- Suspicious Lump
- Mar 11, 2004
-
|
Hmm can you get a peddlers license to have a book mobile but you sell books instead of lending them? Like a food truck but you sell books instead of e coli. I would imagine your customers only shop for books periodically and not daily, so you can have a set route where you are there once a week or month. You can rotate the inventory or have theme days so the store is always different. I am assuming you can rent storage to fill with cataloged books that people can request online and you put it on the truck for them to pickup plus browsing impulse purchasers. Really once you find the people that are addicted to book shopping it might even make more sense just to park in front of their houses.
http://www.vehiclesuccess.com/used-specialty-vehicles-for-sale.html
OP what you're doing now is the ceiling to your idea. You may attribute the failure of other shops to lovely parking or location but in my experience most reasons are multifactorial.
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2017 01:32
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2024 04:22
|
|
- AbsenceVsThinAir
- Jan 29, 2007
-
Maybe you do not even *smell*? That is sad.
*Smelling* *pretty colors* is the best *game*.
|
I know I'm not going to be dropping 50K on inventory. For my piddly little 99% online book selling business, I never pay more than $1 for a book. I go to yard sales to make closing time deals, estate sales to bid on boxes, and library book sales to glean the good stuff.
I'm not sure how much I would spend on intentionally buying used inventory. I'm still trying to price a good starter collection of non-English books and local authors. 10K at the very most. EDIT: I wouldn't rely on B2B liquidators for inventory, based on experiences I've had purchasing for libraries. Good source for mass market children's books and some fiction and not much else. I would be investigating publisher remainder services for specific nonfiction. Non-English will take more research.)
At the vintage market, I sell 50-cent paperbacks and dollar hardcovers. My "booth" (a spot on the sidewalk big enough for a folding card table) is $20 for four hours. The card table was maybe thirty bucks (got it from a Kmart going out of business) and I have a chair. I borrow a canopy if the weather's bad. I've done it three times and made $77, $159, and $104 respectively, cash only. Started raining the first day and the people vanished, even though most of the market was under the covered walk and the rest of us had canopies. I could probably get more buyers if I took credit cards but I can't enforce a minimum purchase to justify the fees.
My favorite kind of used bookstore has the atmosphere and selection of Riverby's and the organization of McKay's. I'd weight nonfiction and throw in some popular fiction because it's hard to find mystery and speculative fiction used around here.
And I'm stalled out on the projected expenses part of the sba.gov fill-in-the-blank business plan. Looks like I'm going to have to make two: the ideal plan where I buy everything new and off the rack and rent the ideal place and the more realistic plan where I buy everything secondhand. (Still renting the ideal place. After studying the government-issued local impact statements, if I want to make a destination sort of place, it needs to be in one of the campus hubs with bus access, which means $25-40/sqft places.)
I knew the owners of Riverby's, we played ultimate together and they are awesome people. Business came up once or twice and I'm pretty sure the way they make/made money was repairing old/rare books for rich people, and completely separate rental properties that they owned. The book store is a labor of love. Although they did comment that books don't spoil, so there's that I guess.
Also, they convinced me to buy a beautifully illustrated copy of Moby Dick and I really loved it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2017 06:29
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2017 01:32
