Greetings kids, what's up? Not much on this front, at least not yet. Pretty soon though I can see a few weeks of suck popping up at work.
The thing about a smaller store such as are is that you have to maximize profit per square foot. While you want to be able to let customers get through the store with a certain amount of ease, you also realize that you have x amount of square feet to make y amount of dollars. So space is at a premium. It is why many vendors actually pay to be in our location, not great sums of money, but money nonetheless and those that pay more get better placement within the store itself.
Thus brings us to a dilemma. When Smithfield News first opened it was primarily a newstand. A good one too, don't get me wrong. Probably on eof the best selections of newspapers in the entire city. You could pop in and get copies of local papers, some of the major out of town papers and even a couple of across the pond papers like The London Times. There were also a considerable number of magazines, and small snacks were just kind of a throw in. Eventually they decided to expand the store to it's current size, by taking over the space next door perviously occupied by a floral shop and the amount of merchandise also expanded. We went from being just a newsstand to practically a convenience store. And in many ways it was a good move, the mark ups (the percent over cost you can charge for an item) is generally large in grocery type items than it is for papers and magazines. As a general rule, groceries run about 40-45% markup, magazines and newspapers run about 20-25% and the cost of both is increasing as people are opting for the internet over the handheld copy.
This is where the makeover comes in, currently we have one entire aisle dedicated to nothing but magazines, the problem being we are probably only selling about $250 of magazines a day, most of them of the porn variety. That means we are making maybe $60 a day out of an entire aisle in the store, before figuring in theft of product. And trust me, there are plenty of porn loving pervs out there who try to (and sometimes succeed) in sneaking a magazine out the door undetected. So the magazines aren't much of a money making proposition, at least not enough to dedicate an entire aisle to. We could probably make the same amount of money in half the space by simply cutting back on our ordering of the less popular mags and condensing the space.
That means we are freeing up half of an aisle and this is where my fun comes in for the next few weeks. It is my job to help remodel the store, acquire new products to sell in the now open spaces, add to other sections and move existing product around so that it is in a a semi logical arrangement when we are all done. That, my friends, is my next daunting task, and it all starts tomorrow. So tonight I sleep so that tomorrow may suck.
we have a lot of asian run stores around here, that are positively claustrophobic to go into because they have so much merchandise crammed into tiny store spaces.
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