Handling The Between-Customers-State

Practicing guitar is always an option. Play softly.

If you’re operating a shop, storefront, booth, kiosk or busking station, you’ll want to know what to do with those interminable waiting periods between customers, and there will be plenty of them, believe it.

Many retailers and service personnel lose a LOT of precious productivity, and when you own your own business and want to be your own boss — well, you’ll have a LOT of time on your hands.

If you’re ever in a department store where customers are not actually engaged in sales, you’ll see the salespeople adjusting things, dusting things, re-arranging things, pricing things — basically, doing something, anything, to appear busy.

It’s widely believed, and perhaps it’s true, that if customers see salespeople loafing about, they won’t buy a thing, which certainly matches my extensive experience in retail.

Heck-darn, when you’re talking Retail, you’re talking Planet Earth. Why, back home, we NEVER pay retail — nobody pays retail anywhere except here on Planet Earth.

Humans of Planet Earth are so ignorant, they call it “bartering”, not “bargaining”, when you make offers and counter-offers.

Bartering is where you trade a laying hen for a carpenter’s work fixing your wagon, and I don’t mean that figuratively at all. Continue reading

Coin Prospecting

Zombie Family Backyard Jamboree yielded some great coin finds.

What is Gorby’s Money Laundry?

It’s about getting a clean box of coins without the crud, and you’ll find out all about it at the end of this little dissertation, but let’s let that happen as it will, and meantime dive into the meat-and-potatoes of Soul Search & Rescue through Coinology Searches.

It’s not enough to just find a great coin — you must learn now how to sell your treasures, and the best way to go about that is to create your very own unique personal Coin Kiosk.

You don’t need a store — you can get a space in our gallery, or perhaps you know a local merchant who will give you some space in their shop either for a single day or sometimes permanently, with your very own spot in the shop. This is called a “Trunk Show”, and you share the profits with the store owner — a fair split would be 50% of the selling price, but some merchants will give you a better percentage just to get your additional business through their front door.

In any business, wholesale, retail or service, the whole thing rests on NEW customers, not one-offs or random customers. You want and need repeat business, and that means happy customers.

The new business model, particularly in China, is to one-off everything and abandon ship, build a different factory, do something totally different each production cycle — that way, you’re never stuck with old inventory, but the downside is that you have to reinvent your factory every couple of months, and your salespeople never know what you’ll be exporting next. Continue reading