Thursday is Free* Comic Day!

*Not actually free.

Thursday we get our comic book shipment from Diamond. This week's shipment cost us just over $2000.00. So on Tuesday, we received $6500.00 worth of inventory, Wednesday we received about $1500 worth of inventory, and today we received about $2000.00. Tomorrow is going to be cake, because I think about $800.00 worth of board games and such is expected to arrive (at least it better - the Magic people will tear me limb from limb otherwise).

So - not a bad week for adding value to the ol' business. Unfortunately, I'm still not done entering all the RPGs into the system, and haven't even touched the graphic novels and such from today's shipment. Luckily, tomorrow is almost entirely re-order items, so that shouldn't be any problem at all. In theory I'll be caught up tomorrow. Unfortunately, that still leaves a crapload of used books that people have brought in in the past week (ones that Edwardo probably shouldn't enter...books from the 1800's with creaky hinges and whatnot...they give him fits). Also, probably 500 records have come in this week. I think I could do nothing but enter records for ten hours a day for a week straight and I wouldn't get through the back-log of records we've got piled up. This won't happen anytime soon, since ~someone~ wants to get taxes done before April 15th. Bah. How tough can it be?

So, that's three days in the life of me. *yawn* My brain gets so tired from dealing with this stuff for ten hours every single day. Definitely makes you kind of lose sense of yourself sometimes. Little out of body experiences and such...though not in the hippie "I was floating above myself" garbage. Just like your brain looking down at your hands typing stuff about your boring day and yelling "fuck off!" That and waking dreams that send me into mild panic attacks...but I think that is just stress and exhaustion.

Yeah!

P.S. - Too bad Jones left after being bored away by a half-hour of being ignored watching me run around trying to put comics on shelves. I could use some video games or mindless hanging out right now.

You came first...

So, unless Ryan updates in 1.5 hours, he'll be the first person I know personally to be eliminated from the IMBC. That's good. That means I won't be in last place. Huzzah!

I very nearly forgot already today...I can't imagine I'll last terribly long. And then I'm fairly certain the blog will never get used again. Until next year if I sign up again. This same kind of spacey daydream existence is what killed mah' chickens last year. Curse you brain! Why can't you concentrate better?

So today I inventoried all the board and card games, and all the accessory stuff that arrived today and yesterday. It took forever, and I didn't even touch the RPGs yet. They'll hopefully get worked on tomorrow, since I have comics / graphic novels / games coming tomorrow from Diamond, and another (much smaller) board game order arriving on Friday, I need to basically database one RPG every thirty seconds from opening until noon, when we'll be getting probably a hundred-and-fifty graphic novels or so.

We're going to try to be better about these regular orders for board games. We're pretty good about doing it for books, and obviously comics come every week whether we want them to or not, but board games (and records for that matter) always get pushed to the back burner - and then we fall behind on ordering, and when it rolls around to where we break down and spend the money to catch up, it's a huge to-do because we just dropped a couple grand on board games, and all we did was replenish what sold over the last few weeks - gaining no new ground on being 'the biggest board game store in the Tri-Cities.' I should have hyphenated and copy-writ(?) that.

I just watched Hellraiser 6: Hellseeker with Ed and Chordes. It didn't make a toot of sense or anything, and it was basically awful in all respects - as have been the first five, but I'm looking forward to seeing Hellraiser 7. And a few days after that, I'm sure I'll want to see Hellraiser 8. And then...no more Hellraiser? Oh wait, except the rumored remake by Clive Barker himself. Wow. Ninety minutes of a British chap with a kinky acupuncturist calling out "Pleasure and pain, pleasure and paaaaaaain." Wow.

As Ed points out, if it was as easy as we imagine, there would be better movies being made...but still. It seems like if I cared enough to try, I could write a better horror movie than most any of the Hellraiser movies. Right? Nah...I'd probably just make the second remake of Night of the Living Dead.

You know what this place needs?

...More role-playing games. So today we got in the first 2/3 of our board game order. 200 RPG books by my count, a couple hundred different packs of card sleeves (well, only a dozen styles or so...but multiples of each, since those jerks sell them in packs of 50 when everyone needs 80), battle-mats, more dice, etc. etc. Good times.

Of course, it'll be days before they actually get on the shelves where people can buy them. After we've had something in inventory, getting it again is a simple process of scanning the barcode and printing out a label. Getting things for the first time is kind of a pain in the butt. I've got two hundred RPG manuals to enter, with 50-100 coming tomorrow to add to the pain. Authors, titles, publisher, publishing date, and binding status all have to be entered manually. But I can scan the ISBN in! Woot! Literally seconds will be saved.

Hopefully this will give that section a nice shot in the arm. We've done really well with board and card games, but haven't really given the RPG section a legitimate chance to blossom - even though people come in all the time wanting to know where our RPGs are. You can't carry only a hundred books in a category and claim they don't sell. Unfortunately that is the way with a lot of things in retail - you have to throw a certain amount of cash at it before you hit critical mass and you actually become THE place to shop for that particular item. Even after this purchase, I doubt we'll usurp that title from the other game / comic shop in town, but we'll definitely be on our way.

Now that we're basically caught up, having most major titles and their offspring stocked, I just have to buy new releases as they come out, and re-order things as they sell. It seems like the problem with RPGs though is how many supplements each line has. Most of the time people buy the main guide and that is it, and other times they are looking for one specific supplement which don't have, they wouldn't want to wait for us to order it, and off they'd go. So maybe we'll see some supplements moving now that we literally have them all - as long we you're playing something from White Wolf / Paladdium / etc.

Or not, and this will all be a big waste of money and I'll be telling sob stories about how I should have spent those gobs of money on getting the complete Rio Grande and Z-Man line of games. At least then I know I'd sell most of them to Hank or Ryan eventually :(

Hi, Hank and Ryan!

Is this three hundred words yet? It feels like it.