Judith Proctor's Journal

 We broke the shop sales record today.  Well, maybe I lie a little. We didn't so much break it as smash it!

We beat our previous best sales for a week by around £350 and also set a new record for sales in one day, cheerfully beating the previous record set last Xmas eve.

We had several really good sales (£60 - 10 vol set of Horace Walpole's letters; a lovely art book for £25; three autographed novels for a total of £25; some modern organic chemistry books for £55 in total), but even without those sales, the record for the week would still have been broken by a good margin.

We're just selling more of everything - about a thousand items over the week.  More books, more children's books, more music, more films, more everything.

We thought we had the shop reasonably well organised by this time last year, but we've been  tweaking all sorts of small details since then and the small tweaks add up.

About a month ago, we started sorting movies into the different age ratings (U, PG, 12, 16, 18).  This week, we swapped the children's movies and the poetry shelves over to bring the children's movies lower down.

Those two small changes have probably tripled our sales of children's films.

Thank goodness for our two Saturday volunteers (both still at school).  We'd never have kept up with restocking the shelves without them.

 Working/volunteering in a charity bookshop can be exhausting at times.

Because we sell a lot of low value items, we have to sell about twice as many items per day as a typical charity shop to make a similar amount of money. Sure, we sell the occasional book for £50 or more (specialist book on Spitfires last week), but the bulk of our sales are paperback fiction.

On a really busy day, we may need to restock around 150 items. All our back stock is up one or two flights of stairs, so we get plenty of exercise if we're not on the till.  (And even being on the till can be tiring for a long busy stint as you've got to remain alert and focused.)

Of course, the sales aren't the only items that need replacing. We also have to  turn over the stock to remove unsold items that have been on the shelves too long, so that's even more books to move up and down stairs.

Then there's the incoming stock.  We get boxes and bags of donated books every day, typically around half a dozen.  Those have to be sorted, priced and filed in the back stock.

We've improved all these processes in various ways since we started in the shop over a year ago.  Richard can sort incoming stock incredibly fast now.  Pricing is surprisingly fast. (He prices much faster than I do, though I'm probably a bit more accurate).  Speed is necessary - it's the only way to avoid unsafe levels in the incoming stock area.

Stock turnover is a smooth, regular process using different volunteers on different days.  We've built up a system over time that gives higher value books a longer period on the shelves (and a better position in the display).

We could always use more people - it is very labour-intensive because of the sheer volume of books involved, but we're doing well.

Sales are consistently averaging £250 a week above the same period for last year.  That's really good for the charity, and we hope it will be enough for the shop to be given permanent status when the lease comes up for renewal.  

The sales are also a real morale boost for us and the volunteers. Last week was the third best week since the shop opened three years ago.

We have regular local customers, and we attract far more tourists than in the past.  (better display)