Rook's Comics and Games

Uncertainty is expensive. One of the driving forces of a recession is uncertainty. If you read or listen to the news, you hear a term called consumer confidence when talking about economic health. The measure of consumer confidence is somewhat like taking a measure of how certain on uncertain a consumer is. A certain and confident consumer is very important for business. When everything is humming along and people are feeling good about the economy and the world, they will behave very consistently. This consistency is important for business. With this consistency, business owners have a much easier time building accurate budgets. Business also has a much easier time accessing risk and it is also much easier to evaluate revenue streams of new or existing projects. When confidence is low and behavior erratic, all of these tasks become much more difficult for business to perform. In fact, business will often take pre-emptive measures when behavior is erratic. Layoffs do not always occur because they are necessary. Sometimes, layoffs can occur preemptively because they might be necessary in the future. When it is difficult to plan for the future, it is much safer to be cautious. When confidence is low and behavior erratic spending in the economy shuts down. This happens on two fronts. Consumers also feel the pressures of uncertainty so the savings rate goes up. This means that consumers are spending less. Business spending is hit two fold. First, business is getting less revenue from consumer spending. Secondly, business will also increase its savings rate in order to survive the current slowdown. All of these things are reinforcing feedback loops and it sometimes takes a long while to get out of this problem.

So, what does this explanation of uncertainty have to do with Rook's? I am pleased to inform you that you need not worry about us as a business. Business is up and we are still growing our business, albeit a little slower than last year. No, the above paragraph is really just an explanation for why raised the price of soda by 25 cents. We used to get soda from Costco. It wasn't a great margin but it was consistent. We could plan on our profits from soda very easily because our cost was always the same. In the last few weeks however, Costco has stopped carrying Coke products. So we now had two choices, forgo Coke products or buy soda elsewhere. We decided to buy soda elsewhere. The only other place in town that would allow us to keep our soda prices close to the same is Walmart. Herein lies the problem. Walmart pricing is very inconsistent. Sometimes prices are cheaper than Costco. Sometimes prices are much higher than Costco. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to these price swings. Also, the prices may remain high or low for quite some time. Thus, the price of soda is very inconsistent. And uncertainty is expensive. We are responsible business owners who want to be around for a long time. Thus when we set our price based on the new soda supplier, we added a quarter per soda to the price to account for the uncertainty of Walmart pricing. So, the moral of the story is; we are sorry about the soda price increase, but blame Costco and uncertainty, not Rook's