I dreamed last night that I got a huge load of games from some distributor and I wandered around a fictitious store (I often have dreams of stores whose layout is completely different than mine) trying to find room for them. I was worried about theft of the miniatures.
Woke up, worried about the store.
Believe it or not, the worry is that we are getting TOO busy. I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on a game order that will probably add to both our sales and our workload.
I mean, of all the things to complain about!
See, despite all my warnings to everyone else about burnout, I underestimated the time and energy it would take to keep book sales up. Book sales doubled and then kept growing. I spend a lot of my hours at the store assembling book orders, a couple of evenings a week doing orders, and an afternoon a week stocking them. I mean, that doesn't sound like much, but it's more than I was doing before.
Our manga sales are way up, and last week I found about a dozen books that weren't written down; which was either an oversight or they were stolen. Trouble with manga and anime is that there is a little bit of history of that. Despite our openness, we really don't have that much trouble with theft, but when we do, it's because we're super busy.
Along the same lines, we are suddenly selling more Pokemon and Yugi Oh than were were selling before, probably because Wabi Sabi isn't around to take the bulk of sales.
Without me even noticing, our Funko Pop toys stock is down from previous levels, maybe by half. Meanwhile, because of the slow restart from my comic distributor, and because I'm working at the store and can offer people deals (I know what I paid), I haven't been able to get enough toys to fill the shelves completely. This should take care of itself as the supply begins to increase.
A lot of this is happening because I've become more involved in the store and I'm in control of the budget. Or rather, the budget is in control of me...
It's fairly easy to see areas where we can still grow. So now I'm wondering if maybe we shouldn't. I mean, maybe we should just keep up with what we're doing for now. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, but no major moves. But then, I think about all the normally slow months, and it's hard not to pursue as much business as we can get. It also may be this plague, ironically, that is making us so busy and when the plague is gone, business will decrease.
The devil's bargain is that I may need to come into the store more to help, especially at Christmas. Maybe open early and stay late, work the first couple of hours, overlap for another three or four hours, and then let Sabrina finish it off.
See what I mean about it being easy to add to the workload?
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