Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinWhere legends live since 1969

The Shattered Ponies of Sethergarde.

§ April 21st, 2014 § Filed under retailing § 5 Comments

So these were the windows in the left side of our storefront, prior to the events of Saturday evening/Sunday morning. Tristan, one of our customers, painted this silly mash-up illustration for us, quite possibly with the sole instruction of “make it as amazingly nerdy as possible,” and lo, he did succeed.

That window painting had been up there for a while, and granted, it was about time for a change, but “having someone smash out half of it” wasn’t really the impetus we were looking for.

For the most part, reaction was positive to it; most of our customers were amused, or bemused, by it, and there was even a mostly-positive Reddit thread about it, of all things. But there were those people who just plain objected to having My Little Ponies in the shop windows. One person even told us “sorry about the windows, but I’m glad that My Little Pony mural is gone,” and, well, that’s tact for you.

Here’s a very good reason for having My Little Pony characters in the window: it got a lot of attention, and attracted a lot of new customers. Parents coming in with their children who specifically cited that painting as the reason they stopped by. Folks who saw pics of the window online and wanted to come by and see the shop in person. That painting Got People Into The Store, and you know I think that’s important because I even capitalized the preposition.

And besides, it’s not like we’re any stranger to weird window paintings, like these examples by our pal Randy Martinez:

Anyway, right now we’ve got big ol’ wooden boards where our window used to be, and hopefully by Tuesday or Wednesday we’ll have our new and (gulp) expensive window in place, and then it’ll be time for a new mural! I thinking something everyone will be sure to love, something action-packed, like Sluggo and Swamp Thing arm-wrestling. That’ll bring in the crowds.

I also wanted to say thanks to the folks who generously responded to my request to pick up some goodies from our listings on eBay and Amazon, and even the few folks who called me up at the store (805-653-2732) to have me track down some items. Please feel free to continue to do so…every little bit helps! (I won’t be in Monday, hopefully, barring any more surprises, but I’ll be back in the shop on Tuesday.)

Again, thank you for the sympathetic response to this completely pointless inconvenience visited upon us. I’ll be back soon to talk about comics instead of just picking at this scab, I promise.