Lee’s Comics through the ages

You always hear a lot about overnight successes. I was an overnight failure. My first day, my “Grand Opening” I made $150 in sales. After that it was an average of around $20 a day for quite a while. Nobody knew about my store. Eventually I was making an average of $100 a day. Meanwhile, my competition, Comics and Comix in downtown Palo Alto was averaging 1,000 a day. Ten times better than me! Most people in Palo Alto knew about Comics and Comix, but they didn’t know about me. I tried to make up for my competition’s vastly superior store and reputation by working on winning over each person that came through the door. Eventually that policy paid off, and I began to break even, but there were some very lean times initially.