Operator playbooks for antique malls

How do you run an antique mall? Booth by booth: recruit dealers, set the splits, lay out the floor, staff one register that can ring seventy vendors' inventory, and settle everyone at month-end without drama. The playbooks in this collection walk that whole system end-to-end, in numbered steps.

A playbook is different from a guide. A guide explains one decision; a playbook runs a whole operation in order, with each step concrete enough to execute this week. Our gold standard is the 70-booth piece — seven moves that take a mid-size mall from opening the doors to month-end settlement, each with a named tool or process and a number attached. The dealer-rotation playbook does the same for the hardest recurring conversation in the trade: moving vendors around the floor twice a year without losing them.

These pieces are written from real Saturdays at the counter, not from a vendor's feature list. Where a step depends on software, we name what we'd use and why. Where it depends on trade instinct, we say so plainly — thirty years of knowing which dealer's booth turns over is worth more than any dashboard, and the point of a playbook is to amplify that instinct, not replace it.

The collection is small on purpose — a playbook earns its place by being executable, and each one takes longer to write than five listicles. Between playbooks, the operations hub covers the individual disciplines in depth, and the vendor-side hub covers the half of the system your dealers see.