In a little over a week, I've turned in record sales highs most every day. I've got two! acoustic guitars left. One is left handed. The rest are gone. A few electrics left. Zero band instruments. OK, one tenor sax. The shop is looking bare. I thought I had about four or five months of inventory and would be stuck with tons of stuff at the end. Instead I might run out of stuff to sell before January is out. Folks are grabbing up stuff that has been sitting here for years. No questions asked. The yellow clarinet. The bugle. The timbales. The orange Gretsch. All the inventory that I was starting to think of as store fixtures than sale items. Stuff I've marked down to nosebleed prices so many times that they look like price tag pin-cushions.

Wish I could've had sales like this when I was making a few cents profit. With all the money I've wasted on advertising, it's also curious that people are mobbing the store from almost the entire south bay. Lined up outside the door. Nobody has heard of the place, nobody has seen my advertisements, but they have all found out in less than a week that a music store is closing down.

I've learned more about retail in the last week than I did in the last four years when I was actually practicing it.