Turning water into wine.

It shouldn't be possible, but we've ended up with 55 linear feet of brand new shelving, and yet we have more room than before. (Not even counting 54 feet of linear new shelving we put in the windows.) All but about 15 feet of this shelving is dedicated to showing the covers of the books, which we dearly needed.

Everything is set up and it looks and feels great.

How do you add bulk and lose weight? How do you add so many more bookshelves without having to reduce any of the space and attention given to other product lines?

This miracle has happened before, more than once. I've been trying to make room for more product for years and every time I think I've reached the end of it, a need arises and a solution presents itself. 

The most impactful of these changes was during Covid. I'd been trying to turn the eastern half of the store into more of a bookstore. I'd made some progress, but was blocked by a lack of space. When we had to close for two months during Covid, I decided to lay down some much needed new flooring.

In doing so, we had to move everything out of one side of the store, and then put it back and put everything into the other side of the store. It got me to thinking about the layout and I realized that by dispensing with a couple of fixtures which weren't really doing us any good and by moving other fixtures just a few inches here and there, we'd be able to add a few more bookshelves. In actually doing it, I found that I could add even more bookshelves. I started to realize that something would be more effective here, that there was underutilized space there, little changes that added up to a lot.

With the new flooring laid down, it seemed to me that the actual layout of the store hadn't really changed but somehow we'd added hundreds more feet of shelving. So while I was at it, I consolidated a few more product lines, without losing any volume for the other product lines, with even more bookshelves.

Still, when I was done, it didn't feel to me like we'd changed things all that dramatically. But within a short time, I realized that in the perception of customers (especially tourists and new customers) we'd been transformed.

People kept commenting on what a nice "bookstore" we had. Now, we'd always gotten compliments. But most people before the changeover had referred to us as a comic store, or just a store. 

I realized that we had, indeed, become more of "bookstore" because we were able to carry so many more books and because we were finally able to add non-fiction books, as well a dedicated sections to poetry, nature, philosophy, and so on. Once on that path, I continued to fine tune the selection until we had the selection a bookstore should have. 

So this is a continuation of that process.

Now we find out if it actually results in increased sales. If nothing else, it makes the store more attractive, and that is good in itself.  

We're getting a massive load of new books today. I've really turned on the spigot for titles since we are now going to be returning books to the publisher if they don't sale. I'll probably be spending a few weeks adjusting, but we should be ready by the time summer really kicks in. 

Amazing stuff.