Friday, February 8, 2008

Store Projects

After declaring my desire to walk away for a while, I woke up with a renewed sense of, well, that I had work to do. My first little project was brought to my attention by an annoyed customer who couldn't find his Reaper mini on the wall. We used to carry every Reaper mini, over a thousand of them. Then, after getting my head examined, we cut back substantially. Back then we could put them in numerical order and you could use the catalog to find them. It was cumbersome back then, but now that we don't have all of them, it's just kind of annoying and not terribly useful. We'll be doing what every other store does now, putting them in categories, like "wizards" and "monsters."

My second project was one that's been languishing for a while. It's an IT project I started this summer to "ghost" the POS machine. I came from IT and when I'm not making a large amount of money doing it, I tend to avoid technology projects. They're inherently expensive and frustrating. I was posting online my current disaster recovery strategy, which after reading it to myself, seemed rather shabby. I'm using Carbonite for data backups, but a system implosion or theft would result in many hours of down time AND expense when consultants are needed to re-install the system. The new Ghost 12 is supposed to have a one-touch backup with the external hard drive I purchased last Summer.

Finally, it's more a task than a full fledged project, but I need to get my Dundracon RPG order together for my main distributor. This is where I pull out my crystal ball, run a bunch of reports on the POS machine, and predict the demand for all things role-playing. My obvious pick would be a metric buttload of Dark Heresy books. Unfortunately, I'll get none, as distributors are sold out, possibly forever. We've got four left in the store, with one last copy arriving today.

Oh yeah, and I'm debating on whether to a) buy a carpet cleaner and have an employee clean the carpets, b) rent a carpet cleaner and have an employee clean the carpets or c) hire someone to clean the carpets. The thread in these, obviously, is I ain't cleaning carpets. The cost is an issue, since it looks like we're going to be carpet cleaning once a quarter instead of once a year like the last store. If anyone is on salary and bored at work, perhaps you can do the cost-benefit analysis for me.

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