All the fixings of a used bookstore.

I'm just going to put this out there: I have all the makings of a used bookstore that someone could start with very little money. They might even be able to make a (very modest) living from it.  I've got about 18,000 books, 25 bookcases, a bunch of other fixtures, a cash register. And lots of free advice.

I keep wondering why Redmond or Burns or a lot of other Central and Eastern Oregon towns don't have a used bookstore.

All of this exists because it was my own backup plan for if I got bored while retired. I figured it wouldn't require more than 600 to 800 square feet, limited hours--12:00 to 5:00, Tuesday through Saturday. Very little downpayment, and in some of these smaller towns, the rent should be affordable. 

A knowledge and love of books would probably be necessary. I'd recommend buying books for a year or so off of liquidation sites to spruce up your beginning inventory, and I think if you're willing to buy good books, you could have a decent business. Nothing to make you rich, but someone just starting out might be able to turn it into something without a huge investment. Or someone older who doesn't want to sit at home. 

My own plan was to find another one or two retired folk who could watch the store if I wanted time off. 

I might still do this down the road a few years if no one appears or I can't get what I think the materials are worth. (Like I said, I think starting a used bookstore is probably the most achievable thing to do for someone with limited funds but lots of enthusiasm.)

If anyone is interested, you can just message me on Facebook or on this blog. I kind of wish I could do it myself, but my own store is doing fantastic so I'm sticking with that for now.

That click-baity stuff wears thin.

I don't know if it's me or the internet, but I'm finding less and less interesting browsing material online. I'm fairly immune to click-bait these days. I find myself reading more headlines and less core material. It ain't hard to figure out what they're going to hit you with. 

We're in a weird non-news cycle, other than the usual fuckery. Which I'm thankful for...news that really grabs me is usually in the catastrophic realm of things. 

I have a number if sites I go to for news, (liberal bias admitted): NY Times, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Slate, Vox, and occasionally, USA Today. I've tried many other sites, but these somehow stuck.

I go to specialty sites about books, Shelf Awareness and Passive Voice.

Locally, I read the Bulletin in paper form and check out KTVZ online (avoid the comments! We're doomed!)

It seems like the quality of the content has declined, become even more superficial--or perhaps I've just lost patience with their puffery. 

For instance, Huffington Post has a section of columns written by non-professionals. I mean, I think these people believe they are professional writers, but most of them aren't half as interesting as they think they are. (Hey, I'm at least Half as interesting as I think I am.)

A lot of self-absorbed blather that strives to be profound and is usually just boring, over-written, and over-long. 

And so it goes. 

The only two social media sites I go to are Facebook and Reddit. 

I just check the main Reddit; I don't belong to any sub-reddits. It's OK to check out when nothing else is going on. 

Facebook. Oh, my. I'm not sure what's going on there. Facebook has decided on a group of "friends" that I'm going to see. I'm pretty sure it's because I've clicked on them--but then, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it? Because I clicked, I get more of them to click. A common denominator seems to be that these friends write original posts and not just copying something else.

Oh, and Facebook has also decided that I want Beatles stuff, more Beatles stuff, and oh, here you go...Beatles stuff.  

Anyway, I think I'm slowly but surely cutting down and drifting away, and that ain't all a bad thing.

I have mostly stopped writing fiction, but that hasn't stopped me from writing. What you see on this blog is only the tip of the iceberg. I probably write ten times more entries than I actually post. Mostly because I have learned, to my chagrin, that I can't be completely and totally candid on posted blogs. Most often not because I think what I have to say is wrong, but because I'm afraid of unnecessarily insulting or hurting someones feelings. I reserve that right to myself, I guess.

Plus who really wants to hear my daily blather? I'm letting myself post this today, because it's an example of why you should be thankful I don't do it everyday and clog up your Facebook.

Not that anything I say here isn't honest and candid, it's just that I censor myself. Lots of observations from an old man may not be suitable to the world these days. Some subjects just can't be touched, no matter how diplomatic I try to be. 

It's always scary to see someone torch their reputation in public. It's unnecessary. Frankly, if you have opinions that cause that much strife, you might want to rethink. If nothing else, you might consider that you could possibly be wrong. 

My blog posts--or more accurately, my diary posts to myself--are just me thinking aloud.  It helps me order my thoughts. I have a habit of asking myself, "How are you doing?" Often the answer is pretty much the same. Not sure anyone would want to listen to that for long. I ponder things, and if the question is thorny, I try to ask myself, "What is the right thing to do, here?" 

For years while working the store every day, I'd go to sleep at night and ask two questions:

1.) What I have done today that I shouldn't have done?

2.) What haven't I done today, that I should have?

These two questions almost always solicit answers, some of the unexpected. They also tend to resolve quandaries that I might have been wrestling with. Now that I'm at an age where things can go sideways at any moment, I'm trying to give myself a break. I've mostly succeeded in what I set out to do, at least to my satisfaction. 

But I'm still working at the store, at least part-time, because I'm not yet ready to completely retreat from the everyday world. There are still the challenges of small business and I more or less relish that. 

Letting go of stuff.

I bagged, boarded, and priced 400 comics yesterday. Took me most of the afternoon. My current estimate on how long it will take to fully install each long box of comics is about 5 hours. Since I'm going to do at least 20 boxes and probably more, we're talking about, at least, 100 hours. My estimate of how much I've done is about 1/3rd of the way.

I'm going to be busy all of February trying to get all this done. I'll do the final touches in March. Quite the chore I took on.

I also took on the job of emptying out the basement and have removed about 150 boxes of used books. I'm sort of alternating the two tasks.

Having a bad back for a month slowed things down, but I'm back on it. I'm trying to keep the momentum without over-doing it. 

But I'm sort of amazed it is getting done. For years I looked upon the piles of stuff and quailed at the thought of dealing with it. Not sure what finally impelled me to get going on it. Part of it was landlord wanting me to clear out some of the stuff. 

I was talking to one of my customers about it, and he mentioned that he was still "pissed" about me giving away all my sports cards. 

"Well, hell," I said. "I have a whole basement of stuff. You want to see it?"

He liked what he saw so we dickered for awhile and came up with a lump sum. I'm nothing if not an opportunist. 

He hauled away a bunch of stuff on Sunday: all the posters, old toys, and non-sports cards plus miscellany. He's coming back for more stuff, and I sweetened the deal by offering him 3000 comics. (Non-bagged, boarded, and priced, thank goodness.)

The older I get, the more willing I am to let go of stuff. I've never been a collector myself, but I always accumulated material for the store. 

This stuff might be worth a lot more than I sold it for, but it isn't liquid and at this point in my life, holding onto it doesn't make sense. I know in my heart that I would never had time to monetize the stuff; nor did I think Sabrina would ever want to take on the task.

I can take the money I'm making on the old stuff and buy new stuff that can sell upstairs. 

Once I actually started dealing with the stuff, it turned out not to be as impossible as I thought.

An Unholy Blessing: Was Covid good for bookstores?

Covid was good for bookstores. I suppose this goes beyond being a mixed blessing to being an unholy blessing. But true, nevertheless.

Ezra Klein has a pretty good summation of why this happened in the New York Times. He's talking about Barnes and Noble, but it's true, nevertheless.

Here's the way he puts it: "There is no joy in sitting your child next to you while you order children’s books on Amazon. And in the teeth of the Covid pandemic, the libraries were closed month after month after month. ...I found myself playing out my own childhood in reverse, taking my kids there day after day, so they’d have a place to sit and play and exist among books."

I think that is exactly what we saw at Pegasus Books. While that bump has subsided a little bit, it still seems to have brought our store to the attention of a whole wave of new customers. It gave me a chance to reorganize the store, mainstream it a little more, bring in lots of new books. 

Usually things revert back to normal, but I'm hoping the families keep coming in. 👪

The basement of my store mirrors my subconscious.

There was no parking in front of the store for me to do another load of books, so instead, I spent yesterday looking around the basement.

It's like a derelict wreckage history of my store. All the things I tried that either failed or became outdated or simply stuff I didn't want to do anymore. 

Material that got so shopworn, I retired it. Almost anything that was complicated, whether a device or some kind of process, eventually got jettisoned. A bunch of marketing approaches that became too labor intensive or involved wrangling with the customers. Promotional material sent to me that I didn't have time or space to deal with. All of it dumped into the basement.

Sports cards are mostly gone, but I found leftovers. A couple of pictures of me in my 40s giving away a signed basketball in our Mt. View mall store. (Lots of dark brown hair on my head.) Paints and displays for miniatures (I always wished I could do something with that, but could never get people to be interested.) Found a huge lead dragon that I painted red with a broken leg. I have fond memories of that figure. Lots of magazines...remember those?

Electronics--what the fuck do you do with old electronics? Enough dusty stationary  and tools and cords to fill dozens of junk drawers. Broken or unused fixtures. (Those I'll probably leave because someone could use them...)

I'm selling off hundreds and hundreds of old toys and posters and especially a huge quantity of non-sports cards. I'm willing to bet that I have a larger selection and quantity of non-sport cards from the 80s and 90s than...well, anyone in the country. I was very heavy into them and enjoyed them and I don't have PTSD over them the way I do sports cards. I always thought if I was somehow confined to a room, I'd fill a wall with non-sports cards and sell them online...kind of a vague backup plan for retirement.

I have a buyer, so I'm letting go of them. They are the one thing in the basement that I'm sorry to see go. 

The landlord asked me to clear out some of the stuff for insurance purposes; and once I got started, I decided to try to go all the way. Used books are being transferred to my new storage shed at home. Used books are my current backup plan for retirement if I get bored.

Over the years I'd already sold or given away almost a million sports cards, and last year I sold off 40,000 comics for pennies on the dollar. What's astonishing is that over the last year, without trying in the least, we've replenished our backstock of comics by tens of thousands. Weird. I don't even remember getting them, except for one collection I purchased last summer. 

Once everything is gone except the comics, I plan to consolidate what's left and take some trips to the dump. 

I think it'll feel good when I'm finished. I'm definitely doing a favor for whoever was going to follow me and have to deal with it all. 

It's been kind of nostalgic... and somewhat triggering (all the stress and drama of failed product and efforts.) Most of it has been out-of-sight so out-of-mind...on purpose. I've finally gotten to a point where I'm willing to face it and deal with it.

The local gaming scene is changing.

I've learned that there were three big changes in in the local gaming community in the last half of 2022 that I was unaware of until this month. Which is very weird to me. I used to really have my finger on the pulse of things. 

Then again, I'm not at the store everyday, and games are not our biggest priority. I understand that board games and card games are a sideline for us. It came home to me years and years ago that, no matter how often the situation changed, that there would always be at least one game store in town.

Anyway, not to bury the lede, on to the news. It appears that Modern Board changed ownership in August, E4 games opened in October, and Main Phase games closed on January 31. 

I've introduced myself or been introduced to the new owners and they seem like good people. They are doing the things, like having gaming space and sponsoring events, that I don't. 

Turnover is something that happens constantly. I'm guessing that a combination of burnout and other opportunities means that people move on. But almost always, there is someone there to take their place.

The first few times that new competition happened, again many years ago, the town of Bend was pretty small and it was pushing the capacity of support. Some of the competition back then seemed cutthroat, though that may have just been because I thought it unnecessary. 

I've become much more sanguine about such things. Bend has grown, most stores develop their own clientele, and co-existence, even cooperation, is not only possible, but desirable. For instance, Dudleys Books is just four storefronts down the same side of my street and we seem to both be able to thrive selling books. 

My own perception is that the chain stores will always be our main competition. Amazon? It came later, after most of the damage was already done by Walmart and Barnes & Noble and their ilk. For some reason, online competition doesn't bother me. 

At any rate, Pegasus Books survives into it's 44th year. Not only survives, but thrives. And most of all, I'm really enjoying it these days.