I got an up-to-date statement from Simon & Shuster, I owed quite a bit less than I'd been accounting for (worst case scenario.) I think the same thing will probably be true with Scholastic and Harper Collins. 

 

We've turned our attention to back-issue collectable comics and it's really paid off. I've kind of delegated Dylan to make that effort; keep reminding people of our back issues and direct them toward where they can find them. We've gone from having very few collectable comics to a big surplus, so much that people can dig in and find some treasures. 

 

Sometimes people compliment me on our curation of books, and up to now I've always agreed out loud but in my head I'm thinking (Well, we have what sells, which is what everyone sells.) But really, it is becoming more and more true that our selection is unique. I keep ordering books that are interesting but not best-sellers because we can afford do, and the more of these midlist books we carry, the more interesting the store. At least to me.  

 

I'm curtailing the experiment of going in early. Yes, it's quicker and more efficient, but...physically, it's wrecking me. I've had a sleeping pattern now for probably 40 years. Go to bed at 12:30,  wake up around 8:30. Once I programed myself into getting up "early" my ratfink brain decided I meant 5:30 or 6:00 and that's too damn early. 

I went in yesterday afternoon and put away 10 large boxes of books. Yes, it took all afternoon and yes, it was stressful and inconvenient. but at least I got my beauty sleep.  Plus, I think I was missing the conviviality of being around my people. 

The volume of books we're selling is intimidating. I reordered for just three days and it came to 10 pages from Ingram and a hefty order from PRH. It's amazing when it comes in and clogs the hallway, because we sell books in small batches and never quite see how it adds up until we start reordering. 

I was considering going in to Pegasus after closing and putting away books then, instead of trying to wake up so early in the morning. But I kinda know that wouldn't work. I'd be in the store with the lights on, like a goldfish in a bowl. It's not comfortable, plus I'm a night person, but not a social night person. When I used to go home at midnight after staying late, I always told myself to avoid werewolves. (Drunk belligerent people...) I really can't face it. 

So I'm pretty much stuck with the volume with three options. 

Spread the putting away books over shorter timespans, which would mean going in nearly every day.

Going in as early as possible, getting it done before opening, going home and crashing.

Staying late. (Not going to happen.)

Or put away books while customers are in the store.

 

I think I'm going to go in early, but not crazy early. Say get there by 9:30 or even 10:00, and then if still able to work for the first hour after opening, do that. If I get interrupted too much, quit and go home, which will mean getting up earlier the next day, and so on.

Honestly, I never expected this to be a big problem. Turns out when you do more business, it means more work! Who'd have thunk it?  

By the way, it wouldn't be quite as much work if I was willing to delegate, but I'm already asking Sabrina to do everything else and I'm the one who has the schemes of what books to order and where to put them away. And except for the frustrations of not being able to do it WHEN I want, I really enjoy the process. 

Got interviewed over the phone (I don't like being on camera) by KTVZ about downtown Bend about, of all things, tariffs. Told the reporter I hadn't noticed anything. (I wish I'd added that I didn't think it was a good idea...")

She seemed fascinated by the fact I'd owned the store for 42 years. (It's 41, but I misspoke and didn't feel like correcting myself.) So she kept asking questions.

Thing is, the feature is going to be short, and I'm not the only one interviewed, so I'll probably only be quoted for a couple of sentences, if that. You just never know what they're going to select. 

It's going to drive my friend Tyson crazy. He's been trying to get me interviewed by KTVZ for years and I've always refused. At this point, it's like I'm the Great White Whale he can't quite catch. But fair is fair, I wasn't on camera, which is the part I always wanted to avoid.  

Accomplished a lot yesterday and I'm tired as hell. After a week or two of waking up at 6:30 in the morning, I slept until 10:30 this morning. That can't be healthy.

Got to work at 8:30 yesterday so I could park near the back entrance of the store and fill the car with all the excess boxes and packing material. There wasn't a single parking space. At 8:30 on a freaking Sunday morning! This town has gone crazy.

I parked in front of the store, which meant I had to haul the stuff through the store, which is inconvenient but possible. 

Then I decided it was time to increase the Rom-Com section by integrating the "Classic Mystery" books back with the regular mystery books. Putting Dasheill Hammett and Raymond Chandler and such into it's own section didn't move the needle a bit. Meanwhile, Rom-Com continues to performs even though the display was chaotic. 

Opened the store at 11:00 and worked a very busy six hour Sunday (expanded by two hours over the rest of the year) so ten hours overall. 

It all had to be done, but wow, it was exhausting.  

The hallway behind the store is jammed with packing material and broken and unbroken boxes. We're reaching a peak moment, I guess. Even though I'm going in hours early to do the sorting and shelving, I'm still falling behind.

Turns out, when you sell as many books as we currently are, it adds a lot of work. Who could've guessed? Really. I just thought, "Oh yeah, we're selling more books," without ever considering the consequences. The danger is that we lose quality control. We're not there yet, mostly because I'm available to take up the slack. We're keeping up with the front of the store, which is the most important part.  

I'm going in early today just to deal with the hallway. I'll fill the back of my Rav and take it to the dump sometime over the next week.

The store was always intended to be profitable for one person at a time to be working the store. If this kept up all year, we'd definitely be looking at two full-time persons and one halftime person. But this only happens about four months out of the year so it makes no sense to add an employee who won't have enough to do during the other eight months. Also, I don't quite trust peak moments because I've experienced 50% declines in business at least three times over the last forty years. That cushion is necessary to survive.

But I do think that when I retire, Sabrina will probably have to move to a two full-time and one part-time employee model.

The other reason I have to go in early is that, during store hours there is never, ever any parking. It's hard to bring or take material out of the store if you're parking on the third floor of a parking garage a block away. 

Oh, and whenever anyone says, "Why don't you sell online? Why don't you go to shows? Why don't you add this service or product line?" I just spread my arms and say, "And when would I do that?"

Oh, first world problems! Too much success! Whatever will I do? 

Linda and I visited Hannah at Oliver Books, and the store looks great. 

I really feel like I did something good when I helped her get started.

 

Her brother, Tim, told me that one his friends hit a $50K Magic card. My response was, "Well, someone has to hit the lottery." Doesn't change my thinking about it whatsoever.  

 

Meanwhile, my main supplier finally offered some new Pokemon and Magic deals after over a month of nothing. (I think that's the longest I've gone without being offered one of his deals.) I went ahead and ordered everything offered, even though it will cut into profits. There is a month left in the summer and it will set us up for the fall.  

The Catch-22 of low supply and high prices vs relatively sluggish sales continues. My rule of thumb has been, if something has proven to be hard to get, order everything that is offered. Meanwhile, books just keep selling... 

We're still on track for our third best month in the history of the store. So I should complain about it not being the best month of our history? (Ratfink brain can't help but being disappointed.)

 

Linda said to me on our way to Prineville. "We should do this all the time," meaning get out and driving around. The weather has been particularly good this year, hovering in the low 80s, which to me is just right.   

A victim of my own success?

I don't know if this getting up early is really working, at least for my health. 

I went to bed at 12:00 last night, which is half an hour earlier than usual. I'm going to try to dial it back to 11:30 from the current 12:30 deadline, which exists because I seem to wake up very early if I go to bed early. 

So I'm getting up early all right: like 6:30. 

For the store, it works perfectly. I can get most of the work done between 8:00 and the opening at 11:00. It's much more efficient and relaxing. 

But the cost of going home and napping most of the afternoon?

I'm hoping I can get back to the old way of doing things this fall, though Christmas will present the same problems. We're getting huge numbers of people in the door these summer months. Sales reflect that, but so does the fact that while sales are up, the amount of money per transaction is down. I don't know what number actually spend money, but it's probably less than half of that. So, yeah, we're hopping. 

No sense hiring anyone else, because I'm still the stock boy and janitor either way. Just have to gut it out, though I've warned Sabrina that without me around, she's in for a shock. (I'm going to volunteer to be stock boy and janitor for minimum wage: but I'm also going to want to leave on lots of vacations, so that might not work for her...)

Oh well, it's better than spending hours watching an empty store, which I spent years doing.  

Sisters Betsy and Susie and Klaus are in town and we had a get together at the house with Todd, Toby, and Felicia. 

Pictures were taken.

I'm always the most awkward person in every photograph. It's enough to make me leery of photos altogether. I look so severe, even when I'm not feeling that way. Murder face. 

 

Went in two hours early and it just wasn't enough. I spend a hour just straightening and filling in holes with product we already have on hand before I even start putting away new books. Two hours early is all I can manage, since I need an hour to truly wake up and getting out of the house at 8:30 already seems really early to me. 

I'm disrupting my sleep for this. But there really isn't any choice. I tried staying to put away books after the store opened and immediately realized that we're just getting too many people in the door to be effective. 

(Basically, this is complaining about success!)

 

Had a few slow days which means a record month is probably out of reach. But it will be in the top 3 months of all time. Top 3 out of 495 months is pretty good, I'd say.  

Watched a documentary about Hannah Arendt. The parallels to today are overwhelming. I ordered "The Origins of Totalitarianism" for the store.

Nothing about what is happening today is new. All has happened before and all has been foretold.  

 

Had a long involved dream about meeting an old girlfriend. When I woke up, it was somehow about the Arendt documentary, but I'm not sure how. It has something to do with not knowing anything about her and her life that is strange to me. Her and some other childhood friends. And, when you get down to it, probably most people I might want to talk to from that long ago.  

If you looked me up online, you'd find pages of stuff about the store and my writing. I didn't set out to create that, it just happened. 

Anyway, because I know absolutely nothing about my former girlfriend, my dream was pretty creative in filling in the holes. There's this thing again where I'm trying too hard to  fit in, to be liked. Instead of accepting that she and her friends want nothing to do with me. I try so hard to understand what's she doing that I'm adrift in a sea of nonsense.  

Wake up realizing that I need to leave well enough alone.  

 

Sisters Betsy and Susie are coming over tonight for pizza.  I only get to see them occasionally so it's a treat.  

One of the things I like about Murderbot is how he prefers to live his existence in pop culture. Real life is a distraction.  It's "Oh, shit, the nice humans are in trouble again. I guess I'll save them..." Even though what he'd really like to do is get back to The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

Isn't that how most of us live now? 

There's a book at the store entitled, "You Are What You Watch." 

It's pretty undeniable. Getting up, eating, brushing your teeth, driving to work, working, driving home, then the real start to the day: read, watch, or listen to pop culture. 

I'm sure there are people living fabulous lives, bless their little hearts.

Thing is, having gone through a ten year depression there was nothing I wanted more than to just have a normal life. I've lived in books my whole life: and I ended up owning a bookstore for 41 years and writing more than 25 books. 

Not a bad life for me. It was only when I allowed myself to fully immerse myself, when I dropped the guilt trip over doing "nothing", that I really became more contented.  

 

We reached a funny stage at the store with Pokemon and Magic. I'll be damned if I can find any replacement product for much less than I'm currently selling it for. But what I'm currently selling it for has met a price resistance. I've yet to sell a Collector Booster of Final Fantasy since I raised them to their current prices, but when I go online they are at least as expensive there.

Oh, well. It being a sideline and the store having a record month so far (the first half of the month was the best first half we've ever seen) I don't have any incentive to sell the product cheaper. Eventually, either the customer will come around, or I won't have to buy anymore inventory. Most likely, the reality will eventually sink in that the initial wave of product is gone but there isn't anymore coming.  

 

The new Pokemon was more bountiful than I expected. Not only did we get the elite trainers for two different releases, which I can also break into packs, but three other sets, including one set that had two out of date Pokemon boosters plentiful enough to start selling them again by pack. 

So we went from only five different Pokemon items to sell (a worrisome shortage of choice) to fourteen different choices. I'm very clever in how I divide these up. I immediately ordered several items at higher prices because I know I can sell the parts for more than enough to cover the cost. 

All I needed was an opportunity.

What was really strange about the last couple months was that almost all options had disappeared, in both Pokemon and Magic. Now we're set on Pokemon, and the new Magic is coming in two weeks and the latest Magic release (Final Fantasy) is going to last. (Not to mention, that unlike Pokemon, we have at least fifty formers releases in stock, and probably more than a hundred choices.)

So we're set for the summer....I hope.  

 

I panicked when I thought we were only getting a few elite trainer boxes of the new Pokemon. I bought some more online from Amazon at a higher price. 

As it happens, we paid about what we intend to start selling them for, which is crazy. But it will extend the inventory farther and we'll be making enough of a margin the cancel the error. 

And really, what is our purpose here? It's to have stuff when people come in. That's our competitive feature: to have a wide variety and depth. 

We're in a weird sort of zone where we are selling at only slightly above replacement costs. (A good rule of thumb is to never sell below replacement costs.) But that price has started to turn off demand. Nevertheless, I feel it is extremely important to have product in stock when customers come in. 

What we're trying to do here is position ourselves for the future. If we can have enough leftover of the current release to last into the next release then we have two brands available, and we can extend those into the next release, we have three...and so on. 

 Ratfink brain woke me at 5:30 so I was on the road by 6:30.

Holy Cow!  The roads were packed, and not only packed, but with really aggressive drivers. This half-awake night person was feeling very threatened by the this heightened energy. I never knew so many businesses started so early. 

My only consolation is that these crazy motherfuckers sometimes have to stay up late and deal with us nighttime crazy motherfuckers.  

 

We had another slow day the day before yesterday which threw me, followed by another busy day. The average is still better than we've ever done, though there is still half the month to go to get to the record.

It turns out, we're getting a bit more Pokemon than I expected, so I now feel like we'll be able to get through the next phase just fine. Not going to lower prices, though. This is the tail end of a bubble and the time will soon come when the sales will drop and we will need to be ready to weather the storm.

Ordering and selling lots of books. Or is it selling and ordering lots of books? My original budget in no way could have kept up with this level of sales so I'm leaning in with the sales level instead of the budget. Theoretically, we should earn just as much profit if not more if we sell at the same percentage of the orders. 

 

Three hours putting books away, one hour cleaning the store. Always feels like I really accomplished something.  

Interesting market, this Pokemon thing.

I simply can't find anywhere on the world wide web who is selling Pokemon for any cheaper than we're selling it for. In other words, with all the choice in the world, customers can buy Pokemon in my store as cheaply as anywhere else.

Except they can't. There's a time lag involved. They see Pokemon in a store a month ago, and to them that was yesterday. There's retail lag. Some stores simply get their product, put it out for sale a SRP, and they sell out instantly. So they tell the customers, "Yeah, we sell for XXX. But we're out."

The customer translates that into, "We sell for XXX..." conveniently leaving "we're out."

And waves come into the chain stores and are sold at regular prices and are quickly snapped up, but I decided long ago I wouldn't deprive customers of their chance to get that stuff, nor did I want to lurk around chain stores. (A worse hell I can't imagine.)

What it means if we are selling as cheap or cheaper than anywhere online that. well, we're too cheap.

But the customers don't see that.

Nevertheless, I have two options. Sell out and maybe never see those customers again or bump up the price. Despite the increasing prices, our profit margin is getting thinner and thinner. At some point I will have to cry uncle and just let us sell out and hope that some more product becomes available.  

 

One week into Ingram only. Certainly is more timely and doing the budget this morning was a breeze. There's bonus to it in that I can wait for a statement to show up from the other publishers that includes all the orders I've so far made and then I can start with a fresh zero balance in my accounting.  

I ordered on Saturday thinking it would come in on Monday, which meant I could put it away today before work. It was a strange thing Ingram was doing for awhile, packing up stuff on Sunday to arrive on Monday. Except this time, it didn't. So that means that two big orders arrived today. 

So I came in to put the few boxes that came in Monday from other publishers, then waited around for the huge orders. I got about one box in and realized, "Nope." It ain't possible with people crowding the aisles 

That good, right? Not always. Sometimes all they do is clog the aisles. 

But there is nothing I do about it but stand there and wait until the move. Impossible.

So there's a huge amount of books to put away tomorrow and I need to try to get it done before opening.  

I'm throwing out all the game plans. We've had such an extraordinary month that my budget simply isn't sufficient to replace the sold product (especially books), much less improve it.  

Well, I can't have that. The store must be served. So the budget is now replacing the perennial sellers and the new hot stuff and to figure it will all pan out. 

I'm not spending anything on extraneous stuff. It all product we want in the store. 

So I'll let the chips fall where they lay and hope for the best. On one hand, we're doing far better than I expected, but on the other hand, it's hard to control a runaway beast. Heh. 

If I hadn't stocked Pokemon far beyond normal, I'd be completely wiped out by now. As it is, we'll probably manage to get to Friday without selling out of everything. I have at least two brands and probably three that I can continue to sell, which is still more than most stores, I suspect.

Some new Pokemon brands arrives on this Friday. I don't know if the new stuff will be enough, but I've run out of places to find Pokemon at affordable prices. I'm in the same boat as everyone else, despite all my preparations.

My old saying, "If something is hot, you can't have too much. If it's cold, anything you get is too much," has once again proven to be true. Another saying, "Supply always catches up to demand," may be true in the long run, but in the near future it's going to be an interesting situation of trying to hang onto just enough product to get to the next release.  

And there it is, Bubble Marker #11.

Someone broke into a shop in New Bedford, Mass. and stole 100K worth of Pokemon cards. (I did mention "hijacking," which is pretty much the same thing.)

By the way, that 100K value is bullshit. You have to have a hundred cards to sell one, and a hundred thousand cards to sell 1000, if that. I could live for years on the supposed value of the back issue comics I have. But the only thing that counts is the monthly average in sales, which is a tiny fraction.  

If I was that retailer I'd gladly take 100K than have to spend years and tons of overhead trying to sell the stock.  

It's all rather silly. Life is too short, guys. It's just Pokemon cards! 

I should elucidate what I think are the major markers of a bubble.

 

1.) Allocations. 

2.) New business's and expanding business's. Everyone jumping into the pool.

3.) Price increases to slow demand.

4.) Separation of product into winners and losers. Dumping the losers. 

5.) Stock at manufacturers and distributors going out the backdoor.  Literal hijacking of product. 

6.) Mainstream media coverage.

7.) Scalpers buying up all available product in mass market. (This should be #1, actually.) Fights in the aisle. 

8.)  Schools banning it because of disruptions. Fights in the schoolyard.

9.) Everyone insisting it isn't a bubble and it's different this time and that they aren't buying for the money but because they really, really like these: pogs, beanie babies, sports cards, Pokemon cards. Also shouting down people like me for being negative. 

10.) Original purveyors complaining but going all in anyway because they think they'll outsmart the market.  

 

I'll add more as I think of them... 

 

Had to go in on regular hours to put the last batch of books away. We basically got three weeks worth of books this week because of delayed shipments. It took me four hours of dodging customers and I couldn't help but feel that it interferes with business. It moves people out of the way no matter how I try to avoid them. Worse, I think it distracts from Sabrina paying full attention to the customer.

An hour after I left the store, sales had doubled. 

So I will, for the rest of the summer do two things.

1.) Order 90% of the product from Ingram to arrive within one or two days.

2.) Go in early during off hours to put books away.  

Still on pace for a record month. 

The dreaded "B" word.

Okay, I've been wondering. Should I start using the B word?

Our sales on game cards has more or less doubled, and they had increased dramatically for the previous years as well. We're selling out our allocations. The prices are increasing with every set and there are lots of people in the game.

So you can't keep exponentially growing for long. People's incomes aren't doubling and doubling. 

The allocations are happening because everyone is trying to get a piece of the pie.

We went all in on Final Fantasy Magic. I thought it would be a bit of gamble, but it paid off. However, I was hesitant to go that deep on the next two waves: Spider-man and Avatar. 

I needn't have worried. My allocations are much smaller, so I can only do what I can do.

So should I be using the B word?  I didn't have enough information. TCG cards are a sideline for us. As an example, it too me way too long to understand that actual players were focusing on Commander Decks. I was ordering very little of that. Nor did I understand how Collector boosters had supplanted Play boosters as the main focus of collecting.  

Well, this morning I listened to a podcast by a big game store guy. And it was like reliving the the sports card market of the late eighties/early nineties. I mean, almost word for word, what this guy was saying was the same kind of thing I was saying back then.

He revealed information I just didn't have. And the conclusion was pretty clear. 

We are in Bubble. 

Thank God I'm not that guy. Thank God TCG's are a sideline and not the main focus of our store. 

I'll need to be careful, and I can't avoid running some risk. The Bubble is only about 50% inflated in my estimation, which is a wild guess. But that means there is only about 20% left in the bubble to be doing things the same old way. 

I'll need to watch carefully and not wait too long.  

Told myself to start waking up earlier, thinking around 7:00 or 7:30 would be about right. My ratbag brain apparently went, "Oh. You want to wake up earlier?  5:30 it is!!!"

 

I think going in early to put away books is so enjoyable because I'm able to accomplish so much without the stress of dealing with people at the same time. (Dealing with people is a full time job, heh.) Displaying product in as clever a way as I can come up with has always been a creative and satisfying thing for me. There is something peaceful about an empty store, half-lit, full of cool stuff.   

 

Had a semi-slow day, which at almost any other time in the store's history would have been a good day. My heart sank. 

You'd think after 40 years I'd be immune to being whipsawed by daily totals, but if anything, that feeling is reinforced by the number of times it was a warning. 

Next day, sales went back up again. Still, it bears watching. (Though the only real danger is that I won't keep breaking record sales...) 

Good thing about ordering daily from Ingram is that I can keep firm control over the budget and adjust accordingly.  

I think in some ways, the non-communicative nature of other retailers helped me find my own way. I mean, I was aware of general trends. Over time, I learned on my own to separate the myths from the reality of retail. 

But the "secret sauce" as one retailer said to me when I inquired a little too inquisitively about what was working for him, that remained cloaked. 

Kinda silly, really. I mean if something works for one retailer, it doesn't hurt them if it works for another retailer. In the end, we're individual units dealing with the public. How we deal with the public will be different. A different vibe. 

I know, that's a little muddy sounding, but I've been trying to figure it all out for decades. 

I decided that there is very little I could reveal about my business that would actually hurt us. I've seen only one drawback to being candid with another retailer: I have to be careful not to use anything they say to me in a way that detracts from them. Not that I think it would, but I don't want there to be even a whiff of that.  

I never asked for specific numbers, though that would have been hugely illuminating. But I was curious about general trends: What do you think works here? What doesn't work there?

Unfortunately, my worst experiences with a competitor was at the beginning (40 years ago), a guy who decided to try to take us down by predator pricing and bad mouthing. It was such an extreme example that I worried every time a competitor opened a store. I would try to take a hands off approach, but I would eventually go into their store and greet them as friendly as I could be and tell them I'd be sending people their way any chance I got.   

Honestly, how well another store does doesn't impact on me. But that's not the way most people think. I firmly believe we can co-exist and thrive. The trick is to do your own thing. 

 

How refreshing. Made an order with Ingram on Monday, put the books away today. Replacement copies I know I can sell.

Meanwhile, I'm supposed to get orders I started building three weeks ago from the publisher/distributors over the next few days. 

That's it. That's just too long to wait. I'm using Ingram the rest of summer, probably doing an order every day. Every book they have in stock that I want, I'll order. 

There are perennials that I can order from the four publishers that can be backstock, but I only order backstock when I'm ahead. It's a bit of a luxury. Right now, I can't afford to lose the Summer traffic. 

It's a flaw in the system for sure. I tell you, if Ingram would give me a larger discount for non-returnable books, they'd get most of my business. For some reason, they don't have that option.

I went into the store at 8:00 this morning, which a few years ago would have been inconceivable. I have a set time I go to bed: 12:30. Any earlier and I awake early and can't get back to sleep. But lately, I've been waking up early anyway. 

It's a lot less stressful and much more productive to do the stocking while the store is closed. I can keep my concentration, I can move freely around the store without dodging, or worse, dislodging the customers, and I can make changes without worrying about disrupting the flow. 

 

Made the order and it even qualified for the secondary warehouse. I know they will arrive before this weekend, not two weeks from now. Enough chasing discounts. 

I also rediscovered something I once knew. It's twice as fast to order from one website which is functional than assembling two websites and three emails. Duh. 

So that's what I'm going to do for summer. I will continue to throw backlist orders at the publishers, but everything else is going to be faster from now on.  

I'm nothing if not inconsistent. 

After all my going too and fro about timeliness vs discount, the third element of the equation has come to the fore: accuracy.

I tried to do my budget this morning as I usually do on Tuesday and the truth is, I can't tell how much I owe Simon and Shuster, Scholastic, and Harper Collins. All I've got is a blizzard of invoices, some with as little as one title, and a couple of "statements" that make no sense to me. The dates seem all wrong, and the accounting is indecipherable, at least to me. I'm sure they make sense to an accountant, but it might as well be Algebra 2, which is the  only class I ever failed in high school. (I just quit going after the first few weeks because I couldn't begin to understand it, even when I had my friend Steve Davies try to help me.

I've added up every bit of money I think I owe and I've added 5K to my reserve fund just in case. But I'm not sure I can go on like this. All I want is a simple statement each month: You Owe X Amount Of Money, so I can write out a check for X Amount of Money. Is that too much to fucking ask?

I went around and around with the credit rep from S & S and we didn't seem to understand each other one little bit. "How much do I owe?" I ask.  "Which claim are you paying?" she answers. "How the hell do I know? You tell me!" and so on. 

So I've made a drastic decision. It's Ingram for the rest of the summer until the smoke fades. Sure I get 10% less discount but by God, I get the product the very next day (not two weeks!) and I know exactly what I've spent. I've always chosen timeliness and accuracy over discounts, all things being equal. 

So the quandary continues.   

No wonder Amazon is eating up the book world. Their search engine is a marvel and they get stuff to you promptly. Doesn't help me, as a retailer much. I mean, obviously, it hurts. But I can understand why it's happening.

The Big Five are still in the stone age, as far as I can tell. 

Penguin Random House at least has a way for you to order online directly with them, and know exactly what is in stock. But then...they split the damn order into a dozen little shipments with a dozen little invoices that come in on a dozen different time schedules. So they're halfway there. 

But the others? Might as well be writing them letters.   

 

After sales dragging all day, we had a burst in the last hour, including I believe, a box of Final Fantasy. (Which makes me feel better about buying another couple of boxes from Mag. Ex.) 

We're on a great pace.

A huge number of books showing up this week, basically two weeks in one. (I neglected to hit the "Send" button on the order the week before last.)

The massive volume of books means I will need to go in early every day for the rest of the week. 

I don't mind. I kind of like it. 

I just ordered 20 Pokemon Pop figures, not so much because I think they will sell fast but because they can be protective coloring. There is barely enough Pokemon product available until the new stuff shows up later in the month. We could possibly have gaps in our displays, which I don't like. So if nothing else, we'll have some nice toys to offer.  

I'm having more fun than I've probably had in the entire history of the store except in the run-up to the baseball card crash. After that, I was leery of all such bursts, and more focused on trying the fix the damage of each successive bubble. (Including the housing bubble.) This time, we are not in debt, we're not over-extended and the overhead is well within bounds. 

We'll be fine either way. 

 

Still struggling with the choice between ordering direct from publishers at 10 to 15% better margins but waiting ten days for the books to show up, or paying lower margins from Ingram and getting the books a a very timely couple days later. 

Question is: how many sales are we missing during those eight days, multiplied by the basically 2/3rds of the books we're currently getting from publishers? A lost sale in not only about the lost profit, it's also a failure to meet the customer demand, and that's something you don't want to do too often. 

When it was just Penguin Random House, I chose to order from only Ingram during Christmas. Makes no sense to order a book from PRH on the 10th of the month and at best have a couple days before Christmas to sell it. But that was only 1/3rd of the books, not 2/3rds. 

The same is true during Summer. Really, there are only about eight or nine weeks of summer after July 4th, which is real kickoff for increased sales. So in 63 days, I can order books from publishers maybe 5 times, or I can order from Ingram more than twice as often. That's a lot more books in on a timely basis.

But there is another phenomenon going on. During summer and Christmas we are getting customers for which ALL the books in stock are new to them. They usually aren't coming in for specific titles, but for a wide selection.

And by ordering from each publisher each week, a wide variety of books are coming in all the time. 

Ironically, it's more important to have every important book during the slower months because every customer and every sale counts.

This is Summer week is where I decide whether to switch from publisher ordering each week, knowing that each book I'm ordering will miss roughly 20% of the summer, or to ordering from Ingram and losing less than 10% of the selling period.

Of course, I can finesse this quite a bit. Often I'll order from both Ingram and publishers for books that I'll probably need more copies of.  And the flow of product is so much stronger than it used to be that there is a better then even chance that if I don't have one title the customer wants, I'll have another.

So I'm sticking to the publisher discounts for now even though it will be a dagger in the heart every time a customer asks for a book we could have had in stock, but instead have to tell them, "It's on its way..." 

I always resisted getting an RV because it seemed to me that most people don't get enough use out of them to warrant the cost. Of course, no one will admit to this, but all I know is that I see my neighbors's RV parked month after month and rarely taken out for a spin. 

Besides, you can pay for a lot of nice rooms in nice hotels for the price of an RV.  

But it came down to never leaving the house again or getting a transport for our cat. Our RV is a very expensive Catbus. 

OK... I was up for it, but then I decided to stay around the store for another couple of years and business has been booming, which makes it fun again. So even less chance to get away. 

By the time I'm done with the store, I'll be 74 years old and the cat will be 18 years old, assuming that we both make it that far.

Therefore when the boys started to ask to use the Catbus, no only didn't I object, I was delighted. "Please...take it any time you want!' 

So now I feel like maybe we're getting our monies worth. It's a family bus, and as far as I'm concerned, the money we're currently earning and still saving for "retirement" is family money and that's the way it should be.

I want for nothing. Seriously. There isn't anything I want that I don't have, except a teleporter that can get me anywhere I want to go in seconds. I can't quite seem to find one for sale. 

So the Catbus is seeming rather part of life now and I don't mind it a bit.  

Interesting that retailers are still blaming Diamond for all that is wrong in the comic world.

Here's the thing. Diamond doesn't exist, except as a name. The company that took it over is a completely different entity.

And they are pulling the plug on most of what Diamond was still doing (not that there was much less.) Word is, they're selling off the consignment inventory left and not paying the publishers. So that's gotta hurt if you are a publisher.

Meanwhile, smaller publisher will have to got through a new company that gives a smaller discount and/or minimum orders. This was entirely predictable. It always amazed me that Diamond was willing to pack a singe comic. I mean, it can't have been worth the time, energy, and labor to do it.

Speaking of minimums, that's mostly how the toy industry works. You buy a case with six or twelve figures. You don't get to say, "I want only Yoda and Boba Fett." No you get three minor characters that no one wants. Plus your buying at such a low discount that it's only worthwhile to buy most toys if you tack a little bit above the retail price. (There isn't usually an SRP.)

But the chain stores are selling for below retail price so it's a double whammy. Meanwhile, the chain stores get what they ordered and they get it earlier. We often don't get the 'good' stuff and we have to wait much longer. 

With Diamond no longer there, stores will have to buy from toy distributors and they are awful. Not just for toys, but for everything else: posters, pins, t-shirts, buttons...you name it. Again, minimums at awful discounts arriving late if at all. Whoopee!

 

 

It took many years for the store to get to where it is. During most of those years I not only couldn't afford to carry 100% of what we should, I was probably only getting half to two/thirds of the way there. 

Now? The only thing stopping us is lack of space. We have gotten to that 100% and surpassed it and it shows. Now people come in and there is a very good chance they'll find something interesting. It's the excess inventory that causes the average to stay steady.  

It's made me refine my notion that the most important element of success is to think for yourself. Or more clearly, to separate the bullshit from the reality. So many businesses are concerned about their image, how good looking they are, how wonderful it all feels.

But books are our image. The more and better books we have, the better our image. I assure you that no one sees that the wall is patched in places, or the there is a bit of dust here and there. Not that you shouldn't try to fix that, but just that there is a lot of leeway--if you are otherwise doing the job of getting good product at affordable prices.  

If you've got the space and the fixtures and the manpower, then the most important thing to have is inventory. Somehow I understood that from the beginning and always plowed the bulk of our gross profit back into the store. In the last fifteen years or so and especially in the last five years, we're finally getting rewarded for that. But that meant we spent 25 years getting there. 

It wouldn't have taken so long if I hadn't made so many mistakes, but mistakes are how you learn what not to do. Experience is what teaches you what to do.

Bopping into the store early this morning to bump around. I'd forgotten the aura of an empty store. There's something very peaceful about it.  I don't have any books to put away, so this will be a look-around, whatever small improvements I can make.

When I first started carrying books, I ordered as many "budget" books as I could afford to get up to speed. Getting my inventory at full wholesale through my cash flow was going to take forever. (I don't borrow money anymore for inventory purposes--it all has to be paid for.)

Some of the budget books were decent, some were junk, a few were prizes. 

I firmly believe that, at any one time, 20% of your inventory are going to be 80% of your sales. But I also believe that you have to have that other 80% in stock. You can work on improving that 20% over time, so maybe it can become something like 30% or 35% of your stock. But it will always be a matter that only part of your inventory will be attractive to your customers. 

Don't ask me the mechanics of it. I've just found that trying for 100% saleable product is pretty much impossible. 

There's a context to inventory; where and how you display the 80% will help sell the 20%.

I recently wondered what percent of the books we sell are the books we put face-outward. I came up with a guesstimate of 50%. I ask Sabrina the same question, and somewhat to my surprise she immediately came up with 50%. The other day I asked Dylan, and he immediately guessed 50%.

But here the thing: only a small percentage of the books can be faced outward. The books behind those books are the kind of midlist books that you'll sell less often, but they are just as important. Anyone can have the bestseller, but a store that can please the customer with something more unusual is also important.

So the more books you have, the better. The better those books are, the better. But you'll always be shuffling books around trying to find ways for the customer to discover them. 

I recently add two authors to my cult stacks. These are authors that few people know about but those in the know will totally glom onto if they find them. 

J.G. Ballard and Roberto Bolano. They join Vonnegut and P.K. Dick and Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Bukowski and a bunch of other authors where I try to carry a good chunk of what they've written. They may not be part of the 20%, but they are also important for verifying to the discerning customer that you know what you are doing.  

Anyway, I'm slowly but surely replacing the bargain books I used to bulk up the store. They've probably gone from 25% of my inventory to maybe 10% of my inventory. Eventually they will all be replaced. But it's still pretty satisfying when one sells; 100% profit, for one thing, since I'm not replacing them. 

It's still not easy to get new inventory through cash flow. It's almost the very definition of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but it's getting done. I probably reorder 90% of the books I sell because I've found that a book that sells once will most often sell twice and a book that sells twice is even more likely to sell three times. I think this is smart, but it also means that the smaller percentage of my budget can be used on new titles and most of those new titles are new releases--bestsellers more often than not. 

But you do it book by book and over time, the inventory improves. I probably won't get to 100% satisfaction, if for no other reason than the amount of space I have to work with, but it's getting better all the time.  

What a breeze! Went in before opening and stocked books. It probably took half as long and there was no stress, no distractions. Obviously, this is the way to do it from now on. 

 

Oops. My smooth operations hit a snag. These days, I'm waiting until Tuesdays to send off Penguin Random House orders, and that frees up Wed. and Thurs. for Sabrina to make comic reorders, then I start constructing a new book order on Friday for the following Tuesday.

I forgot to hit the Send button on Tuesday. Darn-nit. It takes long enough to wait for PRH stuff to show up even when I send orders on time. I'm still working out the new schedule. 

Meanwhile, two lost boxes from Ingram. They don't use UPS and the shipper they do use is horrible. I never know when or if the boxes are going to show up. Especially when they have a new driver. And they always seem to be getting a new driver.  

During busy seasons, like Summer and Christmas, when you need product the most is when the most shipping mishaps happen. I figure the regular drivers are out on vacation, or there are a bunch of newbies just when the holiday crunch is kicking in, but it always seems to go a little haywire. 

 

Broke our streak of good days today. Not by much, but still a warning not to get too smug. A kick in the butt I probably needed. I'd been getting spoiled by what was happening, and that was probably unrealistic. Trending back to norm wouldn't surprise me.  

We're way ahead of last year. In fact, if we just match last year the rest of the way, we'll still have our best year ever.  What's fun is that much of the increase in sales is in product we've already bought, so I don't have to replace it right away.

It's very, very busy. I went in today to put away books and gave up after a couple of hours. I've been planning to go in more often for shorter periods of time to keep down the wear and tear, but there were just too many people clogging the aisles to get anything done. I finally gave up.

It felt very stressful. That stress is self-induced, but knowing that doesn't make it any less. I mean, conceivably, I could take a deep breath and slough off the stress, but I've never been able to adapt my behavior that way.  

The answer is to change the situation. When I nearly quit over my constant conflicts with collectors over the "value" of their collections, my answer was to simply stop buying older stuff. I'm a retailer, pure and simple. 

In most stressful situations, for me it is usually easier to change the situation rather than to try to adapt to it.

So for the rest of the summer I'm going into work before the store opens and putting away product then. It is really a simple solution and the only reason I didn't reach for it before was because I've always thought of myself as a late starter in the mornings. Indeed, I open at 11:00, not 10:00 because when I was working every day it gave me an extra hour to drink my coffee and read my news. In fact, that's a great example of changing the situation rather than my response to the situation. 

Anyway, as I've gotten older, I've been getting up earlier and earlier, and I often find myself ready to go at 8:30 or 9:00. It's been only habit that has me going in later in the day. That plus waiting for the shipments to arrive.

That's the tradeoff. I've got to let the shipments arrive, but come in the next day early to put them away. I may miss  a few timely sales because of that, but so be it. 

Business is running smoothly enough to get away with it.  

Talking to Dylan at the store and realizing that he really doesn't know much about the big comic crash of the mid-90s. I mean, he knows the outlines. 

What I keep forgetting is that he was even born when all that happened. 

So much of the way the market works these days is a result of that time period. For instance, Dylan knows what the FOC is (basically, final ordering) but doesn't know why it exists, how a retailer in San Francisco (Brian Hibbs, kudos) sued Marvel for not delivering on time and what we ordered.

Or why Diamond had a monopoly on comics and the fall out that is happening because Diamond not only isn't the only wholesaler now, they're barely a presence in the market anymore. 

Does Dylan need to know? Probably not. But to me, everything follows from what happened before. It's why experience counts for so much. 

As I've been mentioning in other posts, it seems to me that most people only learn from their own mistakes--but I'd still like to help them avoid mistakes, if I can.  

We're in a groove at the store. Summer business has kicked in, we have the product people are looking for, and we have a sufficient budget to satisfy demand. Bills are all paid. It's time to try to earn a profit.  

It took awhile to figure out how to deal with five book suppliers rather than just two. But I've finally learned the timing and things are getting easier to figure out. (The ordering is very time-consuming, but it's an activity I enjoy, so that's good.) 

I'm going into the store more often but for shorter time periods, and that gets the job done but doesn't wear me out. Dylan has fit right back in and seems to be working complimentary to Sabrina, who is taking charge. I'm just trying to stay out of the way.

Funny thing happening with Sabrina. I check with her before making any big decisions and a lot of the time she talks me out of doing what I planned. I've always been impulsive about big decisions, partly because if I don't get that impulse, I don't do it at all.

But Sabrina has a way of talking sense to me, and since it will be her store in the not too distant future, I am bending to her judgement. But not only bending, but basically agreeing with her. She's more tough-minded than me, interestingly.  

When I started, there was little to no information available on the type of business I was in. Books about business were useless or irrelevant. (The one exception, Growing a Business, by Paul Hawken, which was somewhat useful.) Not only couldn't I get any advice from other business owners, but they wouldn't even talk to me. Especially the Downtowners (all of who are gone now.) 

I flailed around, making mistake after mistake, and worse--I let it show. I didn't hide anything. I was willing to share --and in return, I felt most other business owners considered me a fool.  I tried to figure it out myself. By the time I went up the COCC for the small business counseling, I'd learned enough that the advisor told me I had a "primitive sophistication," which I took as a compliment, not an insult. 

He made me put together a business plan, gave me a little advice, and helped me get a business loan. 

And then I was on my own again. 

So it's frustrating to have learned so much, to have a store that is far exceeding my expectations, which is finally performing at the levels I aspired to 40 years ago, and not be able to pass that information on. 

What I have learned is--everyone goes their own way. No takes unsolicited advice. Everyone has to learn everything the hard way. 

It's a shame, because I can show them some "tricks" but whenever I've done that, they have ignored me, bless their little hearts.  

When Hannah Oliver decided to open a bookstore in Prineville, I didn't have much doubt that the store would be nice and that she'd do a good job. But I did wonder if the Prineville I remembered from my youth was ready for a bookstore.

She reassured me that Prineville was prospering.

I visited her store yesterday and while Linda and I were there, we went to the only Taco Time in Central Oregon. I really love their crisp meat burritos. A Cascade Business News was on one of the tables and I snagged it. 

There was an article on Prineville there, and some remarkable statistics. In the last seven years, the median income in Prineville rose from $45K to $82K.  Crook County as a whole has had a 52.5% increase in GDP.

The town still feels rural; but there are signs. New shops and nice houses on the outskirts. You've got to believe that as Bend continues to boom and with Redmond following, that Prineville will be the next place to accelerate in growth. 

Whenever I make my commute to Bend, I'm accompanied by the grand march of the Cascade mountains on my right, blue skies on my left. This ain't stopping anytime soon.   

A remarkable week, one of the best we've ever had outside of Christmas. And it's only June.

I stocked up on Pokemon and Magic, gambling that we'd be able to sell it during the summer, and that seems to be happening. That's probably 60% of the increase, with books being the other 40% of the increase, holding our own with comics and down a little on toys and games. 

Last year at this time I went all in on returnability with PRH. Bought multiple copies of bestsellers I might not have bought at all before (or after.) It didn't really work out. But in order to prepare, I redesigned the store yet again and that has proven to be a real bonus. Plus I kind of learned that I might have been a little too careful ordering new stuff before that, and that ordering a couple of copies almost always works out.

So the increase in book sales is partially due to that experiment. But as a whole, I really blew my budget on inventory instead of trying for a monetary profit.  

This year I'm going forward with a rolling average for the budget. It's a generous budget (the mistake in the past I've always made is to make the budget too skimpy thus almost always busting the budget in short order.)

I've been doing this for seven weeks now, and I'm about 20% of a single week above the average, so pretty darn close.  

I don't want to anticipate too much. Whenever I do that, it runs the risk of being a disappointment. But July 4th is usually the real kickoff to summer business, where it normally really takes off. If it takes off from the current level...well, that would be amazing.  

Downtown Bend is booming. It's really quite remarkable. I suspect there are few places in America that have as much activity as we do. 

Part of it is that the entire area only stretches a few blocks--you know, like a town of 10,000 people. But we're now a town of 110,000 people and the area isn't getting any bigger. Sure, there are other commercial centers, Old Mill, Northwest Crossing, Cascade Village, but none of them have the old school charm of old downtown.

Now the locals would probably scoff at the "charm" part. To many locals it just seems too crowded to bother with. No Parking!

But newcomers and tourists just see the shops. They don't seem to have trouble parking in the parking garage. They are attracted to the hustle and bustle.

Once again, I'll throw out the old Yogi Berra bon mot:  "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

I wish I had a time machine so I could go back to my younger self, twenty, thirty, especially forty years ago and say, "Someday these streets will be filled with shoppers." Part of me always thought that was a possibility. I always chose to pay the higher rents because I saw a continual progression. I made the right choice to stay right where I was. And I'd already made the mistake of expanding too much, what I will call the Duncan Corollary to the Peter Principle: "A business will expand to its level of incompetence."

I'm happy with what I've got and really don't want to add more complexity or stress. Just grateful to see it happen.  

 

My biggest dilemma is still what to do with myself without the store. (A couple years away yet.) I really don't like doomscrolling and yet I seem to be addicted to it. I seem to be able to read a book only about half an hour at a time these days. Either that or I'm simply not finding books I find engrossing. Linda is able to watch entire seasons of old shows (she currently working through the old Perry Mason shows) but I become quickly bored. Even at night, I have to distract myself with coloring books. 

I don't want to be pest at the other bookstores, which I could easily become. I'm not ready to really consider opening a used bookstore, though if I can't find a solution to my lack of activity, I might end up doing that.  

Take up writing again? Thing is, I don't know how to do that as a leisure activity. I'm either all in or I'm all out. I've tried writing snippets but I quickly lose whatever motivation I had by not diving all in. Still...I could probably get into some routine where I write stuff I want without any consideration of saleability. Just write what I want. But that would pretty much be mental masturbation, though I'm not sure that doomscrolling isn't even more that. 

I'm assuming that I'll come up with an answer in the next couple years. Meanwhile, the store is a lot of fun to watch operating at full blast. I waited so long for that to happen.  

The Final Fantasy Magic cards haven't been a flop. They're selling at about the pace I hoped for, maybe a little faster, though it's the beginning of the run so that seems right. I haven't been at the store so I don't know exactly what's selling. 

Meanwhile, new books continue to sell. It looks like this will be the sixth month in a row where we'll beat last year. In fact, we're on pace to have our best year ever. 

I can't believe how much more work it's taken to catch up from taking a week off. Pretty much spent all of today doing book orders--and I'd already done about 40% of them before today. I'm not sure I'll ever dare do a skip week again. 

Everything comes down to the budget. I'm finding it nearly impossible to keep track of what I'm spending with my three new publishers: Simon & Shuster, Harper Collins, and Scholastic. Unlike Penguin Random House and Ingram, they don't give me totals, and it would add a hell of a lot of time to add them up one by one. I count them, and round them off to a certain number that I'm pretty sure is slightly higher than they actually are. But it's inexact, and I'm been caught flatfooted a couple of times. Nothing dangerous, but slightly off putting.  All those years of living week to week without credit or reserves made me very careful about how I spend the money. 

I figured out a budget that would work within a 20% range of my high estimate in sales and the 20% range of my low estimate in sales. In other words, a firm number I stick to every week. It's hard to see progress on a day to day basis, but I know it's probably starting to accrue. I don't need to change the budget unless there is a radical change in sales, up or down.

Yeah, it only took me 40 years to figure it out. 

This new Magic release is going to be an interesting experiment. Today is going to be a test, though it may be too early to draw conclusions.  

I can't think of a time when we've had all these particular circumstances at the same time.

The eternal retail conundrum: Supply and Demand. 

On one hand, we have a supposed "hot" product that I have been able to order a lot of; as I've always said, selling hot product isn't hard, getting enough material in stock to sell is the hard part. I have this weird feeling that while most stores are not getting as much material as they usually can sell, I'm getting more material than I can usually sell.  

So it's a gamble. Already today, the day of release, the prices seem to have moderated online. However, it also seems to be sold out most places and we have plenty in stock. Not everyone wants to buy in advance, not everyone wants to buy online.

One good thing about ordering so much product is that I can sell a large part of my order at "regular" prices. I'm always more comfortable at SRP. But with hot product, you have to be careful. Another saying I have--it's better to have product at higher prices than to not have any product at all. But preferably, we can have both SRP and sufficient supplies. 

Sure FOMO exists (Fear of Missing Out). But conversely, everyone will always have the fear that they are paying too much and prices will drop. That fear is why people are willing to pay in advance, but that fear is also why they might also want to wait and see.  

During Covid and more recently after Pokemon seemed to suddenly sell out everywhere, my experience told me to buy everything I could get, every chance I got, even at higher prices. That worked very well at the start, but lately I've noticed that I'm able to get more than I'm actually selling. Which would seem to be a warning sign to back off. 

I've also ordered extra product outside normal channels at higher prices. So far, every time I've done that, it's been a step too far. So I think that is where I need to draw the line.  

There is a possibility that it could all be a flop. I'm betting otherwise, but I've certainly had that experience before. Back when I was doing sports cards--the nearest example of what's happening now--I would often itch to buy tons of some product and then only see it flop. But just as often,  the product would be a hit. My general sense was that they cancelled each other out. 

What saved me was that I didn't have the money to gamble all that much.  

This time I do. 

My main supplier has proven somewhat reliable in offering more material over time--but it's spotty. Some product they continue to offer and some is never offered again, and damned if I know which is which until I've already committed.  

All of this stuff will sell over time. I don't know, maybe Sabrina will benefit more than I will. However, I have no problem with handing over a thriving store to her.  

 

Went on vacation for five days and decided to do a skip week.

Oh, boy. I came back to a swamped store and a swamped schedule. Summer is hitting hard all of a sudden. I looked at Sabrina and said, "With the amount of stuff I'm doing off the clock, you're probably going to need a full time employee."

One of my jobs at the store is to just go around and straighten everything. A seemingly simple job that is actually really important with a packed store like Pegasus. It would be so easy for everything to get out of control, to become utterly chaotic, impossible to find anything. Overwhelming.

I spent most of today just doing that; going around, checking to see where we had holes and what was missing or filed incorrectly. Meanwhile, Sabrina was dealing with customers and the register and she's being nearly overwhelmed. 

By skipping a week in orders, I didn't save any work. If anything, more stuff arrived this week than ever before, especially with the huge Magic and Pokemon orders, as well as boxes from Harper Collins and Simon & Shuster on top of the usual Penguin Random House and Ingram. 

Meanwhile the usual six or eight pages of books sold that need to be reordered ballooned to about twenty pages, single spaced pages, books that have to be looked up, to check to see if we have them in stock, figure out which publisher carries them, and enter all the information.

I do this mostly at home, but that's becoming more and more difficult too with the multiple publishers and random arrivals of stock. I make more mistakes if I can't see what the store actually has. 

I think Sabrina has pretty much decided that she'll need a Point of Sale program to keep track and I have to agree though I shudder how hard it will be to get up and running.  

The bright side is: this is all due to success. We're doing very well, sales-wise, and that just requires more effort to keep up with. Peak business, I'd say. Any more and we'd have to completely upend our single store person model and that brings its own headaches. Frankly, having more than one person in the store at a time means we're often stumbling across each other. I try to stay out of the way, but I can't help overhearing discussions where I can add my two cents worth. 

We've got time to try to work out a way for Sabrina to get all this done. I'd like to hang around a little if possible, just be an unobtrusive worker bee, if that's possible. But she's be in charge and I'll need to do what she wants. If she'll have me. 

If not, then...full retirement. Hint, hint, she's been telling me I need to "practice retirement..." 

Getting into the weeds about my budgeting process.

I'm still dealing with the consequences of moving from a timeliness/accuracy model of ordering to not so timely or accurate, but higher discount model. Still working out the kinks, though I'm beginning to get a handle on it. Over the course of the year, the higher discounts should make us more profitable.

I think. 

We get an extra week for budgeting each month, The first three weeks divides almost all the large overhead costs (wages/rent/wages) and leaves the fourth week to pay down on whatever debt we might have accrued, or if no debt, a chance to order something we don't normally order.

Each quarter we get on fifth week, which helps even more.  

I have spent four times as much money as normal this month on Pokemon and Magic, so I'm applying the fifth week to June, even though the accounting Tuesday falls on the first of July. (Tuesdays are when I do all my figuring.) 

I budget week to week. It took years to arrive at this solution. Monthly was too long a stretch and daily is too short a stretch; weekly seems to be the right number to keep accurate track of both sales and budget.  

My budget is planned for when I make the orders not when the monies are due, so I have a lot of leeway, which I try not to abuse.

This week I skipped ordering books. This is almost the first time I've done this since I became a full bookstore. 

It doesn't really matter because we've had huge shipments arrive yesterday and today and probably tomorrow. I can no longer keep track of when books will arrive, except from Ingram. They just keep flowing through the door.

So budgeting has really come down to doing a rolling average of what I spend. This is a change, because until now I've been matching spending to sales pretty accurately. Now that I'm ordering from five different sources for books, I can't really keep track of that. So the focus is on the budget. As long as I budget correctly, the rest should work out (assuming sales continue to be close to what they've been.)

Because of the skip week, I'm moving up my accounting on books to the actual week I order instead of the following week. I don't need to do this, but it does feel more like I'm top of things that way.  

We've been rolling along selling books and cards, and we've turned some of our attention to back issue collectable comics, which we suddenly have a good supply of. As usual, whatever we turn our attention to gets a boost in sales. I finally feel like I have the two major legs of our store on a solid footing so I'm trying to get comics back to being a good solid third leg to the stool. 

 Anyone get this far? It fascinates me, if no one else.