How refreshing. Made an order with Ingram on Monday, put the books away today. Replacement copies I know I can sell.

Meanwhile, I'm supposed to get orders I started building three weeks ago from the publisher/distributors over the next few days. 

That's it. That's just too long to wait. I'm using Ingram the rest of summer, probably doing an order every day. Every book they have in stock that I want, I'll order. 

There are perennials that I can order from the four publishers that can be backstock, but I only order backstock when I'm ahead. It's a bit of a luxury. Right now, I can't afford to lose the Summer traffic. 

It's a flaw in the system for sure. I tell you, if Ingram would give me a larger discount for non-returnable books, they'd get most of my business. For some reason, they don't have that option.

I went into the store at 8:00 this morning, which a few years ago would have been inconceivable. I have a set time I go to bed: 12:30. Any earlier and I awake early and can't get back to sleep. But lately, I've been waking up early anyway. 

It's a lot less stressful and much more productive to do the stocking while the store is closed. I can keep my concentration, I can move freely around the store without dodging, or worse, dislodging the customers, and I can make changes without worrying about disrupting the flow. 

 

Made the order and it even qualified for the secondary warehouse. I know they will arrive before this weekend, not two weeks from now. Enough chasing discounts. 

I also rediscovered something I once knew. It's twice as fast to order from one website which is functional than assembling two websites and three emails. Duh. 

So that's what I'm going to do for summer. I will continue to throw backlist orders at the publishers, but everything else is going to be faster from now on.  

I'm nothing if not inconsistent. 

After all my going too and fro about timeliness vs discount, the third element of the equation has come to the fore: accuracy.

I tried to do my budget this morning as I usually do on Tuesday and the truth is, I can't tell how much I owe Simon and Shuster, Scholastic, and Harper Collins. All I've got is a blizzard of invoices, some with as little as one title, and a couple of "statements" that make no sense to me. The dates seem all wrong, and the accounting is indecipherable, at least to me. I'm sure they make sense to an accountant, but it might as well be Algebra 2, which is the  only class I ever failed in high school. (I just quit going after the first few weeks because I couldn't begin to understand it, even when I had my friend Steve Davies try to help me.

I've added up every bit of money I think I owe and I've added 5K to my reserve fund just in case. But I'm not sure I can go on like this. All I want is a simple statement each month: You Owe X Amount Of Money, so I can write out a check for X Amount of Money. Is that too much to fucking ask?

I went around and around with the credit rep from S & S and we didn't seem to understand each other one little bit. "How much do I owe?" I ask.  "Which claim are you paying?" she answers. "How the hell do I know? You tell me!" and so on. 

So I've made a drastic decision. It's Ingram for the rest of the summer until the smoke fades. Sure I get 10% less discount but by God, I get the product the very next day (not two weeks!) and I know exactly what I've spent. I've always chosen timeliness and accuracy over discounts, all things being equal. 

So the quandary continues.   

No wonder Amazon is eating up the book world. Their search engine is a marvel and they get stuff to you promptly. Doesn't help me, as a retailer much. I mean, obviously, it hurts. But I can understand why it's happening.

The Big Five are still in the stone age, as far as I can tell. 

Penguin Random House at least has a way for you to order online directly with them, and know exactly what is in stock. But then...they split the damn order into a dozen little shipments with a dozen little invoices that come in on a dozen different time schedules. So they're halfway there. 

But the others? Might as well be writing them letters.   

 

After sales dragging all day, we had a burst in the last hour, including I believe, a box of Final Fantasy. (Which makes me feel better about buying another couple of boxes from Mag. Ex.) 

We're on a great pace.

A huge number of books showing up this week, basically two weeks in one. (I neglected to hit the "Send" button on the order the week before last.)

The massive volume of books means I will need to go in early every day for the rest of the week. 

I don't mind. I kind of like it. 

I just ordered 20 Pokemon Pop figures, not so much because I think they will sell fast but because they can be protective coloring. There is barely enough Pokemon product available until the new stuff shows up later in the month. We could possibly have gaps in our displays, which I don't like. So if nothing else, we'll have some nice toys to offer.  

I'm having more fun than I've probably had in the entire history of the store except in the run-up to the baseball card crash. After that, I was leery of all such bursts, and more focused on trying the fix the damage of each successive bubble. (Including the housing bubble.) This time, we are not in debt, we're not over-extended and the overhead is well within bounds. 

We'll be fine either way. 

 

Still struggling with the choice between ordering direct from publishers at 10 to 15% better margins but waiting ten days for the books to show up, or paying lower margins from Ingram and getting the books a a very timely couple days later. 

Question is: how many sales are we missing during those eight days, multiplied by the basically 2/3rds of the books we're currently getting from publishers? A lost sale in not only about the lost profit, it's also a failure to meet the customer demand, and that's something you don't want to do too often. 

When it was just Penguin Random House, I chose to order from only Ingram during Christmas. Makes no sense to order a book from PRH on the 10th of the month and at best have a couple days before Christmas to sell it. But that was only 1/3rd of the books, not 2/3rds. 

The same is true during Summer. Really, there are only about eight or nine weeks of summer after July 4th, which is real kickoff for increased sales. So in 63 days, I can order books from publishers maybe 5 times, or I can order from Ingram more than twice as often. That's a lot more books in on a timely basis.

But there is another phenomenon going on. During summer and Christmas we are getting customers for which ALL the books in stock are new to them. They usually aren't coming in for specific titles, but for a wide selection.

And by ordering from each publisher each week, a wide variety of books are coming in all the time. 

Ironically, it's more important to have every important book during the slower months because every customer and every sale counts.

This is Summer week is where I decide whether to switch from publisher ordering each week, knowing that each book I'm ordering will miss roughly 20% of the summer, or to ordering from Ingram and losing less than 10% of the selling period.

Of course, I can finesse this quite a bit. Often I'll order from both Ingram and publishers for books that I'll probably need more copies of.  And the flow of product is so much stronger than it used to be that there is a better then even chance that if I don't have one title the customer wants, I'll have another.

So I'm sticking to the publisher discounts for now even though it will be a dagger in the heart every time a customer asks for a book we could have had in stock, but instead have to tell them, "It's on its way..." 

I always resisted getting an RV because it seemed to me that most people don't get enough use out of them to warrant the cost. Of course, no one will admit to this, but all I know is that I see my neighbors's RV parked month after month and rarely taken out for a spin. 

Besides, you can pay for a lot of nice rooms in nice hotels for the price of an RV.  

But it came down to never leaving the house again or getting a transport for our cat. Our RV is a very expensive Catbus. 

OK... I was up for it, but then I decided to stay around the store for another couple of years and business has been booming, which makes it fun again. So even less chance to get away. 

By the time I'm done with the store, I'll be 74 years old and the cat will be 18 years old, assuming that we both make it that far.

Therefore when the boys started to ask to use the Catbus, no only didn't I object, I was delighted. "Please...take it any time you want!' 

So now I feel like maybe we're getting our monies worth. It's a family bus, and as far as I'm concerned, the money we're currently earning and still saving for "retirement" is family money and that's the way it should be.

I want for nothing. Seriously. There isn't anything I want that I don't have, except a teleporter that can get me anywhere I want to go in seconds. I can't quite seem to find one for sale. 

So the Catbus is seeming rather part of life now and I don't mind it a bit.  

Interesting that retailers are still blaming Diamond for all that is wrong in the comic world.

Here's the thing. Diamond doesn't exist, except as a name. The company that took it over is a completely different entity.

And they are pulling the plug on most of what Diamond was still doing (not that there was much less.) Word is, they're selling off the consignment inventory left and not paying the publishers. So that's gotta hurt if you are a publisher.

Meanwhile, smaller publisher will have to got through a new company that gives a smaller discount and/or minimum orders. This was entirely predictable. It always amazed me that Diamond was willing to pack a singe comic. I mean, it can't have been worth the time, energy, and labor to do it.

Speaking of minimums, that's mostly how the toy industry works. You buy a case with six or twelve figures. You don't get to say, "I want only Yoda and Boba Fett." No you get three minor characters that no one wants. Plus your buying at such a low discount that it's only worthwhile to buy most toys if you tack a little bit above the retail price. (There isn't usually an SRP.)

But the chain stores are selling for below retail price so it's a double whammy. Meanwhile, the chain stores get what they ordered and they get it earlier. We often don't get the 'good' stuff and we have to wait much longer. 

With Diamond no longer there, stores will have to buy from toy distributors and they are awful. Not just for toys, but for everything else: posters, pins, t-shirts, buttons...you name it. Again, minimums at awful discounts arriving late if at all. Whoopee!

 

 

It took many years for the store to get to where it is. During most of those years I not only couldn't afford to carry 100% of what we should, I was probably only getting half to two/thirds of the way there. 

Now? The only thing stopping us is lack of space. We have gotten to that 100% and surpassed it and it shows. Now people come in and there is a very good chance they'll find something interesting. It's the excess inventory that causes the average to stay steady.  

It's made me refine my notion that the most important element of success is to think for yourself. Or more clearly, to separate the bullshit from the reality. So many businesses are concerned about their image, how good looking they are, how wonderful it all feels.

But books are our image. The more and better books we have, the better our image. I assure you that no one sees that the wall is patched in places, or the there is a bit of dust here and there. Not that you shouldn't try to fix that, but just that there is a lot of leeway--if you are otherwise doing the job of getting good product at affordable prices.  

If you've got the space and the fixtures and the manpower, then the most important thing to have is inventory. Somehow I understood that from the beginning and always plowed the bulk of our gross profit back into the store. In the last fifteen years or so and especially in the last five years, we're finally getting rewarded for that. But that meant we spent 25 years getting there. 

It wouldn't have taken so long if I hadn't made so many mistakes, but mistakes are how you learn what not to do. Experience is what teaches you what to do.