"Let's change everything today!"

I haven't been doing customer counts. I wish I were. Maybe I should start doing them now.

But it's hard to be accurate, and the more employees I have, the harder it gets. Since I have three part-timers, right now, the counts would probably be all over the place. Ultimately, it probably really doesn't matter, except to satisfy my curiosity.

Anyway, it's hard to gauge whether I'm getting, say, 50 people a day, or 60 people a day, and that's a whomping 17% difference right there.

My sense is, that foot traffic was probably down, especially early in the summer, but that it didn't account for the fullness of the drop in sales.


Coming to work, today, another measure really leaped out at me. A cash register full of 1.00's, 5.00's and 10.00's.

Sure, that's great and all. But I'd much rather have a cash register full of 20.00's, 50.00's and 100's, you know?

It says to me that the heart is willing, but the flesh is weak. 5.00 sales are what people do when they want to 'shop' but they really don't want to 'spend.'

Sort of like my 'Empty Parking Spaces in Front of My Store' gauge, it's pretty hard to measure. It's easy to fool oneself, to confirm one's own biases. Still....sometimes, that's all you got.

Of course, the ultimate measure is money in the bank.


Meanwhile, going forward with the makeover. Went to Staples and bought the 3 more new bookcases I need, for a total of six 4' tall shelves, and five 6' tall shelves. Those, plus turning my manga shelves over to fiction, will make more of a bookstore statement. The more I look at the store, the more I realize that it is past time to retire old toys and cards that simply haven't been selling. I'm hoping that I can restrain my impulse to fill every inch so that some of the new bookshelves can display my books better.

It's hard to know until I do it, but I think this change will make the store look more streamlined and less cluttered. Sometimes I put everything in place and realize it doesn't work, and I have to make secondary changes. Giving myself time to ruminate helps avoid that.

I just sit on my stepstool and stare at the walls and try to visualize and stare some more and try to visualize alternative looks and then stare some more.

The best way to do a makeover is all at once. Stressful, but you get the business killing chaos out of the way. The worst way to do a makeover is slowly, which customers seem to instinctively recoil from.

So which am I doing? You got it. The latter; mostly because I just don't want that kind of stress level, and I'm just hoping that I can get away with doing it in stages. I don't really want to stay until midnight for a couple of days; but instead would like to do most of it during store hours.
My youthful -- "Let's change everything today!" days are over, I guess.

Of course, once I actually get going, I tend to accelerate. So, hopefully, I'll be done within a week or so. Just in time to order more books.