trainedmonkey

map of loft developments

the map from los angeles magazine showing downtown loft developments is online. » downtown » comment

scoping the neighborhood

so i did what i don’t do nearly often enough,, and took a walk around downtown, mainly over towards little tokyo. i wanted to check out a few of the “video tape & dvd sales & rental” places listed in the yellow pages to make sure i hadn’t been overlooking anything.

the only one that did rentals was purely japanese films, and nearly all-vhs. (which is a little overwhelming when you don’t understand japanese at all. aisles full of vhs tapes with completely incomprehensible labels.)

the other places nearby (in that direction) are all sales. one focuses on anime and games, and the others are just part of the half-dozen or so discounters/wholesales that are part of the toy district.

there’s a few other places i need to check out in some other directions, but the market does seem to about as empty as i had suspected all along. » video store » comment

l.a. means business is an upcoming event being put on by the economic development committee of the downtown los angeles neighborhood council. » downtown » comment

crunching numbers and figuring out the questions

so i’m crunching numbers on this whole dvd rental store idea, which is an interesting exercise. there’s still so many things i don’t know, but it’s fun. (i’m beginning to understand those people who enjoy playing with excel that i never really understood before.)

i’ve been building up layers of back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine how much shelving would fit in a hypothetical space, how many dvds that would hold, how many new movies (and to what depth) to buy, how many employees (and how much to pay) would be necessary based on hypothetical hours, and all sorts of other equations based on various variables. (how much should you charge for rentals? how long should the rental period be? what about late charges? what about a subscription plan?)

and when the crunching tells you things like you’d need to rent 18.42 movies per hour, or $801.35 per day, to break even, you go in and try to get better numbers for the ones you’ve just made haphazard guesses about.

it becomes clear pretty quickly that the single biggest monthly expense is new inventory. (but it can also be a revenue driver: what happens when you assume that you sell off half of the new inventory after five weeks as previously-viewed movies, after it has made 80% of the purchase cost in revenues?)

the modeling job i haven’t undertaken yet is to plug in the unit count for the various downtown developments (existing and planned), make up some sort of formulation of what percentage of those units would become customers based on the distance, and then figure out where the ideal location would be. it seems like it would be fun, even if it is probably a completely bogus exercise.

new bookmarks: the video store shopper and speciality store services are two places that sell store equipment for video retailers. » video store » comment

downtown movie theaters

another boutique hotel will be opening downtown, but the bit of news that really caught my eye is that the developer hopes to include a small movie theater. also, the linda lea theatre may be reopened if a buyer for the property can be found. a nearby gallery owner plans to submit a plan for showing independent films. (that’s nice, but i think someone could also do well by taking one of the old theatres in the area and running second-run movies, or popular mexican and latin-american films.)

speaking of downtown theaters, the los angeles conservancy’s last remaining seats program is going on now, with movies being screened at the los angeles theatre, the orpheum theatre, and the alex theatre (in glendale). tickets are sold out except for a couple of shows at the orpheum theatre. » downtown » comment

blockbuster downtown

i’ve mentioned the ralphs that will be opening downtown before (drawing a comment from one of the folks who spearheaded the deal — gotta love people who google their own name). of course, where there’s a big grocery store, other retailers will follow. according to this december 2002 press release, blockbuster will also be opening a location in the same complex.

i picked up the latest issue of los angeles magazine last week, because it features several articles about downtown. one of the things that was particularly interesting is a map of the downtown area with all of the loft developments either already open, under construction, or planned. one thing that is noticable is that the gas company lofts (where the ralphs and blockbuster will be) are in the southwest corner of all of the development, and the number of developments is actually weighted towards the northeast corner of the map. it may look different if you plotted the number of lofts — the developments near the gas company lofts are generally larger than those on this side of downtown. (and southwest/northeast is just using the top of the map as north. it’s actually closer to being the west and east sides of downtown, which is on a diagonal grid.)

according to yahoo! maps, the location of the ralphs and blockbuster is 1.1 miles from the old bank district. i haven’t been to that end of town for a while. i wonder how close they are to opening. i guess i should make the trek out there some day. » downtown » comment

blockbuster franchising

the minimum financial requirements for a blockbuster franchise are a net worth of $400,000 with a liquidity of $100,000. a useful number to know as a benchmark. » video store » comment

inbox victory

i now have only four items in my personal inbox: three mails mentioning various books to read (two were comments here), and one about getting blogdrive.com to do an authenticated ping of blo.gs so it doesn’t need to fetch the page to verify it was updated. (something i suggested but haven’t gotten around to implementing and documenting how to do.) » blo.gs » comment

khan!

time’s eye (a time odyssey, book 1) by arthur c. clarke and stephen baxter, in addition to having a clumsy title, also ends up being a choppy ride. the basic premise is that the world gets remixed, time-wise, by mysterious aliens, and there ends up being little pockets of different bits of history that collide with each other, eventually boiling down to the army of genghis khan facing off against the army of alexander the great, with a few 21st century soldiers and cosmonauts and late-19th century british troops thrown into the mix.

one of the biggest flaws of the book is the actions of one of the cosmonauts, which plays out in a frightfully predictable way. (sadly, i was thinking at one point that it was refreshing to see the authors had not leaned on the sort of character/plot device that a more mediocre talent like michael crichton would, but then just a little bit later they went and did exactly as i feared.)

what is most interesting about the book is really the larger-scale problems brought about by the mix-and-match of different parts of earth from different times, and some of the interplay between the characters about what it means. in that sense, the book feels like a little bit of a mix-and-match: a michael crichton book plopped into the middle of an arthur c. clarke framework.

but my real disappointment is that i finished reading it just a short while ago, after the library was closed. if i had been thinking, i would have hit the library earlier to get some more books, since it will be closed tomorrow. » books » comment