Bopping into the store early this morning to bump around. I'd forgotten the aura of an empty store. There's something very peaceful about it.  I don't have any books to put away, so this will be a look-around, whatever small improvements I can make.

When I first started carrying books, I ordered as many "budget" books as I could afford to get up to speed. Getting my inventory at full wholesale through my cash flow was going to take forever. (I don't borrow money anymore for inventory purposes--it all has to be paid for.)

Some of the budget books were decent, some were junk, a few were prizes. 

I firmly believe that, at any one time, 20% of your inventory are going to be 80% of your sales. But I also believe that you have to have that other 80% in stock. You can work on improving that 20% over time, so maybe it can become something like 30% or 35% of your stock. But it will always be a matter that only part of your inventory will be attractive to your customers. 

Don't ask me the mechanics of it. I've just found that trying for 100% saleable product is pretty much impossible. 

There's a context to inventory; where and how you display the 80% will help sell the 20%.

I recently wondered what percent of the books we sell are the books we put face-outward. I came up with a guesstimate of 50%. I ask Sabrina the same question, and somewhat to my surprise she immediately came up with 50%. The other day I asked Dylan, and he immediately guessed 50%.

But here the thing: only a small percentage of the books can be faced outward. The books behind those books are the kind of midlist books that you'll sell less often, but they are just as important. Anyone can have the bestseller, but a store that can please the customer with something more unusual is also important.

So the more books you have, the better. The better those books are, the better. But you'll always be shuffling books around trying to find ways for the customer to discover them. 

I recently add two authors to my cult stacks. These are authors that few people know about but those in the know will totally glom onto if they find them. 

J.G. Ballard and Roberto Bolano. They join Vonnegut and P.K. Dick and Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Bukowski and a bunch of other authors where I try to carry a good chunk of what they've written. They may not be part of the 20%, but they are also important for verifying to the discerning customer that you know what you are doing.  

Anyway, I'm slowly but surely replacing the bargain books I used to bulk up the store. They've probably gone from 25% of my inventory to maybe 10% of my inventory. Eventually they will all be replaced. But it's still pretty satisfying when one sells; 100% profit, for one thing, since I'm not replacing them. 

It's still not easy to get new inventory through cash flow. It's almost the very definition of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but it's getting done. I probably reorder 90% of the books I sell because I've found that a book that sells once will most often sell twice and a book that sells twice is even more likely to sell three times. I think this is smart, but it also means that the smaller percentage of my budget can be used on new titles and most of those new titles are new releases--bestsellers more often than not. 

But you do it book by book and over time, the inventory improves. I probably won't get to 100% satisfaction, if for no other reason than the amount of space I have to work with, but it's getting better all the time.  

What a breeze! Went in before opening and stocked books. It probably took half as long and there was no stress, no distractions. Obviously, this is the way to do it from now on. 

 

Oops. My smooth operations hit a snag. These days, I'm waiting until Tuesdays to send off Penguin Random House orders, and that frees up Wed. and Thurs. for Sabrina to make comic reorders, then I start constructing a new book order on Friday for the following Tuesday.

I forgot to hit the Send button on Tuesday. Darn-nit. It takes long enough to wait for PRH stuff to show up even when I send orders on time. I'm still working out the new schedule. 

Meanwhile, two lost boxes from Ingram. They don't use UPS and the shipper they do use is horrible. I never know when or if the boxes are going to show up. Especially when they have a new driver. And they always seem to be getting a new driver.  

During busy seasons, like Summer and Christmas, when you need product the most is when the most shipping mishaps happen. I figure the regular drivers are out on vacation, or there are a bunch of newbies just when the holiday crunch is kicking in, but it always seems to go a little haywire. 

 

Broke our streak of good days today. Not by much, but still a warning not to get too smug. A kick in the butt I probably needed. I'd been getting spoiled by what was happening, and that was probably unrealistic. Trending back to norm wouldn't surprise me.  

We're way ahead of last year. In fact, if we just match last year the rest of the way, we'll still have our best year ever.  What's fun is that much of the increase in sales is in product we've already bought, so I don't have to replace it right away.

It's very, very busy. I went in today to put away books and gave up after a couple of hours. I've been planning to go in more often for shorter periods of time to keep down the wear and tear, but there were just too many people clogging the aisles to get anything done. I finally gave up.

It felt very stressful. That stress is self-induced, but knowing that doesn't make it any less. I mean, conceivably, I could take a deep breath and slough off the stress, but I've never been able to adapt my behavior that way.  

The answer is to change the situation. When I nearly quit over my constant conflicts with collectors over the "value" of their collections, my answer was to simply stop buying older stuff. I'm a retailer, pure and simple. 

In most stressful situations, for me it is usually easier to change the situation rather than to try to adapt to it.

So for the rest of the summer I'm going into work before the store opens and putting away product then. It is really a simple solution and the only reason I didn't reach for it before was because I've always thought of myself as a late starter in the mornings. Indeed, I open at 11:00, not 10:00 because when I was working every day it gave me an extra hour to drink my coffee and read my news. In fact, that's a great example of changing the situation rather than my response to the situation. 

Anyway, as I've gotten older, I've been getting up earlier and earlier, and I often find myself ready to go at 8:30 or 9:00. It's been only habit that has me going in later in the day. That plus waiting for the shipments to arrive.

That's the tradeoff. I've got to let the shipments arrive, but come in the next day early to put them away. I may miss  a few timely sales because of that, but so be it. 

Business is running smoothly enough to get away with it.  

Talking to Dylan at the store and realizing that he really doesn't know much about the big comic crash of the mid-90s. I mean, he knows the outlines. 

What I keep forgetting is that he was even born when all that happened. 

So much of the way the market works these days is a result of that time period. For instance, Dylan knows what the FOC is (basically, final ordering) but doesn't know why it exists, how a retailer in San Francisco (Brian Hibbs, kudos) sued Marvel for not delivering on time and what we ordered.

Or why Diamond had a monopoly on comics and the fall out that is happening because Diamond not only isn't the only wholesaler now, they're barely a presence in the market anymore. 

Does Dylan need to know? Probably not. But to me, everything follows from what happened before. It's why experience counts for so much. 

As I've been mentioning in other posts, it seems to me that most people only learn from their own mistakes--but I'd still like to help them avoid mistakes, if I can.  

We're in a groove at the store. Summer business has kicked in, we have the product people are looking for, and we have a sufficient budget to satisfy demand. Bills are all paid. It's time to try to earn a profit.  

It took awhile to figure out how to deal with five book suppliers rather than just two. But I've finally learned the timing and things are getting easier to figure out. (The ordering is very time-consuming, but it's an activity I enjoy, so that's good.) 

I'm going into the store more often but for shorter time periods, and that gets the job done but doesn't wear me out. Dylan has fit right back in and seems to be working complimentary to Sabrina, who is taking charge. I'm just trying to stay out of the way.

Funny thing happening with Sabrina. I check with her before making any big decisions and a lot of the time she talks me out of doing what I planned. I've always been impulsive about big decisions, partly because if I don't get that impulse, I don't do it at all.

But Sabrina has a way of talking sense to me, and since it will be her store in the not too distant future, I am bending to her judgement. But not only bending, but basically agreeing with her. She's more tough-minded than me, interestingly.  

When I started, there was little to no information available on the type of business I was in. Books about business were useless or irrelevant. (The one exception, Growing a Business, by Paul Hawken, which was somewhat useful.) Not only couldn't I get any advice from other business owners, but they wouldn't even talk to me. Especially the Downtowners (all of who are gone now.) 

I flailed around, making mistake after mistake, and worse--I let it show. I didn't hide anything. I was willing to share --and in return, I felt most other business owners considered me a fool.  I tried to figure it out myself. By the time I went up the COCC for the small business counseling, I'd learned enough that the advisor told me I had a "primitive sophistication," which I took as a compliment, not an insult. 

He made me put together a business plan, gave me a little advice, and helped me get a business loan. 

And then I was on my own again. 

So it's frustrating to have learned so much, to have a store that is far exceeding my expectations, which is finally performing at the levels I aspired to 40 years ago, and not be able to pass that information on. 

What I have learned is--everyone goes their own way. No takes unsolicited advice. Everyone has to learn everything the hard way. 

It's a shame, because I can show them some "tricks" but whenever I've done that, they have ignored me, bless their little hearts.  

When Hannah Oliver decided to open a bookstore in Prineville, I didn't have much doubt that the store would be nice and that she'd do a good job. But I did wonder if the Prineville I remembered from my youth was ready for a bookstore.

She reassured me that Prineville was prospering.

I visited her store yesterday and while Linda and I were there, we went to the only Taco Time in Central Oregon. I really love their crisp meat burritos. A Cascade Business News was on one of the tables and I snagged it. 

There was an article on Prineville there, and some remarkable statistics. In the last seven years, the median income in Prineville rose from $45K to $82K.  Crook County as a whole has had a 52.5% increase in GDP.

The town still feels rural; but there are signs. New shops and nice houses on the outskirts. You've got to believe that as Bend continues to boom and with Redmond following, that Prineville will be the next place to accelerate in growth. 

Whenever I make my commute to Bend, I'm accompanied by the grand march of the Cascade mountains on my right, blue skies on my left. This ain't stopping anytime soon.