Made a dedicated trip to Portland to visit the Portland Art Museum one day and the Japanese Gardens the next day. 

So we went to the museum yesterday, starting on the top floor for the Mark Rothko exhibit. There were really only four paintings of the style I expected, the others were early career paintings. The four paintings were fabulous and I spent a fair amount of time examining them. Photographs really don't do them justice.

Next floor down was an extensive Rick Bartow exhibit (a Native American who spent most of his life in Oregon)nwhich I loved and Linda also liked. We ended spending quite a bit of time there, soaking it all up. I looked up some of his prints online and there were a couple I liked that seemed almost affordable. I'm not sure how you'd go about buying them.   

More of a quick tour through the rest of the exhibits, which still took most of the afternoon. 

Today we'll check out the Japanese Gardens, maybe make a quick detour to Powell's Books. 

If I have to retire, I might as well do something with my time. 

 

NEXT DAY: Went to the gallery where the Rick Bartow's art is and bought a couple of prints. A little pricey but also wonderful. 

Then on to the obligatory Powell's Books visit. Found four of my books in stock, which is always kind of a cool thing to see.  

Went to the Japanese Gardens in-between rainfalls. We always seem to be lucky that way. Beautiful, but a little cloudy and wet and not quite full blooms. But very pretty. Another gallery of art. Seems that once your eyes are open to art, it is everywhere: restaurants, public spaces, and stores.  

So here's the big takeaway from the trip. Indulging a slightly nicer visit, better hotel, better restaurants. The differences between a higher end hotel and a middlin' hotel are subtle but noticeable. Whether worth the extra cost probably depends on how much money you have to waste. Probably not something we can do every time. We probably spent 10% of the money on three nights as we spent on thirty nights in Australia, which we did economy sized. But that included some long flights and other expenses. 

Had a couple dinners with Todd and Sharron. They seem to be thriving. Meanwhile, back in Central Oregon, Tobin and Felicia are going full-speed ahead on Origin Millworks, making tables and furniture and other things with their little sawmill. Both guys seem to be doing great.

The store continues to function at a high level--far beyond what I would have considered even possible. I wish I didn't to have to hand it over to Sabrina at the end of the year, but I hope to stick around and be a glorified stockboy.  

Visiting museums and bookstores on trips to new cities seems like a good retirement thing to do. I don't seem to have any fear of crowds anymore, which is a miracle. Not going to say I'm cured of my agoraphobia, but I will say that it doesn't seem to be anywhere near the problem it once was. 

Visited friends Wes and Ev on our way home, had a nice visit.

Glad to get home to our own routines and the manic cat, Schrodinger.  

I write on this blog almost everyday, but it is more of a diary than an interactive thing. Even though I don't think I'm saying too many disgraceful things in my private diary, I still don't feel comfortable posting it. 

I'll try harder to come up with some interesting subjects more often, if anyone is still coming here to check. I guess I just don't feel like I need to intrude myself upon the world. I have plenty of opinions, and I think I even have some business and writing insights, but I've also said most of them...more than once. 

Anyway, just putting this out there until I can think of something more substantial to say.  

Store harvesting.

Listening to podcasts about Ukraine and they were talking about how, with infrastructure starting to fail, the Russians have been forced to cannibalize non-functioning infrastructure to keep the rest of the system working. They called it "parts harvesting." Obviously, this is self-defeating. Less functioning units means less money to get more functioning units.

There is a parallel in business that I've seen over and over again. A store opens with the best inventory they can get. They start selling it. They don't replace it right away because they need the gross profit to pay bills. With less product, sales start dropping, so the store starts to sell remaining inventory in short-term "SALES!" Meaning they have even less product. And down the spiral they go. 

In my own experience it took years of struggle to get to the point where the inventory turnover paid for itself. I had to keep reinvesting in product which left little money for things like take-home"profit." (Tax wise, higher inventory is counted as profit, so double whammy--you pay tax on unsold product.)

The irony is, the capital investment is so large over time, that anyone with that kind of capital in the first place could probably make more money simply investing it in the stock market or bonds. 

Instead, after burning inventory, you are forced to borrow more money. Unless you've learned your lesson, the profits will instead go toward debt. You're paying out, instead of earning in. Borrowing money is also self-defeating if you aren't operationally producing profit.  

But you don't know that going in. 

The only thing you can do without capital is to keep pushing inventory a little higher over what you're comfortable doing and just squeaking by year after year until...overnight success!...you have enough in stock to actually pay for more store! pay your bills! and... wonder of wonders...earn a real profit! 

Most things sell out...eventually.

It's interesting when Dylan reports on a day at the store. He'll give a subjective feeling about how busy it was which often doesn't match the actual sales. But in some ways, that subjective feeling may actually be more accurate as to the health of your business. You can feel when people are interested, even if they aren't spending money. It's much harder to know if people are losing interest but they are still spending money. 

If that makes any sense. You probably have to be a store keeper to understand. I do remember early on reading that the customer count was a better measure of how a store is doing than the actual amount of money taken in.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a small store with a few customers that you cater to and who, when they come in, spend a lot of money. But you're using an inordinate amount of time, energy, and effort to satisfy them, including discounts. Are you a healthy store?

I'd say you are on dangerous ground. Whereas, getting a wide variety of people in who seem interested in your business even if they don't actually spend much, is maybe a better sign that you're healthy or in a position to get healthy.

I'd rather have a hundred people spending $10, than ten people spending $100 dollars, but the latter is very seductive until two or three of them quit, while the first store can lose ten or fifteen people and still have better sales. Not to mention attracting other customers and the word of mouth that is engendered. 

I always had a sense of whether we were moving forward or falling back. Sometimes I'd make changes that I instinctively knew were working even when sales didn't at first reflect it. And I could usually tell when a fad was starting to cool (I learned the hard way to cut orders sooner rather than later.)  

Pokemon is currently a good example of that. Sales totals are still pretty good, but I get the feeling that it's fewer people buying more and older people instead of kids and young families. That it is older people makes me feel like they are motivated by FOMO. 

When I check online, sales have moderated, but not by much. So there isn't much incentive--yet--to lower prices.

The difference between this time and the days when fads ruled the market is that I'm only spending what I actually have in hand instead of ordering stuff in advance and hoping it pans out. The second difference is that I'm pretty secure that Magic and Pokemon will continue, even if it slows down, which means everything will sell eventually. 

Maybe not when I'm in charge, but everything will inevitably sell out given enough time.  

Islands of neatness.

 

I keep having anxiety dreams about the store ever since I decided to reorganize it yet again.

It's always a situation where I find that I'm involved in an offshoot of the store that I don't remember. Last night it was the Book Barn only it was called Frankenstein Books. 

Somehow I'm a minor partner, supplying used books. But the books look like crap, so I want to reorganize them. By doing so, I start straightening up the other books and the more I do that the smaller the selection looks, because I'm shedding dead product and consolidating and straightening viable product and that means they become little islands of neatness in the midst of emptiness. 

I'm making the situation worse.

I think that's the anxiety I'm feeling about the changes I'm making. I'm taking a highly functioning store and messing with it. Adding more capacity may be the wrong move. I guess I'll go ahead and take the new fixtures in and see how they work, but be willing to see that it's not working and remove them if needed. Ask Dylan and Sabrina if they work and take their advice.  

Even though this is my last year, which already seems to be accelerating, I can't seem to stop doing what I've always done. Improve the store every chance I get, even if it costs me time, energy, and money.  

Discount vs everything else.

I was taking a break from ordering from publishers, except for Penguin Random House. Despite the extra 10% to 15% discount I would get. 

During the summer and Christmas, I even avoided buying the PRH unless Ingram didn't have a book in stock.

The results? Wildly successful summer and Christmas, far beyond what I would have ever thought possible. 

I think it's been proven that timeliness and reliability and ease of use far outweigh the extra discount. I've started ordering books almost every day from Ingram so that I'm rarely out of a good-selling title.  

Yes, I could probably order large orders from publishers of books that I know will sell forever, but it's just too annoying not to know what the publishers have in stock, how long it will take to show up, and trying to decipher their billing. 

So I'm done. I'll spend the rest of my career ordering mostly from Ingram, a one or two day shipment away.  

My favorite part of owning my own store.

The two new bookshelves didn't fit where I intended. So I put one of them somewhere else in a less than ideal location and brought the other home.

Then I measured again, searched the internet, and found two fixtures that I think will work better. I hope. 

The fixture I put in the "less than ideal spot" will also be replaced by a better fixture. 

Meanwhile, two/thirds of the poplar planks I purchased have found a place in the store, so I don't feel like I wasted my money. 

All this moving around has thrown the store into a bit of chaos, which is why it is being done now in January and February, historically two of our slowest months. Should all be done by March, after which there'll be some finessing around.  

All this rearranging has added up to a lot more linear feet of shelving than I originally expected. I thought at most I'd get about 20 feet, but in the end I ended up with about twice that much, though some of it is so high up the wall that it can only display a few art books face out. Still, better than before.

For some reason, I get great enjoyment out of doing this kind of thing. It's always been my favorite part of owning a store.