Rent, Leases & Landlords

Lots going on, mind swirling, emotions in full rage and stomach flip-flopping.

My lease is up the end of August. For the last few months, I have been including a note with my rent, asking to talk about renewing my lease. So, it really wasn't a mystery that I wanted to stay. I thought that would be appreciated by my landlord, especially in this economy. I can't imagine that there are that many people looking to open new businesses right now.

So, when I get home Wednesday, there is a package in my mailbox from an attorney. "What did I do?", I wondered. Well, I opened it up to find a cover letter about signing and returning my new lease. As I look it over I see my base rent is going up $1 a sq ft. Not unexpected. But wait. Base rent? I was just paying rent. So I keep reading. They are now adding a "Common Area Maintenance and Taxes Fee" to my rent. And adding this to the increase in my base rent increases my total rent by 50% over what I have been paying. That is quite a hike, in my (and every one of my customers that I have told about this's) opinion.

I understand the concept of Common Area Maintenance fee. But this is not a shopping center. It is three stores in one building. About 4000 sq feet total. There are about 10 parking spaces and a little strip of grass. I don't understand what maintaining this area could be. For the first 2 years, she had someone weedwack the weeds every couple of months. There is usually a large hole in the middle of the parking lot that people have to drive around. The hole has been filled for a bit and they have actually been cutting the grass every other week or so since the spring. But I am not paying thousands of dollars for that. Property taxes are there problem. That is what I am paying rent for. For them to pay the mortgage and taxes on the building. Why make me pay for their property taxes AND also pay more in rent. That's like getting the best of both worlds. "We don't have to pay taxes or maintenance anymore. Lets raise their base rent to so we can make even more profit."

So, after not sleeping all night, I give them a call when I get to the store. Lo and behold, they are on vacation until today. Seriously, you drop a bomb like this on your tenants and then are unavailable? Not cool. If anything could have made me more angry, that was it.

Wednesday night I had emailed some of the big commercial places that had spaces available. I know that most are out of my price range, but you never know. Many have been open for a long time. On the way into the store Thursday, I drove around the area writing down numbers of available properties. I planned on using my typically slow Thursday morning to call around and maybe go see some when my help arrived. There was a specific place I new about. A boring 1500 sq ft rectangle, but not a bad location. In the building next door there was a 3000 sq ft space available. Way more than I could ever afford, but I wrote the number down anyway. "What the heck, it couldn't hurt to call, right?" I called both the numbers and arranged to see both places around 4:00. Luckily, the day was much busier than a normal Thursday. I talked with my customers about the potential move somewhere. Everyone was shocked by the 50% rent increase.

So, I finally sneak out of the store to go see the 2 places. Both are on a main road here. My current place is 1 block off the main road, but on a still busy road and right across from an entrance to a big shopping center. I am peering through the windows at the 3000 sq ft place. Hmmm, lots of windows and doorways. Not good for me. I need lots of walls for comic racks and bookshelves. There is also a big wall with what were changing areas for the dress store that used to be here. It looked like a lot of work to get it ready. And the fact that it is 3 times the space that I have now. I can't afford to triple my rent, and being on the main road, the rent per sq ft would probably be even more than I am paying now, so it is probabaly way out of my price range. The landlord, gary, gets there and we go in. Well, its may not be too many windows because there are a bunch of mirrors I thought were windows. The dressing area could easily come down. Not structural. There are a couple of extra rooms that I don't need, but may be able to do something with. OK, this could work. But how much? While it is more than doubling what I am paying now, it is only $900 more than what I will be paying under my new lease. $900 for better location and 3 times the space. That could work.

I leave and go look at the other place. A 1500 sq ft rectangle. I really don't like the space and the price is way too high for what it is. Only $250 less than the 3000 ft place. So my wife is out and about with the kids. She wants to see the big place. So we go look. I brainstorm some ideas about what I would put where. We both like it, but we are worried about the increased rent. I am comfortable with what I am paying now. More than doubling that is scary. Will I do enough extra business in the new place to cover that increase? I don't know, but at least I was able to sleep.

After talking it over that night and morning, we agree to go for it. The space is too good to pass up. I am completely out of room where I am and I need the extra room. This is far more than I would have looked for, but it is too good to pass up. So, I call Gary and tell him I'll take it. He had mentioned before that he was waiting for a guy to sign a lease on it, but he was still getting his numbers together. He is planning on gutting it and putting $25,000 into it to remodel it. I will take it as is. He said he was giving the guy this weekend to get back to him. He called him Friday and his business was closed for the holiday.

So, I should find out today what is going on. He is telling this guy he needs to sign now because he has another another guy (me) who wants the place. What will this unknown guy do? I don't know. My fate is kind of in his hands. Gary wants to rent the place. Its been open for a while and he could use the income. So I don't think he'll let this guy play him for long. I hope not.

My tummy is all flip-floppy. I am excited about the prospect of taking care of my sudden rent problem quickly. I love the idea of more space. I am doing my best not to think about what I would do in the new space so I won't be too disappointed if the other guy signs. But I am also scared of the new rent amount. Its not like I have that extra amount just laying around at the end of each month. I am also concerned about what all will be required to actually move the store. A bit of a logistical nightmare. It has to be done all at once. Close Saturday at the old place, reopen Tuesday at the new place. Coordinating the phone and all that stuff. So I am excited and scared at the same time. Kind of like when I signed my first lease.

I am 90% sure I am not going to get it, that the other guy will sign and I will have to continue my search. I am a firm believer in fate and what was meant to be will be. If I don't get it, I wasn't meant to. I have been needing more space for the last year, but I was willing to resign at my current place for convenience. I am looking at this whole thing as fate's way of saying I need more space and its time to move. So it may or may not work for this space. Hopefully I will know something in the next few hours. Then I'll be able to eat.

The End of Another Great May

Another May has come and gone, leaving in its wake my best month ever. You'd think that Christmas time would be my best time of year, but instead, its May. Last year, May became my best month ever. And I blew past that number this year. The only explanation I can come up with is people are getting their tax returns.

So thanks to everybody who helped me raise the bar. Now to keep it going all summer.

If you've been by the store lately, you've seen the changes I made on Tuesday. 3 more bookshelves (Thanks, Ikea!) and new display shelves for some of the statues. I think at this point, I am pretty tapped on on what I can do with my floor space. I do have one more idea, but it would result in losing all of my in store storage, so I am not really excited. But it may get there.

This summer is going to be a huge sidewalk sale for me. I need room, so I am going to be moving stuff out. I lost room for the toys, so I am blowing them all out - 1/2 price. As soon as most of them are gone, I will be bringing 24 boxes I have at home in the basement. I brought them home to sort and bag one weekend while my wife was away and I never got them back to the store. 24 boxes is the exact number that I can fit on the 2 8-ft tables outside. So I am going to bring them in and sell them all for a buck a piece. Lots of good stuff. I just don't have the room for them even if I price them.

This week I am getting in several hundred trades and hardcovers that are all going to be half off or more. If you are looking for some good summer reading, now is the time. How I am going to display them, I have no idea.

I am also going to be getting stuff up on eBay, so any out-of-towners can help thin my inventory as well.

So, I have a very full plate ahead of me this summer. But I can't complain, because it is all fun.

Back To Normal

Well, Free Comic Book Day has passed once again. What a great and joyous experience! Lots of new faces. Lots of new kid faces. A great day of sales (possibly the 2nd best day ever). And a whole lot of fun.

I was lucky enough to have Dave Hawksworth, an outside sales rep for Diamond Comic Distributors in the store both Friday and Saturday. His primary job is to make sure we are aware of lots of good, award winning trades and other products. He also usually takes pictures of the store and does a little profile on the Diamond site for other retailers. He didn't take any photos on Friday and I think I impressed him by having all but one of the books he was promoting. I had sold the other one, but had not reordered it. I even sold him 2 books so he could promote them at other stores on his voyage.

Dave came back on Saturday to take pictures during the Free Comic Book Day festivities. Luckily he was there at about the busiest point of the day, with lots of kids in the store. I was waaaay too busy on the register to talk to him, but I could hear customers talking me and the store up to him, and I really appreciated it.

Dave gave me lots of compliments and heaped praise on me and the store and how I am running the store. Now I do see this 2 ways. 1st, I doubt he ever tells anyone they are doing a crappy job. But, 2nd, he sees a lot of stores in his travels. So he knows good and bad, and I really do think he thinks I am doing a good job.

I am not the biggest store in the area, either in sales volume or in store size. But I do try to carry a very diverse stock. It was nice to have almost all of the books he was recommending. Its also fun to surprise people by having the oddball books they are looking for.

So I guess I will keep doing what I am doing. Hopefully, I'll keep getting better at it. And thanks to everybody that came down this past weekend. And thinks to everybody that shows up every week or month. I couldn't do it without you.

Diamond and the Small Press Situation

The more I think about the whole Diamond restructuring order minimums thing, the more I think it will help me in the long run. Instead of just blindly ordering from the publishers in the Diamond previews catalog, I am going to have to look on the web for more information about the different companies. I am already getting set up with a small press distributor and there is another that I need to look at more closely.

Now will it hurt these publishers, at least initially. Sure. They are going to lose a large chunk of the people who may order their books. But I know there a lot of stores that don’t even bother with back of the Previews stuff anyway. I love that stuff. It’s what makes me different from the grocery store.

The thought of having to keep track of multiple orders from multiple distributors at first seems like a big hassle, but hopefully it will end up making me more organized. (And hopefully my new POS system will do some of the work for me as well)

The funny part, for me, is that Diamond had this ginormous “monopoly”. (I don’t think it is legally a monopoly, under the true definition) There was literally no reason to get your books anywhere else. They had the big companies (Marvel, DC) and you could get all of the rest there. But recently, stores have been going through book distributors to get graphic novels that Diamond was spotty about keeping in stock. Or at a better discount than Diamond was offering. And I have recently had to go direct through the publishers to get some books that Diamond was not restocking, or stocking at all in the case of hack Slash. I am opening an account with Haven Distribution. They have some books in stock that I have had on back order with Diamond for a long time. Now, their list of publishers is pretty small right now, but I sure expect that to grow in the near future.

I realize that Diamond was losing money on some of these publishers. I just question the 70% jump from in publisher order requirements. Seems awful big all at once. But maybe this is the kick in the butt those publishers needed to make changes to improve themselves and the industry as a whole. Who knows, maybe this will even help the entire distribution chain in the long run.

It is definitely making for interesting times.

Perspective

My wife found out yesterday that one of her friends from Chicago has suffered an unbelievable loss. One of her twins was murdered by a day care worker. Had his head slammed into the concrete floor, fracturing his skull. The one thing the report does not say is that the child is a twin. I just cannot imaging the loss or how you deal with this sort of thing.

It kind of puts the whole Obama Spidey controversy in perspective.

Looking at a New POS System

My current POS system is just that, a Piece of Shit. Comtrac. Supposedly the industry leader in comic book store POS systems. Sadly, they were never able to get me what I ordered and paid for. They started me out on a DOS version while the Windows version was in beta testing. This was in 2006. Windows has been around for a few years before this, right? This should have been a sign, but I was young and didn't know better. So I limped along my first year and a half on the decrepit DOS version. Sadly, when DOS was out, I was using my Apple IIe, so I didn't know the fancy lingo to get it to do stuff. Like working without a mouse. How quaint.

But the promises of the new system doing what I expected and being right around the corner kept me going. Well, finally in December 2007 I got the Windows program and had it all installed and ready to go for January. And it worked OK in January. Lots of bugs and things that were quite annoying, but, hey, I finally had it.

Well, that was great until about 2 days into February, when it had a fatal error. Contacted the company and many downloads and patches later I was told, by the IT guy who was looking at my monitor that I could not be getting the error message that was coming up. I pointed out to him that it was right there, but since it couldn't be happening, there was nothing he could do.

So, I went back to the DOS version and have been limping along on 1982 technology since. The day I was told that the system I paid $2000 for won't work anymore, I signed up for Diamond Comic Distributor's fancy new POS program based on Microsoft RMS. This kind of made me happy only because Diamond is the main company that I deal with for product and Microsoft hopefully has support people who won't tell me that there is nothing they can do to help me. Everything seemed like a good fit.

Except I have now been waiting 49 weeks for the product. I'm not greedy. I know they said it would be a slow roll out to make sure that everything was working properly. But, there are only about 3000 stores in the country. And I doubt all of them are getting the product. Maybe 10%. I certainly should have had it by now. Getting impatient. I really would have liked to have had the new system to start the year so that everything would have been in one place. But then again, that didn't work so well last time.

So, on a comic retailer forum, there was a discussion about doing the monthly order. The conversation quickly turned to how does your POS system help you do this. (Mine does not, in case you were wondering. They didn't do monthly orders back in the 40s when my system was created). And people who have this other system, called Moby , are giving their product rave reviews. I had poked around at this a while back, but was holding out for the Microsoft system due to support issues. But some of the people who have gotten the new Diamond system are commenting that it doesn't work as efficiently as they had hoped. Moby was designed by store owners for making things easier. RMS is a generic program that is being modified for comic books stores, but apparently is not a flexible as it could be and the stores have to adapt to it instead of the other way around.

So I ask a couple people I know who have it and the reviews are glowing. So I am probably going to go with it. I am going to talk to the Ben at Bitter End on Thursday and make sure I am ready for it and then we'll go forward.

I will keep you updated.

So You Want To Run a Comic Book Store

I had a mom come in a little while ago, telling me her son wanted to do what I do and said he'd come and work for free. I told her that wasn't the best idea for many reasons, #1 for me was that I really didn't need to have someone hanging around the store all day. But I will pass along the advice I gave her.

Let me start by giving you the brief rundown of my illustrious career in retail. After graduating college, I bounced around many jobs. After leaving a job selling Chevy's, I ended up working at a Radio Shack. Someone I had worked with told me he made good money there during the holidays, so when I found myself unemployed in November, I decided to give it a shot. It wasn't bad, certainly better than selling cars in January, so I stuck it out. Eventually, I would run 2 stores on my own, before moving to Chicago.

While it certainly wasn't glamorous, it taught me a lot about merchandising, ordering, dealing with employees and dealing with customers. And all of this has been invaluable in running my Comic Book store.

Think about your typical comic book shop. Most of them are organized so that the employees can find stuff easily, not necessarily the customers. Half full boxes laying around. Stacks of stuff lying around. 2 employees arguing about who would win a fight between Spawn and Impossible Man. I told the mom to have her son get a job as an assistant manager in some national chain retail store. The reason for this is the job will have training and structure. Corporate will have requirements, created through years of trial and error. Corporate will tell you exactly how to do your job. And this is really crucial.

The single greatest thing that comic book store employees are missing is customer service. I cringe in fear thinking about my mom going into my old comic shop to get me something. If they bothered to talk to her, it would probably have been just to point in a general direction. All that lady is doing is interrupting their really cool day. They are better than their comic reading friends because they actually work in a comic shop. How cool is that! I get to read comics all day. And talk about comics all day. I'm king of the world!

And I think that this is what the lady's son was looking for. Wouldn't that be a cool job? Well, come by and ask Jason, my helper, who is sorting and bagging 90 long boxes, how glamorous it is. Or counting all the books on the shelf or all of the trades so I can figure out what I am out of. It is a job just like any other. Does it have its own unique perks? Sure. But the store won't be around long if people don't come back.

What Radio Shack taught me was how to deal with the person who didn't know exactly what they needed. Anyone can ring up a person who brings their stuff to the counter. It takes customer service to help someone find what they want or to give them purchase options. It takes asking questions and listening to the answer. Or how about add-on sales? When was the last time someone suggested something to you at the register?

Now can I teach someone how to do it the way I do? Maybe. But I don't really have time to teach. I just do it. I try to make attractive displays with like products so that someone looking for one thing may find another. I try to make sure everything is clearly priced. I try to make thinks as easy to find as I can (Space is becoming a factor in this one right now). Go work for a big box store (or a Radio Shack) for a summer and learn about dealing with customers. That will put you head and shoulders above many comic books shops out there right now.