Slow Day at the Bookstore
Shane Gottwals
Gottwals Books
Slow days stink. There’s no two ways about it. They stink.
Slow days put me down. I can’t shake the feeling. They just do.
The only remedy (besides prayer and reading my Bible) is to hear the register ring.
This is sort of what has happened today. I spent the morning in our new store sort of moping about the fairly good traffic flow yet almost total lack of sales. You sit, look out the window, get way too enthusiastic when someone comes in, think about how nice it must be to have a job that pays per hour, find tedious tasks that don’t need to be done, scour the internet for sundry items that you can’t afford, kill the random fly that’s not bothering anyone at the window, and long for better sales days.
The more I pondered oh-man-this-store-really-isn’t-going-to-make-it thoughts, the more I realized how unstable business can be. We’ve been open at our new location (www.gottwalsbooks.com) for about two months now. I was just recently interviewed (with a TV spot that aired a week ago on our big local news CBS affiliate-check it out on our website) about the business community here in Byron, GA, and I told them that I could not be more pleased with how sales are going. But, this week has me a bit down.
Notice how I just said, “this week.” It is completely absurd to base anything on 3-4 days of sales when your 8-10 week trend has been impressive.
Here’s the heart of the matter… business will often slump, and it will slump hard. I remember managing a consumer electronics store that did two million dollars per year in business. We had (very embarrassing) days when our sales would be a couple hundred dollars. You don’t pay 30 employees with $200 per day in sales. However, I also remember those $10K+ days that made up for all of the rest.
