[Dulin's Books]

I was working with Pioneer Place mall in downtown Portland to do just that. It seemed like an Ideal sort of situation. they were willing to work with me on rent- a great rate actually- and hours for operating in an actually store space(was a Bang and Olufsen).

I was actually only going to be open during the weekends and during the week the store front would be a big advert. pointing people to my website. I have history in mall retail and had someone lined up to work the store with me.

The main issues were timing and funds. I didnt have the funds to get both inventory and pay the first months rent. I wanted that as security for myself because I didnt want my first relationship with them to be not paying the rent. I also didnt want an unpleasant retail experience for customers. that's where the timing came in.

They contacted me about it in the week before Halloween. we had talked previously about a cart possibly. They were getting alot of calls about ereaders and since I was the person they knew that had a plan they wanted me in this space.

But buy the time I could have - scrounged the funds(which i did end up borrowing a small amount but business loans for start-ups are just non-existent)ordered inventory, applied for the city tax permit, design (w/help from a designer) the store front to their specs got that stuff created /printed etc and up I would have been opening probably last weekend if not this weekend.

And probably not had any inventory still. As it we still don't have retail boxes for the PocketBooks. I would have had to have something besides them and I did line up some from Elonex which they were nice enough to hold for 1 week while we negotiated etc.

So i would have paid for 2 months and had maybe 5 weeks until Christmas.

I'm happy with the decision we made to not go forward. We just didnt have time to prepare a good shopping experience. We will be talking again after the New Year about a space so I'm glad no damage was done with the mall leasing agent if we had inventory issues etc.

Still, I was down town the other day and made a point of going to look at the empty store front and think about the What Ifs....if they had just called me 2 weeks earlier...