By the way, we’ll be closed for a few hours on Thursday morning. Austin Energy is upgrading our electrical, and we’ll be without power until Noon CST on Thursday February 28.

When we first moved into our really cool new 7500 square foot building, we felt like big shots. Then I turned the fan on in the bathroom (fart fan) and POOF! Blew a circuit. Uh Oh. Turned out I have more power in my shed at home that in this new building. Gary said, “can’t turn on a flashlight without tripping a circuit”!

Not all was lost however, the City of Austin quoted two or three weeks to upgrade our electrical service. Wasn’t thrilled but said ‘Make it Happen’ and started the ball rolling. That was in October 2007.

Like all great cities, there were inexplicable delays that were “nobody’s fault in particular”. One delay after another, then Thanksgiving then Christmas then I don’t know before it seemed that tomorrow (hopefully) all will be complete.

Anyways: Thursday’s upgrade should go smoothly and we’ll have better working conditions and better technology and equipment. Not to mention I can turn on the fart fan again! We are most thankful.

My cousin Doug and his wife have a blog they use to chronicle their personal lives. Their blog links to flickr.com to show pics they took and I thought that was cool. After loading up a few personal pics, I tried something else; I started putting a select group of proofed sign images on my flickr page.

It really works great and is easy to use and organize pics. And it’s really easy for customers to check out designs we’ve done before. I was talking to a customer who wanted a ‘hand written’ look for his sign. So I sent him this link: click here to see picture. He saw the picture, and made the order without hesitation!

1. Offer Tangible Deals
Believe it or not, time-honored retail wisdom states that people respond better to an offer for a dollar amount off of a purchase rather than a percentage off. The reason is that people can easily deduct x amount of dollars off of a price, whereas figuring out the percentage off actually requires a bit of brain power. This applies even if the percentage off would yield a bigger savings. My experience running the Super Cheap Signs website supports this premise.

2. Don’t Be All Things To All People
There are two types of shoppers in this world: Those who are always looking for the deal and those who are more than willing to pay full price. The customer who is willing to pay full price does so for one or many reasons, such as quality, (more…)