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.