Retail shelving

One of the things that used to be a pain when I ran OC Books was the lack of decent shelving.  We were forever fixing up or adjusting or repainting the shelving we had, and it was never adequate for the books we were trying to display.  When we moved from Dowling St to Prince St, my wife and I spent an evening undoing all the shelves on three units, painting everything, and then refitting the shelves in places that were more usable, because books went from being smallish in general, to being larger altogether.  Of course there were still smaller books, such as the mass market paperbacks, but they were increasingly being replaced by bigger formats.

I would dearly loved to have had the chance to visit a commercial outlet dedicated to retail shelving, like the retail shelving at mfried.com, but we never had the spare cash for such outlay, and had to be content with secondhand stuff, fixing it up, adjusting it, and repainting it.   Such is the life of a small business owner....

Lent began over a week ago.  For those who don't know what Lent is, it's the period of 40 days before Easter which has long been used by the Christian church as a time to take stock of your life, especially the spiritual elements, and reflect on your future.  It's probably better known to most people as a time in which something is given up.  When I was a child Lent was quite a severe time in which you were expected to really do something effective in terms of giving up things.  Nowadays, many people take the giving up aspect fairly lightly, and give up things that really weren't greatly necessary in the first place.

Still that's better than taking no notice of the period at all.

There are a number of traditions associated with the Lent/Easter period.   On the day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, the church celebrated Shrove Tuesday (related to the word 'shriving' or ridding yourself of things).  Shrove Tuesday was also known as Pancake Tuesday because pancakes were a feature of the day.

The first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, is so named because on that day a cross-shaped daub of ash is put on your forehead with the words, remember that thou are dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.   (Although they probably use more modern language in most places now.)

The next really big occasion in Lent is Palm Sunday, which celebrates the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on a donkey, being given great acclamation by the crowd who broke palm branches off the trees and waved them - a sign that he was a king.   Palm Sunday comes a week before Easter Sunday.

And the Friday before Easter Sunday is known as Good Friday, in spite of the fact that the day commemorates the day Jesus was crucified.   Now the tradition related to Good Friday is that it's the day on which we have hot cross buns - the cross being of considerable significance.   So it was something of an irritation to me to see hot cross buns in the supermarket yesterday - when Lent has barely started.

Which brings me to the point of all this discussion.  Retailers, it seems to me, are guilty in this current society of being great underminers, the diabolos of traditions.  The selling of hot cross buns on all sorts of days of the year is one example.  The determination of many retailers to push for being able to be open on Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Christmas Day is another example.   For some reason these business people think they're missing out if they're closed for three days of the year.  How do they think shops used to manage in the past when hardly anything was open all weekend, every weekend?  Yet plenty of businesses thrived in those times.

I don't hold much with Santa Claus as a tradition, but it really gets up my nose when the whole idea is used as a tool for retailers: there are Santa Clauses everywhere, which is not only confusing to children, but crazy in general.   Do we need a Santa in every shop?  Some bewildered children must wonder if he goes hopping from one shop to another as they hold their mother's hand and enter one store after another.

Okay, rant over - pretty much.  I don't think there's going to be a change to the way retailers behave until people stop thinking there's actually such a thing as retail therapy.  And that ain't going to be tomorrow.

Too early for Christmas thinking!

It's only October, but of course, for retailers that means they'll already have Christmas stock on their shelves, from Christmas gift baskets to those dreadful toys that only seem to appear around this time of the year, cost a fortune, and fall apart on Boxing Day. 

I'm not even thinking about Christmas yet (no longer being a retailer, thank goodness); in fact the main thing on our minds at the moment is my son's engagement party, which takes place on Saturday.   Of course it the engagement party of my son and his fiancee, but I found that hard to work into the last sentence without the grammar falling into the same number of pieces as those dreadful toys I mentioned above are prone to do on the day after Christmas.   Phew.

And then once the engagement party is over, we have more of Grimhilda! on our plate...the auditions, for starters (plus having to get another application in for funding before the end of the month).   So it's all go round here and Christmas is barely on the calendar....as it were.   Certainly not on the radar.  

Actually thinking back to the poor old retailers: we used to have to start thinking about Christmas way before October, anyway, as we had to start ordering stuff somewhere round May/June.   Isn't it a tough life being a retailer?  You're working so far ahead of yourself all the time, and always hoping that all the money you've forked out in orders will be well and truly covered by purchases - six or seven months down the track. 

Thank goodness I'm out of it! 

Desperate Retail

Desperation seems to be the order of the day in retail, which makes me yet again glad I'm no longer in it. A bit of Trade Me selling is enough for me, especially now that you can keep on rolling over the same 50 titles without any great effort (or additional cost) until they sell. At present I'm not selling much on Trade Me because I haven't been putting any real time into it (even on Trade Me, surprisingly enough, you have to turn the stock over and provide some new titles) but this morning, having had a bit of time, I've done some shuffling around, put about ten new books on (when I say 'new' I mean new to my part of Trade Me) and shifted some of the 'older' stock over to sella.co.nz. They don't sell much on sella, which bought out zillion.co.nz, where they didn't often sell either. These small scale websites have a huge job to compete with Trade Me, and the main reason I use them is to 'store' stuff until I copy and past it back onto Trade Me again. It saves me having to start from scratch each time.

Books aren't one of the top sellers on any of these auction sites - but they do sell. Which brings me back to retail in general. Nowadays around Christmas we have the pre-Christmas sales, which start about November, then the December sales, and then the just-before-Christmas sales, which smacks of desperation. And if that wasn't enough we have the Boxing Day sales starting the day after Christmas - and reducing the Christmas sales still further.

When these Boxing Day sales first began, they were a way for the retailers to get rid of some of that unsold Christmas stuff. Now they're just part of the whole ridiculous sales-surrounding-Christmas period, which goes on for virtually a couple of months. There are so many sales that no one's buying anything at full price. In spite of the accountant at work who says that the retailers will have bought stuff at really low prices, and can afford to sell them off, I suspect that this isn't entirely the case. There may be big retailers, like Farmers, or the Warehouse or Briscoes, with their endless special weekend sales, that can do this - it's part of their ongoing modus operandi. But the small retailers, who don't have the benefit of mass buying, just have to discount their goods and cut their losses, and from my experience, the more you discount the more you have to sell - and sell fast, in order to keep ahead of the cash flow difficulties that then arise.

I don't think this whole business of sales all round Christmas are helping retail in the slightest. All they're doing, for the most part, is helping retailers cover their costs. It's likely they're not even covering their costs any more. They can't be making any real profits. Discounts, when they aren't your normal way of selling are just a killer. You can't keep giving away your stock. The more you encourage people to look for sales and bargains, the more money you are going to lose. It's a fact of life. I've been there.

I'm happy to stick to Trade Me, selling books that I bought at nonsense low prices in the first place, or which have been donated, or which I no longer need on my own shelves. These don't cost me anything, effectively, so any profit I get is a gain. And I don't have overheads...

Easter trading

Easter, and what's most visible on the news radar? The same 'impoverished' retailers who, every year, fight the law about not being allowed to trade on Easter Sunday or on Good Friday. Yesterday, on the news, we had a bunch of them boasting at how clever they were to do what they were doing. One stood there saying: I didn't ask any of the staff to come into work; I didn't make these customers come out and buy stuff.
And, yes, his shop was full (it was one of the Odering's garden shops) as was the Real Groovy shop (in Auckland, I think) that was shown.
But how essential was it for these places to be open? Not in the least essential. These shops are open because retailers - some retailers - have got to the point where they can't bear to be closed, in case they lose a few hundred dollars. It's plain greed, and has nothing to do with serving the customers, who would quite happily find something else to do if the shop wasn't open. (Probably something healthier.)
People do not die of retail deprivation. In spite of the notion that 'retail therapy' is supposed to be good for you, no demise on the planet has yet been attributed to a category - cause of death: 'could not shop.'
Nehemiah, in the Book of the same name, shut the city gates on the traders who insisted on coming into the city on the Sabbath, and cleared them off the city walls. No doubt there were Jews in the city then who said: but we can't do without shopping on the Sabbath! Nehemiah proved they could. Perhaps it's time for those who deal with recalcitrant retailers to do more than just charge them a nominal fine.

Ultimate shopping with O'Brien

I was introduced, one might say, to ShopWiki today by a passing email. Don't know that I'd ever heard of it, or rather, if I had, it was only very much in passing.
It's rather like a version of Google that focuses only on shopping (Yes, really! Did you think it might be otherwise?), the main difference being that it will only bring up retail items rather than the endless possibilities that Google enhances our world with whenever we go searching...! Apparently it also finds all items in the search range, rather than just ones that have paid to be seen. Interesting idea.
I don't know how obscure you can go, but I checked out Flann O'Brien (see the last post) and he came up without any difficulty. However, a difficulty that did arise when I tried that was that it kept on wiping out this page I'm working on at the moment. Fortunately Blogger saves stuff readily, so I didn't lose anything. But I can't see quite why there's a link between Blogger and ShopWiki. Odd.
You can specify how small or large a price range you want, sort from low to high or in reverse, and each item that comes up has enough information to show you whether it's worth pursuing or not. Curiously, if you checked out the lowest price on the strollers (in the first link above), you'll find a couple - at least at the moment - priced at 0.1c each. Unfortunately, when you click on that particular item you receive a message: This item cannot be ordered on the Web. You have to ring a number to find out more. Still, you can't have everything, obviously!
And doesn't that stroller in the picture remind you a bit of a lawn mower? I'm not sure what the visual link is.
Incidentally, I began reading some of Flann O'Brien's stuff yesterday. Found a collection of his Irish Times columns in the library - he takes a crazy idea and runs with it. Regrettably you have to read the book to see how funny he is, but one thing struck me that I want to record.
One of my (favourite) sayings when my children were growing up was: Talk to the wall, Michael, talk to the wall. My younger son delights in reminding me of this at every opportunity.
O'Brien writes (pg 39 of The Best of Myles) I might as well be talking to the wall, of course, though this phrase has always seemed strange in view of the belief that walls have ears.
I think only O'Brien (or possibly Chesterton) would have come up with something as quirky as that.

Copying the Answers?

I once did a correspondence course in Retail Management. I passed with flying colours, but I never figured out whether I was allowed to look up things I wasn’t sure about when I was doing the question sheets. There was no exam as such, so the people doing the course must have trusted that I was learning the stuff because of the way I was answering it. I guess it was okay, because some of the questions required me to actually think about the answers, and think about what had been said in the course book. I certainly didn’t answer those ones off my head, as I might have been inclined to do (being a know-all).

I suppose it’s different when you do a distance learning degree. A degree assumes that you’re actually doing some studying, not just going back through the course book checking up whether what you’re writing down is correct or not. It also requires you to produce essays and assignments. And no doubt there is an exam. I haven’t done an exam, I don’t think, for over twenty years, so I’m not sure whether I’d still be able to cope with one. Who knows? Maybe that’s what I should do when we return home to NZ. Become a full-time student doing distance learning. Beats sitting around twiddling your thumbs.