I like to read Brians Hibbs' column over at CBR on the comic shop business.  He wrote a post a few months ago where he gives some insight on why he doesn't stock back issues any more.


www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=51615

If they're not in bags and boards, the collectors, speculators and flippers wouldn't buy them after the first day because they would be torn up as people flip through them, and a bag and board costs more than the dime you sell the book for plus you have to pay someone to bag and board them all. We have a quarter bin at the shop, a lot of books were in g/VG when we put them in their sans bag and board, after a week a majority of them were in poor to fair condition just form the way people flipped through them recklessly, especially kids. Plus sell a long box of 300 comics at a dime a piece, you make $30, which doesn't pay the rent for the space it takes up in the shop, which is one of the first rules if retail-every display has to at least pay for the rent of the square footage it takes up in the store (including the dead space around it that customers would stand in to look at the merchandise) or it is not worth having because by the time you figure in total cost of labor, utilities, related to the space and time it takes to sell the merch, etc. you end up losing money by having it there. Selling it in bulk at that rate eliminates all the associated costs of doing business that selling it piecemeal to customers would entail. In bulk it generates a small amount of revenue, piecemeal it costs the business more to sell it than they would make at that price. 

From what I understand Hibbs primary shop (not the second one he just bought) is in a high traffic area of a major city downtown area (SF), which means his rent is probably higher than the average shop on the fringe of a city or in a suburban strip mall somewhere, which factors into what he chooses to use the space he has for to maximize revenue. 

-M

Dropped by my former LCS of choice ("former"="when I was buying new comics regularly" ... the other LCS is across the street from them & has been for a couple of years now, for some bizarre reason known only to its owner, a nice but definitely, uh, unusual guy, which goes toward explaining why that one stopped being my LCS of choice about 5 or 6 years ago when it was a good 3-4 miles closer to me) this evening for the first time in at least a year & a half, since FCBD 2013, & maybe even longer than that. There had been an ownership change a year ago (pretty much to the day, said the guy working there, whom I knew from my previous patronage), but other than some rearranging of shelving, etc., it's very much the same place.

Anyway, time was short (I'm hardly ever over in that more upscale part of town but had made a point of going to a restaurant a couple of miles up the road from them for the first time), so I only went though the $1 boxes, & then fairly desultorily. Wound up with 36 comics for $33, which with 10 percent ($3) tax included translates to less than 80 cents a comic.

For whatever reason (probably because I'm such a wonderful human being), no matter how long between visits for me, the guys who work there seem to pretty much give me my old 20-25 percent pull-list discount even on bargain-bin purchases, even though I haven't had a pull list there in probably going on 5 years. In any event, I'm headed back today, having dropped by yesterday on the spur of the moment & not had my want list on me (which explains the 5 duplicates I inadvertently bought, though I'd meant to leave those for checking later; was in too much of a hurry at closing).

At any rate, I'd been curious about the ownership change ever since learning of it while poking around Facebook a few months back. Turns out the previous owner, whom I knew, had had the place for 20 years but sold it off after basically taking stock of his life when a friend around his age fell over dead. (He's 66.) Good to know it wasn't lagging business or anything; the employee assured me that wasn't the case. He'd turned down the opportunity to sell earlier last year when the owner of a shop in a much smaller city a few miles north of us first approached him, but changed his mind after the aforementioned occurrence.

From what the guy I know who works there told me, business is pretty decent, even with the other LCS across the street. I'm sure it helps that since the place I worked at from 7/04-7/06 closed down more than 8 years ago, they're AFAIK also the only sports-card shop in town. Indeed, the only other guy who was in there when I dropped by was someone I'd known as at least a semi-regular from the place I worked, & who was there for sports-card purposes.


(As a fan of both the Yankees & the Cowboys, not to mention quite the conservative [he was taken aback when I agreed with his evaluation of Obama's presidency as unsatisfactory but said I did so because O. is too far to the right], so he's sort of my arch-nemesis ...

There are some things that my wife refuses to buy online. We needed a swamp cooler this summer and we could have had one within a week but she wants to go to a store and see it working and read the package and bring it home. Not one store in this state carries them in stock. When we ask, they send us to their website to order it online. We still don't have a swamp cooler.

Reheated food is fine by her, except for steak.

I'm hesitant about buying clothes online since I'm somewhat between a L and XL depending on brand and don't need compression shirts or dresses.

And hard drives/flash drives. It's probably perfectly safe now, but one of my first online purchases was a flash drive over ten years ago. It was some sort of hacked bootleg Chinese fake flash drive that worked when I first got it, but quit working when it got close to capacity. A quick search revealed they use smaller capacity drives and hack them to show more storage space than actually available, and when you fill it up it breaks. So since then I've passed on any Internet deals regarding storage and went to Best Buy for that.