Running Two Manhattan Stores

The business is built out of thousands of small sales. A magnet. A T-shirt. A snow globe someone grabs ten minutes before their tour bus leaves. Most of what I know about business, I learned by paying attention to those small moments.

I don’t have a system that always works. What I have is a habit: I look at the numbers every day, I watch how people actually shop, and I keep asking whether what worked last week still makes sense this week.

Almost nobody walks into our stores because they need something. They are tourists. They have some time, some money set aside, and a feeling that they should bring something home. My job is not to meet a need. It is to make a happy decision easy.

So I watch. What do people pick up and put back? What do they ask the staff about? Families shop differently from a group of students. Someone visiting from overseas usually wants something that clearly says New York. Those small patterns shape what goes near the door and what goes in the back.

Every order is a bet: will this product sell, at what price, and how fast?

The cheapest supplier is not always the best one. If a shipment arrives late right before a busy stretch, the low price saved me nothing. I lost the sales instead. I would rather pay a little more to a vendor who delivers on time and keeps quality steady. But I still push on price, because in souvenirs a small difference per unit adds up across thousands of units.

Overbuying worries me more than underbuying. Running out of a popular item hurts, and I feel it right away. But a pile of slow items is worse in a quieter way. It is cash sitting on a shelf that I can’t use for products that actually sell. So before a big order, I ask myself:

• Did this sell at both stores, or only one?
• Did it sell at full price, or only on discount?
• Am I ordering because the numbers say so, or because the vendor’s offer sounded good?

The two stores taught me not to assume. Something that sells out at one location can sit for weeks at the other, even though they are in the same city. Now I make buying decisions store by store.

I track sales every day, then look at the week, the month, and the year. I don’t trust a single good day, and I don’t panic over a single bad one. The patterns only show up when I zoom out. That’s when I can see which months carry the year, which products quietly stopped selling, and whether a change I made actually did anything.

No single decision makes a store work. It comes from a lot of small decisions repeated every week: what we stock, when we run deals, and how we staff the busy days.

Deals are where this matters most, and where I make my hardest calls. A multi-buy offer on small items can turn a one-item purchase into three. But timing is everything. Run it when the street is full of tourists and it moves product fast. Run it in a slow week and I may just be discounting things people would have bought anyway.

I still second-guess these decisions. After a strong weekend, I ask myself: was it the promotion, or was it the weather and a full city? I check the daily numbers afterward, but honestly, I can’t always separate the two. I would rather admit that than pretend every good result was my plan.

The schedule is where every decision about people and money meets.

One extra person on a slow shift is wasted payroll. One person short on a busy Saturday means long lines, a tired team, and customers who walk out without buying. Neither mistake shows up on paper right away, but both cost the store.

I try to build the schedule around people’s real lives: classes, second jobs, family. Someone working hours that fit their life is someone who shows up, and shows up in a good mood. That matters in a store where the customer is on vacation and expects a friendly face.

But I can’t give everyone what they want. When two people need the same Saturday off, someone will be disappointed. What I can do is be fair, be consistent, and explain my reasons. I’ve found people accept a “no” much better when they trust the person saying it.

When I hire, I care more about reliability than polish. I can teach someone how to run the register or arrange a display. I can’t teach them to show up on time. A bad hire doesn’t just fill a spot badly. It puts extra weight on everyone else.

Small retail is a long series of decisions made without perfect information. More staff or lower costs? A bigger order or more cash on hand? A deal now, or full price later? There is rarely a clean right answer.

It’s also why I study Computer Science. Every day I make decisions from daily sales, purchase records, and schedules. I keep thinking those decisions could be sharper with better tools. Most small businesses run on instinct and spreadsheets, and I believe the gap between the two is where the real opportunity is.