It Could Be Worse

The order came down last week and we shut the doors on March 31st after two straight business days with hundreds-of-percent-higher year-over-year sales, and immediately went into very-little-cash-flow mode with only online sales to sustain us.

There is no TCGPlayer Direct right now, so every last tiny order comes in by the hundreds daily, and takes an inordinate amount of time to process, with only two of us on duty.  I think now with what I know, I would drop online singles sales altogether if TCG Direct never starts back up, or was otherwise not there.  They dropped the $2 purchase minimum some time back and I didn't see a problem in the moment because Direct absorbed most of those sales anyway.  Now that I'm seeing more raw data, I think there should be a $5 purchase minimum.  Or higher.  And I don't sell cards for pennies, either.  My condition and rarity floors, which range from 25 cents per card for commons on up, are ideal for the in-store environment but a colossal waste of time otherwise.  I have long enjoyed the labor efficiency of TCG Direct, and this experience has reinforced my appreciation for it.

I'm loathe to stop the music, though, small orders or otherwise, with so little money streaming in.  Every sale counts to some extent.  TCG and Amazon pay us much later, and eBay pays right away but is a bad platform these days.  It seems like most of what we can do right now is a bunch of ad hoc scrambling to gain a little altitude, to be discarded as soon as we're able to reopen the doors.  (See photo for metaphor.)

But we're doing it anyway.  We're at zero payroll, as I freed our staff up to go take advantage of the unemployment stimulus with a declarative reduction of hours to zero and a state closure order to top it off.  We've applied for relief funding, but as Gary Ray keenly put it on his blog article this week, you have to proceed as if help is not coming.  We're working to earn our way past this ridiculousness in one piece, and we had a modest bankroll on hand to weather the storm with.  We will be monstrously strong on the other side, in theory, with a full pantry of goods and money flowing mostly only in the inward direction.  I always knew the time might come when I'd lean hard on our million-card singles inventory, and that time is upon us.

The plus side is that bills are basically zilch right now.  Our landlord, who has always been very reasonable to us, knows we will do our best to keep up.  Distributors are paid or are about to be, as deposits trickle in.  Payroll is zero as I mentioned, utilities are paid, we don't need any supplies, and that's it, there's nothing else on the expense ledger.  We'll have to pay March's sales tax in a few weeks and that will feel rough coming from a nearly static bankroll.  In April we'll "enjoy" a sales tax filing of zero.  May we be so fortunate that it's the only such month.

There is stress due to the uncertainty.  I have been abstinent from alcohol for years now, but I find myself leveraging a nightly salted margarita as this lockout goes on.  Sometimes even a mild buzz helps to dull the frustration of not being able to work, produce, and achieve.  I have grown accustomed to a certain amount of moneydollars landing in my lap on a regular schedule as a consequence of the work I do and the decisions I make.  This unprecedented societal disruption we're going through has lain waste to such frivolous expectations.  For those who have their "green card" on account of a chronic case of ice cream headache, I imagine you're having an even better time mellowing through the chaos.

You know what, though?  Uncannily, everyone (well, most everyone) is just rolling with it.  This is what should be a catastrophically bad situation -- on paper, it's worse than the Depression or any modern war -- but everyone is fully expecting to get back to business as usual before much longer.  In a world where communication technology has been abused so badly the inventors would have suicided had they envisioned how it would unfold, somehow the sheer velocity of information through our connected matrix has gotten humanity moving of a singular purpose.  And yes I realize there are vast, vast disagreements among people of various political stripes as to how we should manage this situation, but all that is just arguing over the color of the drapes.  We already bought the house.  The mortgage is recorded.  The science is winning and society will prevail, despite reasonable expectations that we couldn't possibly claw our way through this.

That mortgage part -- that's a bit of a worry, for sure.  As I mentioned last week, we really are going to be paying for this forever, and that's going to mess things up in an economic sense for decades to come.  But also as I mentioned last week, people simply won't tolerate a defunct reality for long.  We will get back to our lives as we knew them.  More people will die than anyone wants to see die.  We will agonize over having lost them, and then we will get on living so their deaths might not be in vain.  And that's a pretty reassuring thing to realize.

Hopefully, Princess Leia's optimistic "It Could Be Worse" won't be followed up by Han Solo wryly remarking, "It's worse."