Toy Store Saga

[Kanalah]

Part Twenty One

We're finally getting ready to put stuff on the shelves, so we decided to cover our windows and door in craft paper. I've always wanted to do a big reveal like that. We had half of the windows and the door covered when an older lady walks by, sees through the uncovered windows then walks over to the covered windows and tries to peek through. Because we're hiding all the good stuff on that side - duh.

I should mention that it's about a five minute walk from our apartment to the store and I can actually see our backdoor from my bedroom window. By this time hubs was working another contract while filling out apps everywhere. So sometimes he was there to help and other times not.

I think I did a pretty awesome job getting the shelves put up and stuff arranged. I know a lot of mom and pop style toy stores are small and crammed full of stuff. I tried to make mine have nice wide aisles. We even had a play table in the front and demo tables set up for the trains and slot cars. We decided to go with a "toys and hobbies" because we sold custom kits for the slot cars and had garden train sets.

So now we were finally ready to open, in early November. Instead of late August/early September.

[Canihelpurass]

Duh , cliffhanger

[Kanalah]

Dawwww...

I am trying to make each section longer so you guys have more to read.

[Kanalah]

Part Twenty Two

After we had been open a week, I decided to finally have our grand opening sale. We had door prizes and free giveaways for the first 250 people. I had stuffed paper bags with little goodies and flyers and I was ready for people to come in. My first customer came in, walked up to the counter and asked for a gallon of high octane model airplane fuel. I gave him the look a rabbit gives an oncoming train and said "I'm sorry?" He responded with "What kind of f-ing hobby store is this?!" slammed his fists on the counter and walked out. Hubs and I looked confused at each other.

In total on our grand opening we had 6 people come in. I ended up contacting all of them because they all won a door prize. Only 2 people actually came in to claim theirs. You'd think if you won a free something, you'd want to come pick it up. I was getting discouraged, but I was hoping things would pick up as Christmas approached.

I bought a booth at a local baby festival hoping to drum up some more business. That turned out to be a mistake.

[Victory Sabre]

Wow. This story gets stranger and stranger. I wish I would have found it about a week later, though. I can't wait for parts 23-10000.

[Kanalah]

Part Twenty Three

I actually found out about this festival through someone at church, it was a pretty popular event and as far as I could see, I was going to be the only toy store there. I didn't understand it at the time, but apparently there is a bitter rivalry among toy store owners. The other hobby shops didn't mind us because we all sold different things, and we'd send people to the other stores if we knew they had what the customer was looking for.

So I get to the festival to set up. My mom helped me to unload the car, but this is the first show where I am all alone. I got my table all set up with flyers and coupons. I am on the outskirts of the shopping area, and the first bad sign is that over half of the people didn't show up with their merchandise. The show promoter had everyone move into the main area and that was when I saw another toy booth.

There are two big local toy stores in my city. One is mainly a website with a local warehouse- I'll talk more about him later. The other is one of those "crammed full of stuff" toy stores and is run by two older ladies. This was the first time I met these nice older ladies. There I am at my booth, not hurting anyone and trying to make some local friends. I guess you could say I was standing on the corner minding my own business and one of the ladies walked up to my booth. I didn't recognize her at first and greeted her warmly. We made small talk until she noticed my flyer.

"Oh, you're that new toy store." She said coldly. I responded in the affirmative and she started knocking over stuff on my table. "You're the reason we had to move to a smaller store!" She screamed while trashing my table. I was shocked and pretty much just froze to the spot. She finished her tantrum, wiped her eyes, told me I needed to close my store and stalked off. I avoided her for the rest of the show. I only had one paying customer, and she complained that I had a purple princess quilt for $20. She bought it for $15 after I told her how to take it apart and make it bigger.

I packed up my stuff, went back to the store to unload and cried.

[Silvercat]

WTF? What is it with where you live?

[Kanalah]

I have no freaking idea.

I think a lot of people skipped this show because it was going to rain, but it turned out to only sprinkle in the morning. It was enough to scare the shoppers away, I think I only had 5 people come to my table.

Edit: Yay I just found a ton of old photos!

[Caffienated_Caramel]

Put em up! We wanna see!

[rose_metal_nz]

Put em up! We wanna see!

Agreed! And please. post. more. stories! I'm chomping at the bit here!

[Kanalah]

Okay first some pictures of the story so far:

http://s89.photobucket.com/albums/k2...loToyShop2.jpg
Here are a couple more pictures of the Bordello toy store, showing the actual toys and not just the quilts.

http://s89.photobucket.com/albums/k2...igToyStore.jpg
Here is the store both before and after carpet. That's hubs in the bottom picture. At the end of that hallway was the bathroom, with the stockroom on the right hand side.

http://s89.photobucket.com/albums/k2...gToyStore2.jpg
Here is when we were finally able to move things out and get set up. The bottom photo has my paper-covered windows.

Part Twenty Four

I should mention that although the landlord told us it was electric heat in our store, when it started to get cold, we turned on the heat and nothing happened. We called the landlord who called an inspector. Turns out we had gas heat, but they couldn't turn it on because there was a maze of leaky pipes in the ceiling. After a plumber came out, we finally got our heat turned on. It had been 58F inside our store.

Finally it was getting close to Black Friday. I had advertised all over, put up a flyer in my apartment's laundry room, handed out coupons, and even bought one of those "back side of the receipt" ads. I was expecting to be busy. Luckily hubs didn't have to work that day, and he volunteered to help.

We walked over and opened the store early, but I noticed on my caller ID for the store that Cranky Lady's toy store had called at 5:30 am. Sheesh. We were actually fairly busy and sold quite a bit, but we had some people making the comment of "Oh, what a nice store! So when are you having a sale?" I even called the bordello to check in with them (mom was working that day). She hung up on me when I told her that my store was busy.

We stayed late and grabbed some dinner before walking back home.

[FenigDurak]

Kanalah, I thInk you're soaked in bat-shit-crazy pheromones. Take a long hot soak and move to Nashville. We'll dominate the sewing communities! Between the two of us we're a sewing powerhouse!

[Kanalah]

I think it's just because I'm nice, and people figure I won't fight back. After all this nonsense, and hearing people trash-talk my quilts - I fight back.

Fenig, I have a running joke when people ask me how I get so much done in a year. I tell them I have a sweatshop of one.

[Kanalah]

Part Twenty Five

Our holiday season was pretty good. We weren't packed, but we did alright considering our grand opening was pushed back so far. We were asked if we carried dolls, so we made a note to pick up some at Market.

At January market we ordered the minimum for dolls, which was $250. We also found out that our plastic animal vendor had a new rep and they upped the minimum order to $5,000! They did that because they were selling to walmart/target/toysrus now. So we decided to switch to another plastic animal brand once we'd sold down our current stock. We also picked up doll houses and furniture, kites and all kinds of cool stuff. We were gearing up for an awesome summer.

Unlike the bordello store, our sales went in the toilet after Christmas. There were weeks where we didn't have a single person walk in. We decided to film a TV commercial - I wrote the script, and hubs narrated and we filmed my baby cousin playing with the toys. It did increase our business, but only as much as we spent - for example, if we spent $1,000 to run our ads for one month, we got $1,000 in sales that month. One thing it did do for us: our local ad rep for Fox kept hounding us to put our ad on his channel.

[Kanalah]

Part Twenty Six

I should mention that not all of the other store owners in the shopping center liked us. Most we had no contact with at all. On one side of us there was a ladies dress shop, and on the other side was a high end light fixture store. They both loved us, but for different reasons. The ladies at the dress shop were like having 6 grandmas next door. The light fixture store was another story.

Everything in their store was breakable and expensive. They had some couches up front for kids to sit on and wait for mom and dad, but often that wasn't enough. We had a couple of times where the parents would drop off their kids while they went shopping. Hubs and I went next door and politely told them that we are running a business not a daycare. The owner of the lighting store had four kids and he and his wife came in to do some shopping one afternoon. They ended up buying a big slot car set with 4 cars for their kids to play with at home. A couple of weeks after that, I noticed his kids coming in a lot and camping at our slot car table. When I asked the oldest where his parents were, he told me they owned the shop next door. I must've made a weird look because he said "We bought something here, so dad says we're allowed to hang out now." I was speechless.

Another problem we had was the dumpster wars. According to the city's rules, we could only contract with one dumpster company. No big deal, they showed up when they were supposed to and emptied the dumpster. Our problems were with the neighbors. The ladies at the dress shop were used to just putting their trash in the dumpster closest to their backdoor. Sometimes the truck would put the dumpsters back kind of weird and ours would be behind the dress shop, so they'd fill up ours instead. It was no big deal - the weather was nice and I didn't mind walking an extra 20 feet or so to put our trash in their empty bin. Our major problem was with the lighting store. They had tons of employees and apparently didn't tell them how to properly handle trash. They would never flatten boxes and when their dumpster was full, they'd start to fill up ours. And they went through a lot of boxes. One time I was out back flattening boxes and I caught them watching me. I said "If you cut all the tape on the box and flatten it like this, you can fit more in the dumpster." They looked at me like I had three heads. Shortly thereafter I bought a lock for our dumpster.