[Author's note 2015-04-26: there seems to be no mention of what threw off my day, but the entry about food is destined to become semi-regular. Next follows one of the times JZ and I struggle to find a workable business. This is not as easy as it seems, the supply and demand of the local Miami business arena is very highly manipulated. It is focused on business ventures that exploit the huge over-supply of the uneducated.]
I’ve been thinking and thinking what kind of business JZ could run as a partnership. It has to be something that JZ can operate by himself when I am not around. I say a bookstore, with used furniture for sale, and a juice bar. I mean, this type of combo business is the future, if you ask me. And a glass of carrot juice in this town can cost $4.50, making it healthy for both the buyer and seller.
[Author's note: this post was obviously pure speculation as ten years later we were still talking. I find it neat in that it details that JZ (formerly JP) and I had so long ago been investigating setting up a small shop. Back then, Barnes & Noble had not yet instituted its used book program, so we were ahead of them on that count. I had also not yet moved out of Miami, so I did not know about the coffee shop book stores in Ft. Lauderdale. Nor that they would all be belly-up by 2011. I didn't like that city because of parking problems. Anyway, read on about used books. ]
Problem with books is JZ won’t know a lot about them. Is that important? Also, location would be tricky. You need intellectual white males [as customers], and they are a declining species in Miami, just no market for them. Mind you, nobody has done the Barnes and Noble with used books. Like Borders, a coffee and a little tart sets you back $5.00, and you get to sit right next to a whiskey-voiced overweight divorcee playing with her cell phone. My idea is to have a better library system on a database. (The look-up system at Borders has inane categories like "highest sales", but no book reports.)
Unlike the formal new book stores, it is an immense help to have the book described by someone who has actually read it. I could now kick myself for not following through on my plan from years ago to catalog the characters in each book I read. And in what chapter they first appear.
[Author's note: That last paragraph is unclear. What I meant was I had the idea of a listing of characters in a booklet and the page or chapter in which they first appeared, as a guide to the reader. This concept was long before this blog came along, so I am referring to a plan I never pursued. I did give this very idea a try years later, with a blog. But it would rely on other people contributing and hence fell flat. Since blogs were still new when I tried the idea, a blog called "Have We Met", I did not yet know how difficult it was to get others to chip in. So both the idea and the blog went into hibernation. But there was a time in the early days when nobody knew which blog would be the one to carry on.
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