The street is empty. Has been for a few days. Folks must be at the malls shopping. Or not shopping at all yet. One or two wander in and need a kazoo and a cheap guitar if I'm real lucky. Better stick with my conservative projections for the month. Then again, this is the seasonal slowdown I was warned about - except it didn't hit 'til the end of November because Thanksgiving was the last week of the month this year. Always, they say - you're sitting around wondering if you're going to get any Christmas shoppers at all for a scary length of time into the season. And then they start flowing through. The shortened Xmas calendar is going to have some effect on my earlier optimistic projections though. I can only sell so much in a day. People don't like to wait in line very long and I'm the only cashier and the only salesperson. Some of these sales take quite a bit of time to educate the person in the instrument they're looking at. The larger chains probably have graphs showing how much you can sell in a day per employee per square foot multiplied by some inventory factor. It's always possible to beat the odds and for instance sell four saxes in a day, but these are cosmic ray induced events, not the norm.

To be fair, we're working through the biggest economic blip since the great depression. Should be thankful that I've got cash flowing anywhere at all.