More and more I find myself not knowing about something that the general public is aware of. This is something that has always bothered me. I seek information, I want to know what's happening. But I've lost or eliminated a bunch of news sources that I used for years. I can no longer get the paper versions of either The Bulletin or The Oregonian. I dropped the New York Times because I felt they were pandering to the MAGA, softening the news or outright slanting it. (I know, I know, the news has always been slanted, but I felt they were going too far.)

So I've been reduced to some left-leaning online magazines that are irritating me more and more. Click bait headlines and amateurishly written essays that lose the lede more often than not. And talk about slant!  It's wearying.  

I was startled to read the Business Insider recently and find zero evidence that they think anything is unusual. Which is just weird.

It seems like the two extremes are Click Bait screaming or normalizing horrible behavior. (Not counting the MAGA press which is doing what the leftist press is doing by ten times more and also lying shamelessly. 

AP isn't doing enough stories for my taste. USA Today has been hiding under the news label while being a rag for a long time now. I'm thinking about bringing back the New York Times so that I can at least get a general overlay of the news. They gave in and called the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, which is pure cowardice. But they do cover a lot of information, more than anyone else.

I know that there are other sources, but they are mostly behind paywalls. If I have to pay for one of those the NYTimes looks like the best of them. 

Had a swollen gum last night and it really worried me. I thought I'd have to go to the dentist and have them tell me, "Told you so!" Washed it with salt and woke up this morning with it feeling normal. We'll see how the day goes, but I am relieved.

 

Dreamed Michelle Obama came into my store and asked for any 2000AD comics I might have. I recommended a Judge Dredd graphic novel. I tried to interest her in European artists, but she was only interested in Judge Dredd.  

 

Getting up early and getting all the work done before opening is still the way to go. I kind of enjoy it, frankly. I can just dink around the store straightening and cleaning. We're at maximum capacity right now. Not sure I can squeeze anymore in. Then again, I've been saying that for years. I guess more to the point, I'm not sure if I should squeeze anymore in.  

 

We were offered yet more Pokemon from our distributor yesterday. Up until now we've had to try to stretch our allocations as best we can but I think we might be finally catching up to demand. Prices haven't moderated much, but the demand seems to be down. At some point the two lines will cross and I'll need to be more careful.

I'll continue on ordering full allocations until the end of the year but I'll need to be careful about the slow months of next year.  

You don't hear me bitterly complaining anymore about the street closure events downtown because it is no longer killing us. We have enough mainstream product in the store now to at least approach average sales. When we were a "specialty" store it used to kill us.

Yesterday I worked extra hard trying to respond to the hordes of people coming through the door, and ended up at slightly less sales than the previous Sunday. The same thing was true on Saturday. I came home utterly exhausted with the song "Too Many People" running through my brain:

"Too many people going the Fall Fest
Too many reaching for a piece of cake
Too many people pulled and pushed around
Too many waiting for that lucky break"

 

I still feel sorry for any specialty stores downtown, especially service businesses. But I also feel that when I was trying to get the Downtowners to slow down adding new events there were very few if any store owners willing to speak up, though many probably secretly agreed with me. All it did was make me look like the bad guy, as if I was trying to keep people from having their fun.

 

So be it... 

 

 

I woke up in the dark and drove to the store with the car lights on and I felt fine. 

I've been a night person for as long as I can remember. But over the last few years, I've found myself wanting to go to bed earlier than my standard 12:30, but every time I did it I'd wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back to sleep.

This summer, business was so strong that it simply became impossible to put away books while customers were in the store. I started going in early, before opening, but I was only getting a few hours of sleep. So I set out to change my schedule.

It took over two months, but I think I'm finally there. I went to sleep at 10:00 last night, but 11:00 is fine too. I usually wake up at least once, but I've learned to just wait to fall back to sleep, which seems to happen if I don't panic. 

I'm going to keep up this new schedule if I can. There will be another challenge when the hours fall back in November, but I'm going to take whatever time it takes to get used to that schedule as well.  

I'm turning yet another toy shelf over to books. Toys have always been part of the mix for the store because I couldn't figure out what to put on the walls over seven feet from the floor. 

Turns out, I can put special editions books face out, as well as sets of books. Yes, it's a little inconvenient, but they sell at least as well as the toys have been doing over the last few years.

I stocked up on toys while Diamond, our comic wholesaler, was still in business. But they're gone and I have no inclination to try to open accounts with toy wholesalers who are notoriously unreliable. We have enough toys to last us a few years, while we transition those spaces into books and graphic novels, probably keep about half of them, which is fine. We're doing the same thing with board games. There are a stupid number of board games coming out, so we're sticking to the tried and true, even though games like Catan and Ticket to Ride are selling in the Targets of the world.

 

We've transitioned our retirement account from 70% equities (that's the stock market) to 30%, which is safer at our age. The rest is fixed income of one kind or another, or cash. I simply do not trust the stock market anymore.  

 

I've finally settled into the new sleeping schedule. Usually in bed by 11:00 now, instead of 12:30, and usually up by 7:00 now, instead of 8:30. Gives me enough time to drink my coffee, peruse the news, and then drive to the store by around 9:00. Spend two hours putting books away in a quiet store and leave at 11:00 before I get a ticket and the customers arrive. Usually get home by noon. 

I'm not looking forward to the time change. It's going to be starting all over again.  

Finished the 2024 taxes. 

What a mind-draining activity. Make one computational error and I have to start all over. The longer I do it, the more mistakes I make, even when I try to take breaks. It could be done in one day, if I measured by hours, but takes two days measured by energy and probably should be three days to be sure. 

Rough estimate of the operational profits from the store is pretty close to 2023.

I've always played it conservatively, not trying for any questionable deductions. I've never claimed travel, entertainment, or home office expenses. The store is pretty much self-contained because that's the way I made it. 

This year I seriously considered including home wifi and streaming services. Pegasus Books by any measure is a pop culture store and I need to keep up with what's going on in the entertainment business.

In the end I decided not to fight that battle since we are so close to the end of our tenure as store owners. 

That will be Sabrina's decision when the time comes. 

Last year, I tried to be careful in my purchasing, looking for the best margins. Our sales were down from the previous year, but not outrageously. I just figured we were experiencing a slow decline from the Covid peak of 2022. 

This year I decided to quit chasing margins and concentrate on what was selling and being aggressive about keeping it in stock. So far, we're up by 20% over last year, and we'll almost certainly going to have a best year by more than 10%. 

A few percentage points in margin pretty much gets washed away by that much of an increase in sales.

I always seem to come back to the conclusion that I should just order what sells and keep ordering what sells and pay whatever I have to, within reason, to keep it in stock. 

Lesson learned once again.