The POS follies: Part 11b

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on August 10, 2008

Categories: Retailing/Industry

For the dozen or so of you who care about such things, in our last installment I discussed taking some 1400 items off the racks when the POS system says “Hey, that doesn’t sell!” “But, Brian,” some asked, “What are we going to do with 39 Avengers?!?” Er, no, wait, the question was about 1400 removed-from-stock books, same diff. Well, we have a sale, I guess. My wife gets invited to Nordstrom’s “Customer appreciation sales” which is like a pre-sale sale for Nordstrom’s “best” customers (she’s not actually one of those, but my stepmother is, so…), and I thought it was a great idea to try and emulate. So, we invited all of our subscribers (box customers, whatever you call…  Read More…

The POS Follies: The Return, Part 11

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on July 18, 2008

Categories: Retailing/Industry

The new TILTING AT WINDMILLS is up right here. [If you hit the link below for the label "POS", you'll get the whole series, too] We’re very nearly a year later on installing the POS system, and several conclusions about it are in the new TILTING. We’ve been spending the last 2 (and probably next three) days going through each “Hasn’t sold in a year” title to set it’s Minimum Point (the place where it triggers a reorder) down to zero — it’s a pretty laborious task on 1400 items, but there you go. I’ve made a couple of suggestions on how to make it better to Mark & Ben & AJ at MOBY, and we’re trading mails back and…  Read More…

Hibbs explains it all.

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on August 17, 2007

Categories: Retailing/Industry

Over at Newsarama, Hibbs talks more about the POS system in the store: “I’ve only been using POS for two weeks now; and only the one system, so nothing I say on the topic should probably be granted that much weight, really, but I can already see how this is going to transform the way that I operate my store, my ability to properly order things that have fallen “off my radar”, my accidents in double or triple ordering some material, my access to data for customer searches and special orders, and so on. If I can enact even half of the efficiencies that POS promises my store should quickly become that much more efficient and profitable.” It’s not necessarily…  Read More…

POS Follies Part 10, the conclusion

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on August 8, 2007

Categories: Retailing/Industry

So, the Point of Sale has now been live for a week, as of today, and I have to say I’m in love. There have been issues, of course — the primary one being me trusting the Barcodes that were already in the system thinking “well, they must have scanned clearly at Starclipper, so they must all be 100% right!” Well… no. Nice idea in theory, but pretty crap in practice. I’m not 100% clear on why the differences exist — perhaps they’re from Diamond-provided codes that hadn’t actually ARRIVED at SC for confirmation when they sent me the database, or something along those line — but either way the problems are easy enough to fix, even in the middle…  Read More…

POS Follies Part 9

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on July 31, 2007

Categories: Retailing/Industry

OK, system in and up, doors opened a bit, and we’ve done our first 2 sales. OF COURSE the first sale (w/ 4 items) scanned successfully on zero of them, but he was cool enough to let me go enter the scans back into the system (though I can easialy check someone out w/o it), so the NEXT time I sell those books it should go smooth. We’ll see! Second transaction was good for 3 of the 4, and the last was my last copy of something that I won’t restock anyway, so I let it go. Anyway, back to it, more later (maybe) -B

POS Follies Part 8

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on

Categories: Retailing/Industry

OK, double Ow. Left the house at 6:30 this morning, arrived back home at midnight. Whee. That whole “let’s try to open” thing? Turned out to be not so great of an idea, weirdly enough — still just enough training to do/things to go over/ fussy things to finish (or get into shouting distance of finished at least) So we didn’t bother to try. Oddly enough, we still pretty much did a “normal” Monday’s sales, as we let in subbers who were just there to pick up thier orders, and anyone who knew JUST what they wanted…. but still, that means we’d have had a GREAT Monday if we’d let browsers in. We will definitely be open on time tomorrow,…  Read More…

POS Follies Part 7

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on July 30, 2007

Categories: Retailing/Industry

Ow. So Mark Richman of MOBY arrived on Saturday night to complete our install of the MOBY point-of-sales system, and to begin our training on it. Saturday night, Rob Bennett and I did the hard physical inventory of the store, as Mark wrestled the hardware into working order, clearing up all the issues I couldn’t figure out, like how to get all three of the different printers (receipt, bar code, and regular 8.5×11) working in harmony. Rob and I started around 7:30 PM. “How long can it take?” I mused out loud, “I bet we can get it done in 3 hours max”. Admittedly, I thought we were going to have one more body with us. We were done SEVEN…  Read More…

POS Follies Part 6

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on July 14, 2007

Categories: Retailing/Industry

Woof. So, first off, thanks to those who gave me Excel tips in the last post — yep that’s what I’m using. Wish I had those BEFORE I started doing the eyeball sort, but c’est la guerre. ‘sfunny, I’ve been using Excel for like a decade (maybe more?), and I haven’t got the SLIGHTEST idea how like 75% of it functions. I generally only need it to sort, or move chunks of data around, or that level of depth — most of those options in the, say, “Tools” menu? Don’t even know what they do. ANYway, done with the majority of the database futzing — yesterday and today I went and scanned in most of the barcodes that MOBY didn’t…  Read More…

POS Follies Part 5

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on July 11, 2007

Categories: Retailing/Industry

Just jumping in real quickly to let you know the project proceeds. Last Thursday, Friday and Saturday I spent a total of 33 hours, in those 3 days, walking the store, pulling books off the rack shelf-by-shelf and checking to see if they had records already in MOBY’s database. Basically, over those three days, I’ve touched every single item in the store (except the back issues) at least once. (I also pulled a lot of stuff OFF the shelves for our sale box — so, if you’re a CE customer and you haven’t checked the TP sale box in a while, NOW is the time to do so; there are some tremendous deals in there! [I just made Jeff Lester…  Read More…

POS Follies part 4

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on July 6, 2007

Categories: Retailing/Industry

Right, so where was I? Last Friday I lost a few hours because the firewall router I was trying to install wasn’t working with the modem for some arcane reason I can’t begin to understand. I had my dad come (over three tries) and get it going (he was a network guy for PacBell before he retired), but that cost me some precious computer time on Friday. Saturday, Sunday, and much of Monday were lost to me because I kinda forgot it was “that time of the month” — order form for August, and subscription set up for July, and the general “end of the month blues” of paying bills, etc. Tuesday, the comics arrived. Can’t sell them until Thursday,…  Read More…

POS Follies part 3

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on June 29, 2007

Categories: Retailing/Industry

Well! I *finally* got the pre-populated database for MOBY (took nearly a month because I had some fussy requests for them, and I wanted a go at the data without having to use MOBY itself to access it — MOBY is nice as a POS program, but kinda of mediocre as a let-me-edit-100k+ items; I’m using Excel to manage the data), so this is now my life for the next 2-4 weeks. The MOBY database goes back something like 5 years, and has something on the order of 140k items in it. Now, of course, AT LEAST 70k of those items aren’t things I’d EVER stock in my store of my own volition (like, say, games, or cards, or XENA…  Read More…

POS Follies: Part 2

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on June 10, 2007

Categories: Retailing/Industry

Rob had to help his sister move this week, so I did two back-to-back full days at the store today (well, “am still doing”, technically), which I haven’t done in a while. It is really good for me, honestly — got caught up on buckets of stuff in filing and sorting and making sets or whatever. But I’m now very very tired. James Kochalka came by on his way to his event tonight at Giant Robot, and we chatted for a bit. He’s a really terrific guy, and he did some really color nice sketches in two volumes of his books on the shelves. I’m not going to tell you which books they are, in the hopes that they’ll end…  Read More…

POS follies part one

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on June 1, 2007

Categories: Retailing/Industry

I hate hardware installation — even with a fresh system… so many wires and stuff to trip over and wind through and trying to make sure that everything is all compatible. I suspect it is even worse when, like me, you’re not actually putting in the POS *yet*, so you have to keep the space for the cash register and all of the “analog” systems at the same time you’re trying to set up the new stuff. I’m likely about a month or so before I even try to ACTUALLY put in the POS — I’m waiting to hear back from MOBY about what I can expect with the database before I start making with the inventory and all of…  Read More…

Shh, something’s coming

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Posted by: Brian Hibbs on

Categories: Retailing/Industry

Yeah, yeah, I suck, you’re tired of reading it. But I spent most of today installing (much of) the hardware for our new POS system at Comix Experience, and getting the new DSL up and running at the store. Yes, after 18 years, Comix Experience is actually going to enter the 20th Century. What’s funny is tomorrow will be the first without-Jeff Friday in a loooong time, and Jeff was kind of complaining about not having internet at the store, and tomorrow will also be the first full day of having internet, so, huh. That’s more ironic than rain on your wedding day… I’ve also been spending a lot of time setting up a Secret Future Plan for the Savage…  Read More…