Handling The Between-Customers-State

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.

Use Your Time Well.

If you’re reading this while sitting in the gallery, you’ve just wasted even more precious retailing time, and if you’re reading it in the can, you won’t be able to act on it until you get out of there, and if you insist on reading the rest of this dissertation, don’t blame me for the wasted time.

Okay, so what DO you do in the Between-Customers-State?

First of all, you need to assess what it is that you might be able to accomplish while sitting on your butt, in a very quiet and peaceful shop. I’m assuming you have the usual online tools available to you at this time, and that you have loaded onto your system any games or eBay selling accounts you might want to access.

• EMAIL — Everybody I know has email all the time, so take the opportunity now, while you’re thinking of it, to handle this altogether unpleasant task. Get it done, then look around for more things to do.
• PACKING & SHIPPING — Get the orders for the day out the door. Don’t delay on this issue.
• ORDER FULFILLMENT — Before making new things, do the things you need to do to pack and ship them out. Make sure that all the stuff you send is good, make sure it works, make sure the product is secure in its packaging, and make sure it matches the description and the price on the label. This is the time to correct issues, not later, at the demand of a customer. Don’t wait until later to fix it.
• ONLINE MARKETING — This would be a good time to take photos of items that you want to list online, to process the photos if necessary, and then to write the online listing and upload the photos. You should have more than enough time to list a minimum of ten items per day, which adds up fast, and brings in sales, a little at a time, but they DO happen!
• PROMOTION — This is the time to make those calls or write those blurbs for your local newspaper and weekend art supplement, if your paper has one. We have “The Prospector” in the Union newspaper, which also covers five other local FREE giveaway papers that are very popular. The UNION allows us to “boost” our listings for $15 a week — otherwise, unboosted, it’s free. You can create a number of listings and run them concurrently, if you have an ounce of “clever” about you. Here’s where your skills at getting a news-worthy article together for your local paper — if you do it right, they’ll even use your color photos! If you do manage to get an article, it’s considered “good form” to take out at least a quarter page ad in the paper when the article runs, in order to boost the article and give the audience a way to respond to that super-special “PRE-DICTATORSHIP STOREWIDE BLOWOUT SALE you’re running this coming weekend.
• CLASSES, LECTURES & WORKSHOPS — A class can be a performance, if you know how to present yourself in an ASCAP/BMI world. You can’t legally perform your own music in your own shop, UNLESS you’re selling it or demonstrating it in a music class, which is how I do it, even though technically we are licensed by BMI through the Folk Alliance. I wear a Folk Alliance photo ID badge just to avoid trouble with BMI investigators, who do show up in town every so often, to try to catch unlicensed performances and fine the perpetrators $35,000 per violation, which means “per song sung”, so keep it simple, keep it stupid — it’s a class, not a performance. Seating in the round helps create that impression, and giving everyone a guitar makes it foolproof.
• COIN SEARCHES — You can perform penny searches, quarter searches and valuation and identification searches, and you can help folks to understand an inheritance and how to care for it or sell it. This time in the shop affords you a terrific opportunity to search for error coins, or to sort out your coin finds, to get them labeled and evaluated for the market, and to do all the paperwork and admin that goes along with coin searching and marketing of your Coinology Treasures. Doing a coin search while customers are coming into the shop is fine, but STOP! — the moment they walk in the door — and talk to them: “Hi, come on in!”. Be friendly and busy at the same time, and be available for questions and help, but not intrusive of the customer’s privacy. Let them look around all they want to, touch things, move stuff, it’s all ok and you can fix it after they leave. Don’t make the customer wrong for messing the place up — it’s not their space, and if it were, they wouldn’t be any more respectful or considerate, so give it up — this is Planet Earth.
• PORTRAITS — Offer to produce live-sitting portraits in charcoal, pastel, acrylics, watercolor, gouache, or cut out black craft paper into Victorian Style silhouettes, and FRAME the result right then & there, using standardized sizes of paper, matboard and frames!  This can be a fast way of earning a LOT of money at a fair!
• PAINTING PERFORMANCE ART — Set up an easel and paint something right then and there, in front of God and everybody. You should be actually painting ONLY when you see someone wandering near the shop, booth or tent you’ve set up. If you’re painting on the street without an umbrella, you’ll eventually pass out, get soaking wet or in some other way regret the lack of foresight. If you’re inside a nice dry gallery, you’ll appreciate it even more as winter rolls in.
• GUITAR PRACTICE — This could be drum practice, Zen flute practice, singing practice or whatever musical practice you might prefer. It need not be limited to five minutes — you can play all day long without a performance license, provided you’re either selling lessons, giving a lesson, doing a class demo or you’re selling an instrument and giving a demo of it to a potential customer. I have a Martin D-16 for sale that I’d gladly take into the shop and demo until it’s sold, then do it again with another guitar!
• BEADING DEMONSTRATION & INSTRUCTION — Give a class on how to bead, how to weave beads and how to use beads in jewelry and macrame. It’s easy to learn these skills, and they are very easy to teach to others.
• SAIL OR FLY IN THE ASHRAM — What a great opportunity to try your skills and patience at flying or sailing or both, and if you can get some passengers, you can try your skills at keeping them aboard — it’s not that easy!
• HOST AN ASHRAM ACTIVITY — This could be anything from a prayer circle to a walkabout, or a group sail on a yacht or steam side or stern-wheeler. You can do a reading, perform a comedy routine or even do a dance or two either alone or with a group, using SL technology. There are so many activities already going on, you might just want to join one of them, and remember that there are folks from all over the world in there, so time is relative — it’s always time for Ashram Work somewhere, so don’t let the “middle of the night” syndrome keep you from getting in there and doing something. You’ll soon discover that there are others who are just as subject to the night-wandering as you are, and the longer you do a thing, the more chance you’ll have company at it.
• EMBOSSING — Jewelry making, wire work, embossing and all those easy and simple skills can be employed here — you can just dig in and start, and soon you’ll have people joining you at the crafts table, which you should have available, along with materials and supplies for jewelry crafting. This can be a fast “cash-cow” money-tree if you’re willing to emboss people’s NAMES onto a brass or coppery disk and mount it for them in an acrylic “Lucky” capsule or put it into a wearable locket or bezel.
• PAPER ARTS — People just love scrapbooking, and we’ve got all the stuff necessary for it — all it needs is someone to actually DO it, and get folks passing through the gallery to also try some scrapbooking or other paper arts and crafts, of which we have more than plenty!
• WATERCOLOR — There’s nothing easier to clean up than watercolor, so go ahead and make a mess on the crafts table! Watercolor is on paper, and paper means framing, and framing means money, so make sure you spend at least some time encouraging people to run up a large bill in framing for all the subjective art they produce!
• FRAMING — If you know how to frame and there’s framing to be done, it can happen right there in the gallery,  unless it’s a big, major framing job, in which case, we get it done outside by a pro framer.
• RACECAR OR MOTORCYCLE RACING — What a great time to race a car or motorcycle in the Ashram in my latest and greatest race track ever, “Hell-Racer”! If you can keep your vehicle on the road, you’re an expert, and if you can do the course in 3rd or 4th gear, it’s a minor miracle!
• BUILT A HOUSE — Take a few hours to put together a building in the Ashram, or to furnish, light and activate your already existing in-Ashram structure.
• TAKE A HIKE — You can hike some of the walking trails in the Ashram, or stroll around the compound outside the temple, if you like.
• CLUB MEETINGS — Form an art club, women’s creative workshop, health collective, creative writing club, whatever strikes your fancy, fits your pocketbook and answers to your previous knowledge and experience — in other words, whatever interests you or whatever you’re good at or both — and have a meeting once a week, on your day in the gallery, if you have days assigned and the gallery task shared amongst a group. This is a great way to establish a study group.
• POETRY READINGS — Poetry readings, storytelling, improv theater workshops, anything that brings literature, activity, interaction and high attention levels into the picture. Poetry is very attractive and will bring a small but very sincere crowd.
• SIGNINGS — Public signings for authors, painters, sculptors, craftspeople — these could be all day long if it’s you doing the signing, or one hour on a specific day once a week, if you only do a signing on “your” gallery day.
• SPECIAL SALES — Announce a special 50% Off Sale and brace yourself for the onslaught. If there isn’t any, you’re in worse trouble than you thought. It’s either your merchandise, your location or your manner, all of which can be repaired, but you DO need to recognize the problem before you can solve it. A sale ought to attract at least a small number of folks, and if it doesn’t, it means (a) they didn’t read your ad, or (b) they don’t care about your product, or (c) they wouldn’t go to your neighborhood if you paid for the taxicab. HINT: It’s never the product. They know nothing about the product until they have it in their hands. It’s about YOU, and the faster you realize that, the easier it’s going to be to fix it.
•  DANCES — Don’t give a dance performance in a shop — it’s a waste of time and talent. Instead, offer classes in dance, movements, martial arts ,or beginning levitation. People love to move their bodies, and if you offer something that also takes off the pounds and inches, they’ll love it even more. The Movements adds BALANCE to the mix, making levitation so much easier.

• MAGIC SHOW — While ASCAP/BMI prevents you from giving a LIVE MUSIC performance, it doesn’t prevent you from doing a magic act with music, if you like. The music is considered “incidental” and performance rules don’t apply, if you use your own music, and if you SELL your music on CDs or DVDs, you are allowed by law to play that music as a demo in order to sell it — I know my performance law, and that ought to hold off the always-hungry wolves, while you earn a basic living from your performance skills — you won’t get hassled in a subway performance, or on the street, except by cops — busking is off-limits to BMI/ASCAP, because it’s considered “street begging”, although if you’re actually poor, forget it, you don’t have a chance in hell of making a valid point in a court of law.
• TAROT READING — You can offer Tarot readings or training — make sure you do this by specific appointment, but you can also do it with customers coming in the door — most people have enough patience to let you finish the reading in peace.
• PLS TRAINING — Coached lifestream sessions are limited only by your coach training level!
• ORB RUNNING for themselves or for someone they know, you can coach them on how to get into an Orb, how to run through it, how to pick up or trigger an item or doorway — you can sit and watch over their shoulder, or just let them figure it out for themselves.
• SUPERBEACON SESSIONS — what a great way to spend your gallery day!!! Offer Beacon Time to others or use it yourself, as long as you’re able to respond to customers who walk through the door. There are a number of Zone Box Inductions they can use for FREE — remember that customers won’t walk through the door or disturb the space, if you’re sitting there holding the crystals with your eyes closed and breathing slowly, in deep meditation or out of body altogether, so it’s better if you work as a coach, rather than a subject — at least during office hours — and use your skills as a coach to help them learn to use those consciousness tools for waking, real spirit healing, and deep meditation.
• CONTACT TIME — This is the time, Kato — get in touch personally with all the ART FRAMERS, Designers, Decorators, Realtors, Builders and Health Professionals in your area, and tell them about the art and artists you represent, but you have to make it worth their while to listen to your pitch, so you need to show them immediately how they personally will profit from this — and that means you’ll need some sales training on how to do this without making them uncomfortable or pushed. Framers are always looking for “fillers” for their frames, and decorators appreciate a hefty “kickback” when they sell things on your behalf, so be prepared to SHARE the profit from the art sales. It will always cost something — there’s always a “finder’s fee” to pay, and you shouldn’t be reluctant to pay it.
• MAKE A GAME — You have the tools available to you to create a BlueLine Orb or to produce a tabletop game with the gaming tools we have, such as dice, percentage detailing, spinners, cards, game pieces, game boards and more.
• RESEARCH — This might be a good time to get online and google some things to find out more about some things you want to find out about.
• NAPPING — Don’t let the customers catch you napping, but if it’s really, really slow, you might want to roll out a sleeping bag and catch 40 winks. Be sure to lock the door and turn off all the lights before you lie down and go napping.
• DUSTING — Okay, got all those other things done? NOW it’s time to dust, move things around, find and price unpriced goods, vacuum, mop, whatever you like. Get out the Windex and spritz it all around the place, people LOVE the smell of cleaning products! With the right deft moves, your shop can smell like Aisle 15 “Cleaning Supplies & Laundry Products” at your local Raley’s Supermarket.

There are a lot more “productive” things to do while waiting for a customer, but in the end, most retailers will sit there behind the counter and read, daydream or nap for most of their business day.

If you take a short lunch break or walk outside the shop, be sure to take along some business cards to hand out along the way. I like to give away meteorites, beads, incense or lucky pennies along with the card, which insures nothing — they might very well still throw it away, but the chances are better that they’ll keep it, look at it and sometime use it.

Those who daydream through the gallery day are always the first to complain when things don’t go well, but they’re always the last to act upon it. Don’t let yourself fall into the auto-mechanical ruts of complacency and sleep — there are a lot of other ruts to fall into!

If you’ve run out of things to do while waiting for a customer, why not INVENT something to do while waiting for a customer? Are you expecting someone else to come along and invent things for you? That’s a clear definition of a retail customer, and a shopkeeper should never be that.

Selling is an artform, and a service.

Good selling means getting the customer together with the right product at a fair price, meaning fair for both buyer and seller, a win/win situation if ever there was one.

Fair trading will bring customers back again and again, and make new customers by word of mouth. Satisfied customers will chat up your product and your shop.

Your shop should be just different enough to become a “destination shop”, which means that customers really WANT what you’re selling, and that means a LOT of customers ALL the time, if you expect your business to succeed. One sale a day does not make an income, unless you’re a diamond merchant or a real estate dealer or an art dealer.

Well, there you have it — you can’t afford to deal diamonds or real estate or expensive luxury cars, but you CAN paint a picture, and that’s all you need to get started on the higher levels of income production — all you need now is a reputation and a following!

Reputation, reputation, reputation!

Reputations are built on scandal, not fame — but people have to already care about you or automatically know about you, in order for a scandal to have any impact on your art or performance career.

These days, it’s not enough to just fail in rehab. You really need to go a lot further than most folks would care to go. Back in the Old Days, it was enough to just be a LITTLE weird.

Surrealist Salvadore Dali wore a weird pointy mustache that went up past his eyeballs, and did strange “Da-Da” and “Surrealist” things in public, things that earned him the “Weird Award” for 1934, 1937, and 1938, and made his name a household word for weirdness.

Notoriety is cheap and easy — Fame comes hard, and drops you like a rock.

For art sales, all you need is notoriety. Famous artists do earn millions of dollars, but they have the same end-game as performers — you end up squeezed out and dried up.

Notorious people don’t have paparazzi following them everywhere, unless they’re currently in the news, and it’s never about them.

The notoriety need not be real. Pretending to be notorious is good enough for art marketing — nobody requires that you PROVE that you’re weird.

It’s enough for your sales rep to just say you’re weird and let it go at that. The price you get in the end will depend largely on the amount of notoriety of the artist.

Well, those things ought to keep you pretty busy between customers — so with all that stuff going on in your shop, gallery or fair booth, what’s left to do?

PARTY ON.

ARTISTS’ PARTY — Yes, you can throw an artists’ party — get a bunch of artist friends together, everybody bring your own — put up a bunch of art, posters, prints, greeting cards & postcards and craft items from those artists who attend the party, and have a “student sale” area where arts & crafts items are placed on foldout picnic type tables — and don’t be reluctant to serve some snacking foods and drinks, making sure it’s all packaged, not just dumped into a box, basket or bowl.

CONTESTS  & AUCTIONS — Create an art contest or juried show, and make sure that the jurors are local celebrities, and give them an opportunity to add a signed art piece of their own to the ONE-HOUR fund-raising auction you have at the end of the show.

BLOWOUT SALES — Create a blowout sale of something that will attract customers, such as a “Storewide Silver Sale” in which you offer silver dollars, half dollars, quarters, dimes and wartime nickels at just about “melt” price. Don’t do this with numismatics, of course!

FEATURED ACTIVITIES of various sellers in the Nevada City ARTWALK included:

• Live Forge Demonstration, food, drinks, art & conversation.
• Storytelling & music by singer/songwriter (probably outside BMI regulation)
• Artists Showing & selling Prints & Stickers after original works of art.
• Food, Drink & 15% off all items in store.
• Featuring local art and offering live music & non-alcoholic drinks.
• Printmaker will demonstrate linoleum cutting, Tarot Readings.
• Trunk show for jewelry & Tarot Readings.
• Aerial Gymnastic Performances on High-Wire & Trapeze.
• New Line of CBD products & Art Show.
• Offering light refreshments & featuring local artists.
• Artist Musician, massages by donation, facials.
• Featuring local Navajo artist & New Chocolate Flavor of the Month.
• Working studio, mixed media & mono prints, slab tables, antiques.
• Refreshments & Entertainment throughout the evening.
• Fair-Traded Bead Jewelry to benefit Huichol Center, Mexico.
• Fiber Art, Cotton, wood & metal to benefit Jaguar Sanctuary Cost Rica, entire store sale 40% off, win door prize, drinks on the house!
• Local artists & nourishing affordable food options.
• Live Music by Foggy Mountain Music Co. (licensed performances)
• Locally made goods, food, drink & lively conversation.
• Handicrafts from around the globe, local art & artists.

So those are just a few of the ways in which you can use the time and space of gallery-watching or store-sitting or retailing, and there’s nothing to stop you from coming up with even more.

Between all those activities, you’ll not be bored, I promise you.

One of the saddest effects of extreme wealth is boredom. You can feed the rich almost anything in the way of a new experience, and they’ll follow you anywhere, and that’s the saddest part of being filthy rich, and I’ve known plenty of filthy rich in my day.

Every single one of them spent a lot of their day being bored.

Napping is good, daytime television is better now that there’s political coverage every few seconds, and there’s always knitting, crocheting and the ever-popular hunting and fishing.

TABLETOP GAMING is another way to organize a group, but you’ll need to acquire or already have the skills as a Dungeon Master. There are plenty of experienced DMs amongst our staffers, so ASK how, and we’ll tell you how.

See You At The Top!!!

gorby