Inventory Troubles

Here is a little insight into the rough and tumble world of comic book retailing. Every week, I, or some lackey I trick into doing it, count the books on the shelves. I keep track of the last 10 weeks worth of merchandise, so I don’t count everything, just the recent stuff. It is a rather time consuming process and is rarely completely accurate. Stuff out of place or items sold after the count are not taken into account. Still, it’s the best way to see what is selling, what is not and what I need to order more of.

I decided to use my antiquated POS system to try to help me with the count this week. Sadly, it just tracks what is sold. I can print a report for what is sold on Wednesday, but instead of telling me I sold 27 copies of Secret Invasion #7, it has 27 lines stating Secret Invasion #7 and in several different places on the list. Why, I don’t know. It just does it that way. So it is quite a pain determining how many copies and just what was sold that week.

But given all of those problems, here is my big one. You would think it would be simple to just take the number received or the number on hand from last week and then deduct the number sold and then I would have my total on hand. This is technically correct, but it does not take into account items in customer pull files. For instance, I know I sold out of Thunderbolts #125 because there are none on the shelf, but my count shows 4 left. Thus they are in pull files. Yes, I can go through the files to see what is still there, but that starts to get time consuming again.

I think I would be better off just counting the shelves again.

Any ideas out there?

Changes, Changes, Changes and a recap

More changes are in place at the store. Boscov's, a department store, recently went out of business. I was able to pick up a great slatwall gondola for less than it would have cost just to ship a new one here. The shelving for it finally came in on Tuesday, so I squeezed it in. I had to move a lot of stuff around, but I think it really looks good and I like how it is working out so far.

I have also made a change in my storage situation (something I should have done long ago) and now I will be able to get my back issues organized. If there is anything you are looking for, please let me know. I will soon have almost 100 long boxes sorted and priced. I can't fit them in the store, but I will be rotating them with what is currently in the store, so the back issue selecting will be fresher. Plus I'm sure that some of that will be fresh quarter books stock.

September was my 2nd slowest month of the year, which is not good, but is understandable. I just hit my 2nd anniversary, so sales data is really raw. Trends are really hard to see at this point. Last September was a small drop from August, so this may be a trend. School starting and activities and general craziness at home can certainly lead to lower sales. But last year was a 5 drop and this months was a 20 drop. I really hope this was just a blip.