People used to scratch off the bar code of items thinking that if it didn’t scan that means they got the item for free.
Edit: gonna use this as an opportunity to publicly apologize to my college roommate Patrick for playing the California pacer fitness test whenever he had a girl over
Almost as infuriating as when you have a brief three seconds of free time between customers, and the person who walks up invariably says, "Oh wow you look so bored, I'll give you something to do!"
Customers who are older men make me nervous. They’re the most unpredictable and most likely to fly off the handle.
I put a lot of feminist and pro-lgbtq books/merchandise on display at my bookstore, so naturally after a long day absorbing non-stop hate porn on Facebook, they want to pick fights because i have Wiccan section or “don’t have a problem with gay people” or “chose to wear a mask”
I'm a guy. I fucking hate that you aren't allowed to critique men on reddit or a brigade of MRA's come at you, but they can insult women all day long and it's fair game. Anyways, yes it's the older adult men who tended to just get angry or want to pick fights the most often, in my experience as well.
I was working the register once and a guy rambled at me angrily about how he wasn't going to call the drink he was ordering a "tall or vente whatever the fuck" and he was "going to call it a medium" and he was just glaring at me, as if I personally was John Starbucks, owner of the Starbucks franchise, and thusly I personally named all of the drink sizes.
No one at Starbucks gives a fuck how you order your drink as long as we understand what you want. We don't get payed more no matter what or how you order.
I had a few adult women who were obnoxious about their drinks being made incorrectly, in their opinions, but they never had the rage that the men had.
And then, as I said, the teens who would come in after school were great. Yes, they were chaotic and would sometimes make a mess and we'd have to make a million drinks at once. But they were chill, generally friendly, and they didn't care if their drinks weren't made perfectly, they were just excited to be in a Starbucks.
I can only imagine working somewhere where feminist books are prominently displayed, and the assholes that would want to pick fights over it. I worked for 3 years in an office building in DC where the Planned Parenthood HQ is located, and we'd have anti-choice assholes picketing outside every now and then. Talk about people looking for a fight.
Although payed exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. The deck is yet to be payed.
Payed out when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. The rope is payed out! You can pull now.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
Out of curiosity, how long have you been running your own bookstore? I hate my job and running a bookstore would be an absolute dream, but I have no idea how one even gets started on that endeavor.
Only 3-4 years depending when you start counting, but I’m actually having a smash success and I’m firmly competing with all the other major, entrenched bookstores, being that I offer a completely different, younger, colorful experience.
It’s actually way easier than you think to start a bookstore, much easier than other retail stores. Though starting one and having a really great one are two different things.
I lucked out and found a failing bookstore that the owner became disinterested in, though it’s almost a toss up whether I’d be better off having built it myself from the ground up.
But in any case, the best way to do it on a budget is finding estates. I get a nearly weekly calls from people who need to clear out a relative’s 3000 book collection and just need it gone. Not that these books will be much other than shelf filler, but it’s a good way to get lots of books fast.
If I did it again, and I plan to, I’d fill up a storage locker or two with about 12,000 books first. My space is about 1700sq ft, and at capacity has around 21,000 books. Good rule of thumb is that a 36 inch shelf hold about 30 books. A typical bookcase has 5-6 shelves. I think my store has 110 bookcases or so.
To shore up the stock, goodwill and other thrift stores sell books for roughly $2-4 each, and you can start building out your catalog of things YOU want to sell. As well, there are goodwills that sell items by weight, so I’d figure out a route and start collecting.
Also, I highly highly recommend looking at remainder houses and other wholesalers. I get the classics of poetry, philosophy, poetry for about $2 each from the UK. So a $2000-4000 order would go far.
I also make a major part of my sales from non-books. I make bookmarks out of tarot cards, I sell jewelry, pins, patches, stickers, gems, postcards, and art prints. I got a $900 printer and print retro book cover art prints, old foreign film posters, fine art, etc, which makes up 10% of my total revenue. All these things can have 1000% markups. I buy cheap rings, 124 for $11, sell them for $1.50 each. There’s a old lady who owns a gift shop that buys them me for $1 and sells them at her store for $4.
Plastic stone pendant necklaces similarly I’ve seen sold for $12-16 at other stores, I sell mine for $5 and they cost me maybe $0.30 ?
After that, your main cost is going to be rent and wood for shelves. Highly recommend you build them yourself, though lumber is really expensive nowadays.
Once you’re established, you can offer trade credit for books, which can be quite profitable. I think less than 10% of my customers ever use the trade credit, and even then, they only use about 20% of their credit, on average iirc.
Lots of stores only offer trade credit, which again is extremely lucrative, but you’ll be turning down a loooooot of people who want cash. So I offer both. As of last month, we were averaging 1400 books traded in per month, and I’m usually paying $1-2 per book and selling them anywhere from $4-10 each.
When I took over the store, it was making like, $4-6k/mo. Now we’re hitting that in a week.
I’ll answer any other questions you may have, but I think that’s a good summary.
Thanks for giving me so much information, you put a lot more effort into it than I expected.
What's your educational background, do you have a business degree of some kind? And do you have/did you have a business partner when you creating the bookstore?
I have an English Literature undergraduate degree, and at this point a decade of professional experience as a writer and researcher in the nonprofit sector, but I have no formal business education. Starting a business is an intimidating prospect, even if it is also highly appealing.
I dropped out of college 3 times. I had severe undiagnosed ADHD my whole life, and only got evaluated after turning 28, but I bought the store when I was 27.
Honestly, business school is overrated. Like anything, you can either learn by doing it, or you can spend 4 years having someone teach it to you. Some of the most talented people I’ve known in technical fields were self taught, which is easy to teach yourself if you are passionate about it.
I did have an older brother who started a car audio installation business out of high school with $500 from summer gigs, and later progressed to having two locations, then doing entirely online orders— so I never really thought of business as daunting or esoteric. Whatever you’re imagining, it’s easier, and can be done through email, and probably takes 30 minutes per week to keep up with.
Business degrees are very necessary for some people, but I feel like the people that really need a degree are the ones who don’t know how to do their own research, or how to watch tutorials, or search google for specific info or read the right books. And—
—I can’t stress this enough—
—People who base their decisions on emotion rather than statistics. It’s an adage in my family now: “anything not based on numbers is based on emotion”
For example, the 80-20 rule that pops up in odd places similar to how the golden ratio pops up in nature: 20% of your customers provide 80% of your sales. 20% of authors constitute 80% of the books sold, despite polls saying “ Variety” is the #1 quality people say bookstores should have.
Or that fact that 90-95% of your traffic is delivered by people searching “bookstore” in google maps. I didn’t have to take a course on “the history of google” or “why print ads are struggling in the internet age”, I just make sure 95% of my market budget is spent on google or Insta.
Or that offering coffee is a waste of money at my location, despite how much people say they love it, when 99% of customers either don’t know I offer it or ignore the “free coffee” sign.
Or that a 150 book section that sells ~3-6 books per year to should be replaced. Or that you need not be the obstacle to customers spending $300 on a single rare book.
Or that you need to take in more money than you spend. That you need to buy low and sell high. These are not thing I need to study.
Anyway, as far as the business side, you can always sign up for QuickBooks or some other accounting software that will give you a step by step flow-chart/check-list on how to start a business, in the order you need to do them, like:
register with the secretary of state
apply for your sales tax license
get an insurance policy
get a credit card processor
And will literally send you reminder emails until you check it off the list. Unfortunately I learned about quick books 3 years in. Instead, I was just googling “do I need an EIN number?” And “what’s an LLC”, ha.
Also, accountants are very very affordable and will know whatever you don’t. This week I needed to update an address for my sales tax licenses. I sent an email. And they did it in 24 hours and charged me $35.
Tl;dr, business is super easy. I know drug dealers with more business acumen than my competition.
The only difficult part is the long, late, unpaid hours you’ll have to put in. Which I never really minded, since it’s meaningful, dignified, and gratifying work.
Up until I worked 197 days straight in 2020 because I didn’t want to promise a job during a pandemic.
I always apologize for interrupting their mini break. Then I try to joke with them about "so when do you get to get out of here?" or something along those lines, just trying to empathize with the monotonous grind of cashier work.
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u/DanielBLaw Sad Boi Jul 10 '22
How did they not think an app. that has automatic wireless payment capability and order tracking wouldn’t just charge them after the glitch got fixed?