lighthouse

1 minute ago, chrisco37 said:

I don’t think they’ll slab that book.  It would be interesting to see what you could get for a bundle though.

Amazing to me that there has already been a sale of $2500 for a slabbed copy... even for a CGC 10, that's insane...

On 10/16/2018 at 2:29 PM, Malavin said:

I’m enjoying this post. Any more to add lighthouse?

It's been a very busy couple of weeks with training recently hired employees and processing new collections. But I hope to be able to carve out a couple hours in the next week or two to talk about how months 2-4 went.

And I still can't decide what to do with these...

Sell all of them raw... Slab the best 25-30... Sell them as original shrinkwrapped bundles... Sigh...

I guess until I make up my mind... they will just sit...

1 minute ago, Octavius said:

From what i understand is that DC have indicated that there will be no reprints of issue 1 for the foreseeable future. Does that change your thinking in anyway?

It resulted in us reducing our orders for issue 2. There's still time before the FOC date, obviously, since initial orders for Batman Damned 2 were due tonight. But rather than planning for 50-75 shelf sales to go along with sales of second prints of #1, we are planning for around 10-15 shelf sales of 2.

The $4-5k in value in Damned 1 is a nice windfall. But I would have much preferred to be able to bring in more new readers. Mainstream media coverage brings former collectors out of the woodwork, and each of those visits is a chance to bring someone back to the hobby. Second prints of Batman Damned not only would have sold themselves (and issues 2 and 3), they would have resulted in additional sales of other current DC titles and DC trades.

It's a short-sighted decision by DC. But it's their company. They can run it how they like...

Acquired in a large (10,000+ book) collection a while back. With the recent run this issue has had, I figure it may be time to turn loose with it, but thought I would do a PGM here before sending it to CGC.

Hopefully all the file sizes work out. If not, I apologize in advance. First time doing one of these.

Centerfold and cover solidly attached. Nothing missing from interior. The rest pretty much speaks for itself.

45 minutes ago, slg343 said:

I personally would have pulled them COB Wednesday.  You want a full shelf on Wednesday if possible, but after that it is fair game.  I personally would move the rest of the stock online for the next week to avoid the customers that think you are ripping them off.  Just my 2 cents.

Hope you make a few dollars off these as I hate seeing local shops lose out because they get stock with extra stock and then don't maximize when they do hit with a good book.

We don't do any mail order. No website ordering. No eBay. None of that. We sell some items on consignment through MYCS, and we let Amazon handle liquidating some overstock for us through their FBA service. But we don't sell anything online that would require us to handle fulfillment.

That said, we will be fine moving these. As much foot traffic as we have, I'm not concerned about getting these out the door when the time comes. Maybe that is around when issue 2 hits in two months. Maybe it's when issue 3 hits. Maybe we are still selling them a few years from now. If I had 500 copies I would be more concerned about rebalancing my portfolio. With a few dozen copies, they'll move fine.

I'm just hoping DC recognizes the opportunity they have here, and gets second printings in the pipeline fast enough to have them available when issue 2 hits. It's going to suck if half the people who want to actually read the story can't because so many of the issue 1s are tied up in collections of people who happened to watch late night tv. The FOC for issue 2 is still 25 days away, but I can tell you that my order volume could go up or down by a factor of 2 depending on whether 2nd prints of issue 1 are available. It's not fun saying "yeah, here's issue 2 of that story you heard all about on the news, but issue 1 is $60, would you like to get both today?"

Ultimately we kept them on sale at cover price until noon on Friday then pulled the plug. I think at one point we had 10 or 12 customers in a row who walked in, bought one copy, complained that we wouldn't sell them a second one for their "friend", bought absolutely nothing else, and left.

I'm sure all those people will come back, right? Right?

Still have a few dozen copies left. Including two original shrinkwrapped bundles of cover A. It's funny because we received at least 80 calls about the book on Thursday, told all those people that we still had copies, but very few made the trip. So now the extras sit until we can put them back out without risking bad reviews.

Ah well, back to the monthly order...

Sorry for the lack of updates the past few days. Had to let an employee go, which happens. And now trying to decide what to do with Batman Damned.

Apparently ordering 110 shelf copies was a good thing?

It's one of the toughest frequent decisions to make as a comic retailer. How many copies do you sell at well below "market price" in an effort to build goodwill, and at what point do you cash in? Obviously we never pull hot books out of sub boxes and pretend we didn't get them just to make an extra buck. Anyone who subscribed to it is getting their copies at cover price whether they pick it up this week or in a month. But seeing eBay auctions at roughly $20-25 (including shipping) for the main cover and roughly $30 for the Jim Lee cover, it's tough to decide when to stop selling them at $6.99.

You'd love to think that customers who found them at your store at cover price when everyone else is sold out will remember you treated them "fairly" and give you extra business in the future. But from past experience with "hot" books, most of the folks who call ahead asking for a book currently selling at triple cover or better will come in, pick up that one specific book, and not visit the shop again until there is another hot book their regular shop doesn't have. You're not the store with the great customer service. You're that dumb LCS that sold them the book too cheap they brag about snagging in an online forum. There are exceptions, but it happens an awful lot.

We sold ten shelf copies before Diamond sold out yesterday. We sold another ten this morning before MYCS and Midtown went out of stock. And we are averaging 5 or 6 calls an hour today from non-regulars looking for the book.

We will sell some more at cover price. Haven't decided how many yet. And then likely we will just pull them from the shelves. Even though offering them at $15 a piece tomorrow should make us look nice for selling them below tomorrow's market price, it all too often just results in casual customers thinking we are overcharging them on a book that came out this week. So we will likely take the only other alternative. Pull them from the shelves. Wait for it to be common knowledge that they are $20 or $25 or whatever. And then put them back out.

11 hours ago, jas1vans said:

If you would have owned any of the bars or restaurants I worked in over the last 20 years, I'd still be in the service industry. I think your belief in taking care of the existing customers is definitely the way to go. I never understood why chasing new revenue took priority over maintaining existing revenue.

Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. There have been plenty of times when I've had to reexamine decisions we were making to see whether they were benefiting new customers at the expense of established customers. It's very easy to fall into those traps, no matter how much you "know" that the right thing to do is take care of the people who already count on you. But we make a concerted effort in the other direction and just hope we don't fail too often.

15 hours ago, HouseofComics.Com said:

Now that you've gotten through another new comic book Wednesday, let me toss you a quick little question on your philosophy towards local cons. If the promoter of your local con asks to put fliers in your store, do you say yes? Do you support your local annual Comic Con (really a pop culture con, with some comics)? Do you take a booth at the show to promote your store? Or will you in the future?

Also, has your philosophy on this been consistent with your previous stores or has it changed with the new store?

In my first two shops, literally no one ever asked to put out flyers. At the first shop in Texas, I never set up at cons. But at the second shop (in Oregon) we set up at shows from Seattle to San Diego. The very first ECCC (roughly 2003?) is still the most profitable show I have ever done. Sales at that show were just insane relative to the cost of the booth. Did that show twice, plus multiples of "the other show" in Seattle (I think Steve? was the promoter, been way too long). Did a half dozen of the Portland shows. Did WonderCon in SF in 2003 and San Diego in 2004, but by then I wasn't a brick and mortar shop any more.

At the current shop, we will put out flyers for any Con within 300 miles or so. We don't have a huge area for them, probably 2' by 3', but we wind up with flyers out for cons, art shows, film festivals, all sorts of things.

We have not yet taken a booth at a con, but that's largely a matter of not having enough staff to adequately service customers in two venues at once. We won't let the customers at the shop suffer just so we can grab extra sales at another venue (or worse, so we can drive more traffic to the shop). It's a slap in the face to care more about finding new customers at a show than about the customers that are already in the store. Given the lead time necessary to get "good" spaces at Cons, we will probably look at exhibiting starting next March or April. We would probably have staffing where it needs to be by November. But I don't want to advance book space at a Con without already having the staff in place.

So currently our "support" for Cons would be in the form of flyers or donations. Any event that asks for material for a charity auction or raffle, we will donate. That's actually true of pretty much any event, Con or not, whether it's a high school fundraiser, church group, or minor league baseball team. But down the road, yes, we plan to exhibit.

On 9/9/2018 at 10:51 AM, davidpg said:

Lighthouse, are you using a traffic counting solution right now?  If not, you should be.  You know enough about what you're doing though the insights you get from proper traffic counting can be eyeopening.  Let me know if you'd like to discuss it as I've worked the business.

 

We are not currently. We spot check the daily counts by reviewing the security feeds (we have 8 visible cameras in the store). And we staff a person for accurate traffic counts for event days like Halloween Comic Fest or Free Comic Book Day.

We were somewhere in the top 21% of shops for FCBD attendance this past May. Diamond only breaks out the higher counts in 500 person increments, but there were 3.4% of shops with over 2000, and another 4.0% between 1501-2000. We were in the 13.4% with attendance between 1001-1500. Best guess would be around 85th percentile. So in the top 300-350 shops, something like that. There were 2,428 shops participating this past May.

58% of shops had fewer than 500 FCBD attendees, and the mean was roughly 610 (drug well above the median by the high attendance outliers). The average shop gave away around 2200 free comics. We gave away around 6,000. On a per-square-foot basis, I doubt there were many stores that came close to how packed we were for FCBD. Three hours of having a doorman denying entry until we were under occupant load was definitely not what I expected.

Our foot traffic is unusual for reasons I will get into later in "the story". But we may well add a dedicated traffic counting solution down the line. In spite of all my advance planning, there are certainly things I didn't anticipate, lots of them. And our goal is to always be better than we were the previous month.

8 minutes ago, SteppinRazor said:

I can imagine that no matter what recommendations, there will be those who don't like it.  The Death of Superman, Knightfall, and the X-Men Fatal Attractions knocked me out of the hobby when they came out, but somehow there are people who like that pile of toilet paper.

Question is, would you stop going to that comic store, or just ignore the employee's recommendations?

I find it's important to frame recommendations against other titles. If you like X, we think you will like Y. If you're a fan of Smith, we think you'll like Jones. If you loved the complicated characters in this book, we think you'll like that book, etc.

If someone comes in telling us they loved Regression, we will likely steer them to Ice Cream Man. But it depends on WHY they liked Regression. We could just as easily point them to Walk Through Hell. All are excellent, unsettling titles. But none are exactly alike by any means.

We get customers who don't care about story but want pretty art. Okay, that's an easy enough request to fill, even if it's not my personal preference. We need to know what to recommend for that person, even if we wouldn't give the same recommendation to someone who tells us they loved Maus or Blankets.

25 minutes ago, FineCollector said:

That's an interesting perspective.  I don't disagree that customer service trumps comic trivia, but you're not selling a commodity like gravel or walnuts.  If your employees don't share a passion for comics, your customers may not accept their recommendations, particularly if they don't know the important creators or classic storylines.  You can be sure that any comic shop employee who tells me Civil War was a great story is one that I will ignore from then on.  Beyond that, you'll have TPBs that become pieces of furniture because employees don't know how to recommend them.  A lesser concern is that the employees may not clue into a good find when someone calls to sell something.

Do you train new employees how to handle comics?  I find that many non-comic people in retail either don't care how they handle a comic, or are terrified to handle comics above a certain dollar amount, or both.

From our perspective it takes around 200-250 hours to get an employee trained to the point that they could be in the store alone with customers for a half hour. And roughly 400 hours to get them to the point that they could handle an entire shift as the primary employee.

New employees spend a LOT of time on the more menial tasks in the beginning. Making bags and boards, restocking Funkos, restocking t-shirts etc. During this time they are in the store with experienced personnel so they can hear how customer questions get answered (and how they absolutely never get answered). They learn where various things can be found. And they read a lot of current series to get to know the material. After a time, they get assigned to Tuesday evening shifts to assist with the weekly shipment. Week after week after week they are shown exactly how to unpack the boxes, exactly how to handle books to get them to the rack. We've had many sub customers indicate they have received 9.8s from books we put in their sub pull for them, and proper handling of new releases is a huge point of pride for me (and now for the rest of the team). Part of that Tuesday evening shift involves bagging and boarding books that come back off the recent releases racks and into the boxes and that is all supervised. Proper handling of comics isn't rocket science, but it does require training. And it's actually easier for us to teach someone who hasn't collected previously than someone who has a decade of bad habits built up from handling their own books poorly. By teaching new employees how to keep a 9.8 new release in 9.8 condition even if it's a book that "will never be worth anything", it's easier to transition to having them handle "expensive" books later.

Two "worst of times" ago, I got multiple CGC 10s and a few dozen 9.9s from new releases, so I am confident in the handling techniques I teach the employees. The only actual difference between that technique and "every Tuesday" is that we don't have everyone wear nitrile gloves every week.

No employee is ever going to have read every comic story ever written. I mean, we carry over 300 titles a month and it isn't like anyone is reading all of those, much less the 300,000 issues that came before them. But we don't turn an employee loose on their own until they have had plenty of time to get up to speed. By the time that employee is the face behind the counter, their comic knowledge is strong, and their customer service is even better.

1 hour ago, jmg3637 said:

Great thread Lighthouse

Had the chance to finish reading it yesterday while waiting for my Daughter's tonsils to come out.

Enjoyed finding out the behind the scenes of a Brick and Mortar store.

Was wondering how long since the store opened its doors? 

That's part of "the story". And I will get to it in time.

I still have a lot more to cover from the earliest stages, including Diamond's credit process, our marketing decisions, wall book display choices, Diamond's discount structure, loss prevention strategies, collection buying, etc... but all in good time.

3 hours ago, thunsicker said:

Hey lighthouse.  If you're looking for more stuff to share that would be interesting...

Could you speak a bit about how you went about staffing the store.  Figuring out how many employees you needed.  Planning full time vs part time employees.  Are there any employees that haven't worked out for you?

There's a lot more of the regular story to tell. But I like to sit for 2-3 hours straight composing those posts. The quick replies I can do while waiting for a few hundred price labels to print, or while waiting on things to download. So I'll get back to the "story" soon... but sure.

My initial staffing estimates were horrible. They were as bad as the cover of Berzerker 1 from Gauntlet Comics. I mean really bad... Seriously, go look at that cover for 3 minutes. Lol.

But that's largely because I expected to have a couple months of slow rampup. Not $1.81 a foot in a day. So the initial staffing was planned to be one full-time future-manager employee beyond myself, plus one part-timer in the 10-20 hour range, with additional staff to follow later. I had a few friends who volunteered their time to help out during the pre-open phase. And a couple of those helped out with crowd control during the grand opening (and to assist with the costume contest). But at the end of the first week, we had already beaten my full-month sales estimate for month 1, and I had just the two additional employees.

We wound up hiring from our customer pool (a very common strategy), and added a couple part-time folks that way who could assist with grunt labor (making bags and boards, restocking Funko, etc). One of those early hires is still with us. The other was removed after a couple months over attendance issues.

We get probably 60-80 job inquiries a month, and of those we interview 2-3 people a month. Of those roughly 20% of the interview candidates are offered a position. It's frustrating because a huge number of people think their love of comics is critical to getting a job. We get inquiries like "I've loved comics my whole life, this would be my dream job!" And it's extremely unlikely that those candidates will be a good fit. We hire for trustworthiness first, customer service second, punctuality third... comic knowledge is probably 15th-20th if I were making a complete list. I mean I freaking love eating cheeseburgers, but that in no way qualifies me to work at Five Guys. Comics are amazing. Getting employees to fall in love with comics isn't difficult at all. Over my three shops I can't tell you how many employees went from "I haven't read any comics ever" to "I can quote you first appearances of 100 different characters and will rant about how much I love 30 different titles if you let me" in a matter of weeks. We can teach people about comics, we can't teach people to care about customers. We require all employees to read dozens of titles a month (on the clock), and demand that at least a third of those are outside their normal interests. I'd say our average employee read 50-60 new books last month alone.

On the question of full-time versus part-time, in the initial stages, part-time is better. We would rather have 5 different employees who work 15 hours a week than 2 employees who work 40. Even if you ignore the payroll burden questions, the flexibility to have people cover someone else's shift or to have extra employees come in for a busy day... that's critical. If you need 5 employees working the night before FCBD, you can't reschedule 2 people in such a way to get the coverage you need. Things would likely be different in a B location, but it isn't unusual for us to have 30 customers in the store at a time, and we hit our occupant load for three full hours during last FCBD (having to hold customers in line outside the store waiting for people to leave). Flexible scheduling is the only way we made that happen.

20 hours ago, G.A.tor said:

I ordered 2 initially and even with price change I’m still just at 2. It was solicited as a 10pack to begin with (unlike reg boxes the graphic boxes have been case solicitation since just about day 1). 

So unless folks messed up and ordered as singles vs case of 10, they should only see the previously price discrepancy corrected  

When I first read your reply, I thought I was going crazy... It's not as though I haven't misread plenty of Diamond listings in my time, but I specifically remembered having a 10-minute discussion with three of the employees about how many of these boxes to order. And there was a pretty heated discussion about whether to order more Saviors or more Factions. So I went and pulled the original Retailer Order Form to check.

It's possible you place your orders through Diamond's POS software and perhaps the item info had changed there by the time you were placing your order. But I was doing mine through their order entry system on the site, using the paper Retailer Form as I always do... and sure enough, those boxes were listed as singles in the Retailer Form.

This is our first time ordering Graphic Boxes from Image. The recent Marvel and DC ones have all been in 5-packs. But it's certainly possible the Image ones were in 10s. I wouldn't know since we hadn't ordered any before these.

I'm just glad to know I wasn't going crazy. I mean, I know I'm going crazy, but at least not about this lol.

Here's a real life example of how much fun it can be dealing with Diamond.

Every Monday evening it's FOC time. FOC stands for Final Order Cutoff, and represents an opportunity for shops to adjust their orders up or down. For new release stuff it's normally 23 days ahead of release date. For TPBs and HCs, it's usually 2-3 months out. For statues, it's usually 6-7 months out. So if you got caught off guard by how well Middleton's Batgirl covers were selling, you're not locked in on what you guessed you would need 7 weeks ago when you placed an initial order, you can place a new guess 3 weeks out.

Even though today is a holiday for most people, it's still FOC time. So I log in to fine tune my orders, and see that the total retail of what I am adjusting is a bit higher than normal. I figure maybe there's some statues or Omnibus or something, because nothing struck me as all that huge for September 26th. So I sort the FOC items by descending extended cost and...

Well that's interesting... I mean we are big fans of Walking Dead, but I think I would have remembered ordering over $3,000 retail worth of graphic comic boxes. Given that such things can be reordered later, it's pretty odd that I would have ordered so many in the first place. Maybe I was drunk the last Thursday in June? No, wait, one was June and two were July. I definitely don't remember being drunk both Initial Order dates... So I pull up one of the items and find...

Well now... that seems to explain it. See that pink bar of text? Three days ago, just before Labor Day weekend started, they apparently changed this item from a single box at $13.95 retail to a 10-pack of boxes at $139.50 retail. And they just ported the original orders over even though the quantities had multiplied. So instead of having orders on file for 10, 8, and 4 graphic boxes, we now have orders in place for 100, 80, and 40...

It's a good thing I didn't decide to go camping for the weekend and lock in my FOC numbers on Thursday afternoon before leaving town... I mean I am sure we could eventually sell 220 Walking Dead themed short boxes... but...

Now, do I honestly think Diamond would have held retailers to these quantities? I doubt it. I am sure there will be dozens of retailers who chose not to even check their FOC this week (there's no obligation to), who are going to be shocked when they see that their order of 3 became 30, or their order of 22 became 220 like ours. But there's a decent chance they wouldn't have realized what happened in time. And if you happen to be a new account and still on COD Certified terms (as all accounts are their first 6 months)? You'd be stuck coming up with extra cash just to get the rest of your shipment that week...

Is it an honest mistake, made by some employee right before they left for the holiday weekend, and they didn't realize the consequences? Probably... But I am awfully glad I checked the FOC this particular week.

20 hours ago, shortboxed said:

Can you explain how your loyalty program works? My LCS simply offers 10% off your pull, but no loyalty program. 

Square has changed the way their system works recently, and we've had to adjust a bit. But essentially it works like this.

Transactions are automated through Square whether cash or credit (or gift card). Every item has an inventory tracking category, like you saw in a couple of the recaps earlier in the thread. We assign a certain number of "stars" to each category. So someone buying a new release gets 1 star, someone buying a t-shirt gets 3 stars, someone buying a Marvel Gallery figure gets 5 stars, etc. We then give $15 off a future transaction when they hit 25 stars. This makes the stars worth 60 cents each on redemption.

We developed ALL of these thresholds ourselves. I probably spent 8-10 hours crunching numbers and talking to customers and fellow shopowners, as well as researching behavior online. A lot of thought went into whether the make the redemption award $10 or $15 or $20 or $25. And I won't get into all the specifics as to why $15 was chosen, but it wasn't a casual decision by any means.

The system tracks how many stars are earned in each transaction and it texts customers with their current totals. All the tracking is done by phone number, so if a household wants to "share" their stars they can just have them added to a particular phone number. Square will automatically capture customer info connected with any credit card, so even if they've never been in our store before, if they used that card for Square at their last bikini wax, it will pop up with the last 4 on our POS, allowing us to offer to text their receipt to the number ending in 1973 or whatever. It's not much different from using a loyalty card at your grocery store, you are getting better prices by allowing the merchant to capture data on you. We offer an extra star to any customer who gives their email address (which then authorizes us to email them with offers). They can obviously opt out later if they choose. We don't currently use email marketing at all. But we have well over a thousand customer email addresses captured at this point.

Back of envelope math would suggest that customers buying $2.99 comics are seeing a 20% discount, and those buying $3.99 comics are seeing a 15% discount. That's actually not the case. A customer buying exclusively $2.99 comics sees a discount of 17.45%, and a customer buying exclusively $3.99 comics sees a discount of 13.08%. Because it isn't $15 off a $74.75 purchase (25 comics at $2.99), it's $15 off a purchase of $89.75 (25 comics at $2.99 plus whatever the free $15 item was).

In the long run, we see blended loyalty discount rates around 4%. It obviously varies month to month because some customers will wait to redeem until there is something they really want. We have one customer who routinely waits until he has 100 stars to redeem for $60 off all at once. So some months report light when customers are accruing, and some heavy when there are extra redemptions, but in generally lands around 4% .And there are obviously some customers who come through town, visit once, accrue 15 stars and never come back. Those stars don't cost us anything if they never return. When you include discounts for active military, first responders, and educators, plus some scratch and dent discounts here and there, we tend to sit around an average discount rate of 5%, plus or minus half a percent.

Essentially we wanted a program that everyone could participate in. So that customers who only buy t-shirts still get something, customers who only buy Funkos still get something. We give a bigger "discount" on new release comics than on other merchandise, because those customers are the biggest "regulars" we have. Pretty much the only items in the store that give no stars are individual bags and boards and the various $1 reprints (Image Firsts, True Believers, etc). Our Funko regulars know that they effectively get 1 free Funko for every 12* they buy. The trade paperback collectors know that they get one $14.99 trade for free with every 6* they buy. Gallery collectors know that if they buy 5 gallery figures, they have $15 off something else. And those new release subscribers don't just get stars from their pull, they get them from any trades or t-shirts or statues or wall books or anything else as well. So they still get a strong effective discount on new books while also getting rewards for everything else.

Free is a powerful word. If it wasn't, you wouldn't see stores offering BOGO deals, they would just say things were 50% off. And customers are much happier getting $15 "free" than they would be getting a discount on each purchase along the way, even if those discounts totaled more money in the long run.

Recently Square announced some significant upcoming changes to their program, and for a week or two we were concerned we would have to scrap the whole system. We cautioned some of our regulars that changes might be coming that we couldn't control, and that we would honor past rewards but might have to discontinue the program. We had customer after customer respond by raving about how much they loved the program and to please never change it. Thankfully our voice was added to many others and Square ultimately backed off the proposed changes. But it was great hearing that the program made customers so happy. Because ultimately that's our goal. As long as we take care of our customers, profits will take care of themselves.

*(it's actually 12.5 and 6.25, but in people's minds it's 12 and 6)

------ Edited to add

From a back of house standpoint, the loyalty program pays for itself many times over. We get incredibly detailed customer tracking information. We can pull up individual customers and review all their transaction history. We get automatic info on lapsed customers. And we can change aspects of it whenever we need to. When we started carrying comic-themed doormats, it took 30 seconds to update the loyalty program with them added. No one has to carry punchcards. There's no stamps. It's all completely seamless. And it adds no time at all to the checkout process, which is huge when we have 7 or 8 customers waiting in line to pay. Of all the features the Square ecosystem has made available to us, the loyalty program is easily the one with the biggest impact.

2 hours ago, DeadOne said:

I was going to ask how you handle those customers who neglect their pulls and your policy on frequency of settlement, whether or not you required a credit card for back-up and how such a policy might be different from what you have used in the past. If you're getting to it though, I can wait.

I would also be interested in reading your thought process behind the POS system you've chosen. I've heard if you get the one offered from Diamond it comes with an almost equal start-up cost value in free merchandise. I'm assuming it was overall cost/efficiency in comparison to probable return if something other than the Diamond POS was chosen.

We do not require backup payment. The only subs who have to do anything like that are the ones who want to subscribe to titles from publishers like Boundless (what amounts to pseudo-porn). If it's a title we simply can't shelve, we require that they keep a running gift card that they top up periodically, which amounts to a deposit against those books. Because if we get stuck with them we will likely choose to destroy them rather than risk them popping up in a box on the tables. I don't judge those customers; my personal collection happens to have a bunch of early Cherry Poptart in it. But if a customer bails on picking up Weapon H it can go back on the shelf. We can't do that with the Boundless stuff.

Communication is key with the subs. It's easy enough to tell who is having a hard time financially versus who is just lazy. The body language is very different. We will encourage subs to pare down their list if we think they are in over their head. We don't shame them about the purchasing, we frame it as whether they are really enjoying title X, Y, and Z right now, and give them the ability to dump those titles without having to say they can't afford it. Most of the contact with absentee subs starts with us reaching out like "hey, you hadn't been in in a while. There's a new miniseries coming out for Deadpool and we wanted to check whether you'd like us to hold it for you so you don't miss out". It opens the dialogue with something other than "hey deadbeat are you gonna buy your stuff or not". Ultimately we strive to grow the hobby, and part of that is not having people pause their collecting on bad terms. If stuff is going on and they need to take a break, we don't want to build a shame spiral for them that might push them to not return to the hobby. Because whether they buy from us or someone else in the future, we don't want to be the reason they quit the hobby. Those "new miniseries" calls have given us multiple chances to bring someone back into the fold, or to give them closure that wasn't a negative experience if they need to tell us "yeah, my car needs a ton of repairs so I need to put my pull on hold for a while".

There are certainly some advantages to Diamond's POS system. My understanding is that it makes auto-reordering much easier, and shortens the time on monthly orders by making data collection fairly easy. But ultimately it wasn't the right fit for us. We have roughly 7,000 SKUs at this point and growing all the time. Many of those come from Diamond but many do not. We currently have accounts with around 15 different vendors for everything from apparel to Funko to Magic to supplies to doormats. We needed a system that would let us manage all those categories and vendors with the same level of insight. We happen to be in one of the states where Square is able to handle payroll, so we wind up using them for POS, Inventory, Payroll, Gift Cards, and our Loyalty program. It makes our switching costs astronomical (as the people from FirstData found out when they came by to pitch us Clover), and there are things about the ecosystem I don't like. But having all those bundled together cuts my personal time investment tremendously when it comes to the back of house functions. Square's inventory tracking and reporting is robust. There's definitely a learning curve but we get a great deal of data at our fingertips. And having the Loyalty program has meant that we do no discounting at all. None. I'm not saying we won't haggle a bit on wall books. And we do offer automatic discounts for active duty military, first responders, and educators. But we don't give discounts to pull customers on their new books. They are in the rewards program the same as anyone else. And customers rave about the loyalty program far more than they ever would about getting 10% off this or 15% off that.

Had we gone with Diamond's solution, we still would have had to find vendors for the other functions. Likely would have had to piecemeal them together. And the end result for our customers would not have been as good.

14 hours ago, thehumantorch said:

Could you tell us about your file customer base?  How quickly it's grown and how many file customers you hope to have within 1 year?

There's a lot more story to tell, and I plan to chart more of the changes over time. But I can give some of the early numbers.

After one month open, we had 31 pull customers. Between them they were getting 156 titles. Total number of copies was roughly 170, counting the folks who got both covers of DCs, multiple covers of IDW, etc. That doesn't double count the twice-monthly titles, so in the 156 number, a sub getting Batman would count as 1 (rather than the 2 actual issues each month).

After two months open, we had 54 pull customers. Between them they were getting 270 titles. Total copy count around 305. Later on we did a better job of tracking the multiple copy folks, so the numbers are a tiny bit fuzzy early.

And that's obviously just what was subscribed to, not total spending. There are some subs who literally only pick up the titles on their pulls. But most subscribe to 10 and actually buy 14, that sort of thing.

In the very beginning we would start a pull for someone for as few as one title. We did that in the beginning to be as "friendly" as possible with new customers. But the deadbeat rate for single-title subs winds up around 55%. And while it isn't that big of a deal to ultimately yank 3 or 4 consecutive issues of Darth Vader out of a box and put them back on the shelves or tables, the overhead associated with getting the pull set up isn't worth it. So later on we set a 3-title minimum. We miss out on a few people that might have started with 1 title and ultimately grown into 5 or 6, but it saves the grief. Making polite nagging phone calls to a 6-title deadbeat sub is easier than trying to call someone about the whopping 4 books in their box.

17 minutes ago, jools&jim said:

How does one measure such an exact percentage of shed body fat?  I guess I need to get out of the house more often. 

Here's another question: is there such a thing as a fully-Westernized comic book store in China, with new American comics/back issues/trades/tchotchkes/etc.?

It's not a perfect measurement to be sure, but there are several brands of bathroom scales that measure such things, and I own two of them. They both agreed I was roughly 33% when I left and 22% when I returned. It's quite possible both those numbers were wrong, but I would expect the delta was close (I did lose 5.5 inches off my waist).

China is a big country, so it's certainly possible. The younger citizens LOVE Americana. But the city I was in was their Detroit, a cold weather, industrial, automotive city of 3 million people. My neighborhood had no foreigners in it. The closest foreigners that weren't North Korean were around a kilometer away, and the nearest enclave of foreigners was a Germantown around 10km away. It was very common for me to meet people on the street in my neighborhood who would tell me they had never met a foreigner in their entire life. That's certainly not what you get in Shanghai or Beijing. I was a cross between supermodel and zoo animal for many people in my immediate neighborhood, but I "got to know" a few dozen of them, and many others got used to me walking around and it stopped being quite the spectacle for them.

Lots and lots and lots of stores in my city sold comic book character merchandise (the majority of it certainly unlicensed). But actual comics, no. The only ones I saw during my stay were the free ones given away at Age of Ultron.

14 minutes ago, chrisco37 said:

Good to see you back, TJ.  I do hope that, as you said, you’ve made good on your debts.  There were some good people that put a lot of faith in you way back when.  

That said, I wish you well on the new shop.  I’m enjoying the story (you were always really good at that).  

I’m fascinated by your China adventure and want to hear more about it.  Was it like Cane in “Kung Fu” or more like a John Woo movie?

The monetary debts were settled long ago. The karmic debts, it's hard to say if those are ever truly repaid. I think most of us wind up perpetually owing some folks in our life, and being perpetually owed by others. But that's life. You try to do right by as many people as you can, and hope the ones you didn't do right by will forgive. Roughly 5% of my Facebook friends are members of this board. They chose to remain my friend when I probably didn't deserve it, and they've seen my journey the last decade (including way too many pics from East Asia). All I can do is try to be the person they thought was worthy of their friendship.

The China stories will come, with some Thailand and Cambodia mixed in. Somewhere in my stuff that came back were some Chinese Marvel Avengers given away at Age of Ultron. None of them were 9.6+, but I figured I could probably get top census for once.

But here's a typical 6:22am scene in early September about 150 meters from my apartment while I was there.

Sigh... I can smell the youtiao from here... (pronounced yo-tee-oww and oh, so tasty...). I had fresh baozi every morning, but had to limit the youtiao to a couple times a week.

There's a reason I lost 45lbs and 11% body fat while I was there. When there's a daily farmer's market in walking distance that opens at 430am all year round, it's awfully difficult to eat unhealthy. And if you take another look at the pic above and try to find obese people? Yep. None to be found.

Whatever you do, never get in the middle of a group of women fighting over fresh corn. The guy on the left has the right idea. Stay a few paces back at all times.

I'll do more storytelling in a couple days. Monthly order was due last night, and I'm pretty wiped.

2 minutes ago, 1Cool said:

Any big surprises?  I was surprised to see new books only accounted for 15% of your first month - has that percentage increased with more pull box customers?  I've heard some groaning about the borderline collapse in the number of new books being sold at stores - what is your experience in terms of the the health of new comics.

And there has been a lot of discussion about young comic buyers.  What percentage of buyers do you see falling into the 10 - 16 year old range?

Lots of big surprises. Some we will get to later in the story, some we may not.

New Release Comics stabilized around 23% of revenue.
Trade Paperbacks and HCs sits around 17% of revenue.

Those TPB/HC customers are still reading comics, they are just reading them in a format that better suits their lifestyle. It would be easy to try to group customers in boxes but it doesn't work out that way. It's not as though people are all TPB, or all digital, or all single issues. We have some customers who read half their titles digitally, a quarter of them in traditional issues, and a quarter only in trade form. One of our larger pull subs, who is subscribed to 78 titles a month currently, gets all of his DCs as single issues, but also buys every new Walking Dead and Saga trade that comes out. We have a sub who gets all the new Star Trek titles as single issues, but she only buys her Harley Quinn in trades. We have several customers who test drive new titles only in digital form, but if they decide they like it, they convert to single issues.

Looking back at the last couple years, I think Marvel's publishing unit has floundered, and as Marvel goes, so goes the industry. Legacy was a cashgrab, and while it was the umbrella under which we saw a few great stories (like Donny Cates' stellar run on Thanos), it really wasn't the freshening that was needed. Marvel has wasted opportunity after opportunity to convert mainstream interest in the characters into revenue from the publishing arm. They make it nigh impossible for a casual fan to determine a "reading order". And the "stealth-miniseries" nonsense is very frustrating. The 2018 relaunches are a mixed bag. Cap and Black Panther and Venom are doing well. Amazing is still drafting off the Red Goblin fervor, with lots of customers cautiously buying it but few raving about it. The Iron Man and Thor titles are suffering. The one genuine highlight has been Immortal Hulk. I have no idea if the story can maintain the current momentum, and whether there's enough runway there (or whether CB "don't call me Akira" is enough of a fool to yank Ewing off of it), but so far it looks like the story that is going to vault Al Ewing into being THE top writer working at Marvel today.

Regarding young buyers, we see a decent mix of younger customers, but far more 14yo girls buying comics than 14yo boys. Part of what makes it challenging to tell is we have more than a handful of subs who specifically tell us "I need to add a copy of Lumberjanes for my daughter" or "I need to go to two copies of Star Wars Adventures from now on because the boys aren't willing to share them any more", and I don't have firm info on ages for those kids. We have probably 10-15 all ages titles each month that outsell lesser superhero titles like Champions. Sonic outsells titles like Spawn, Daredevil, and Old Man Logan. Star Wars Adventures outsells all three X-Men:Color titles. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic outsells Titans, Batman Beyond, Green Arrow, etc. Very few of the all-ages sales are to subscribers. But we routinely sell more Uncle Scrooge than Exiles, that sort of thing... I am VERY hopeful about the Marvel Superhero Adventures one-shots, because they put all-ages stories featuring movie characters on the shelf every month. I just wish there was an all-ages Deadpool I could sell... and I realize how ludicrous that sounds. But you wouldn't believe the number of parents who tell me their 8yo loved the two Deadpool movies and they want to get him some Deadpool comics (but then balk at the graphic violence)... sigh...

16 hours ago, musicmeta said:

Do you have any Valiant comics on your shelves for sale? I would think only a few key issues would sell in 9.4+ and mostly the rest would not but having a nice Comic book store with a lot of foot traffic might facilitate more demand for Valiants regardless of series??  Any customers trying to sell you Valiant books?  I always thought the pre-Unity books were really great reading and some if graded in 9.6/9.8 actually are worth a little bit of money. Even most of the post Unity books from the first series are great reading.  Is there a need for your store to list the 2nd/3rd series of Valiant books?  Just curious as to what the market is for your store when it comes to Valiant comics.  BTW,  Your story is most informative...Never even thought to consider a lot of what you talked about in considering "IF", "When" and "Where" to open up a brick and mortar comic book store. 

There's more demand for older Valiant than I would have expected. Not enough to justify keeping the "immediately after Unity" stuff on the tables. But there are a half dozen keys that move for $100+ now, and we have multiple customers that will happily snatch up random pre-Unity issues for $10-20 each. The hardest stuff to find is obviously the end of the run stuff from volume 1. And very little of that has come in. But we probably see books like Harbinger 1, X-0 4, Magnus 12, and the like coming in every 3-4 weeks.

The current titles do okay, not great. But we order heavier than we would otherwise just because Valiant makes more of an effort to reach out to us. I get a call from Valiant at least once every 6-8 weeks checking in and asking how things are going. They solicit feedback in which titles are easier or harder to sell and why. I'm usually on the phone with them for 10-15 minutes each time. None of the "big" publishers have ever called, even though we are in the top 10-20% of accounts depending on the publisher. We do get calls from small press creators every few weeks, and we will automatically order at least 5 copies of any title that a creator takes the time to contact us about, even if we think it will be a tough sell. But Valiant is the only "name" publisher to do so.

Once the movies start coming out, I expect we will be able to comfortably move all the volume 1 stuff on the tables. But I doubt the sales will warrant more than two long boxes of tables space.

19 hours ago, jas1vans said:

Great read.

Thank you for talking about the hard work that goes into opening your own business. I've read a couple other "starting my own comic shop" blogs and there is no mention of initial investment, no thought process of stock, location, etc. or any mention of long hours. "Have comics, sell comics, profit" didn't seem to line up with what (little) I know about how a business operates.

Good luck with the shop!

Long hours are (and should be) a natural part of the entrepreneurial process. But mine are overly long because of the location I chose. Kevin Smith's flagship Secret Stash location is only open 48 hours a week. On that kind of schedule, if you can get an employee to cover one full day for you, it wouldn't be difficult to maintain a personal schedule around 45-50 hours a week. But we are in an environment where we are obligated to be open 7 days a week, minimum 73 hours, frequently open later than our stated 9pm closing time on Fridays and Saturdays and pushing that 73 to 76 or 77.

I knew what I was signing up for. And I am no stranger to long hours. In a past life as a union employee I would routinely clock 2-3 weeks a year where I cracked 100 hours, and a couple dozen weeks where I broke 80. This is a much longer streak of them. But working 80 hours for yourself feels like less work than 60 for someone else.

I probably won't delve into the initial investment side too greatly. But I will say that my opening calculus was centered around determining what I felt net profits would be in year 5, applying a very conservative P/E to that number, and then backtracking to my initial monetary investment and determining what I was being "paid" during the 5 years in terms of equity. I am taking a modest salary from the shop, but I wouldn't have started down this path if I didn't think the return would be there.

You can absolutely make a good living as a comic shop owner. There are hundreds of people doing it around the country. But there are also hundreds of comic shop owners who have bought themselves a not-much-better-than-minimum-wage job. If they have modest needs, and find the non-financial rewards to be there, it can still be a very happy life. Time will tell whether mine continues its initial trends, but I am 100% certain I provided this business a better starting position than my two previous ones. Better location, better planning, a wiser and more humble owner, far better capitalization. It might still fail. But I'm enjoying the journey.

26 minutes ago, the blob said:

I just see midtown with aisles of dollar box books priced at $4-6 and wonder if anyone ever buys them and those are some high rent locations.

Their business model is obviously very different. I would imagine they get a big portion of their new release gross margin from incentive variants. Blowing out the qualifier books via mail order at 30-35% off to trigger the order volumes needed to cash in on the 1 in 100, 1 in 200, 1 in 500, etc.

In general, common back issues have sold for around what current new books do since the beginning of time. The same "garbage" back issues that were two dollars when new books were two dollars are now $3-4 because that's what new releases cost. They are cheaper at local and sub-regional cons. And they are cheaper at flea markets. But in a retail environment, they tend to stabilize at similar prices if presented well. And the trip is "worth it" for customers who spend an hour and check 20 items off their list at $3 each. That same trip might or might not be worth it if they have to spend three hours digging through unsorted boxes to ultimately find the same 20 items at a buck a piece. The tradeoff of two extra hours time to save $40 is one that many collectors are not willing to make.

And I wouldn't think of charging $3 for those books unprocessed and unsorted. But graded, sorted, in clean bags and boards, displayed at waist height in a well lit store that has soft instrumental music playing and no loud crowds? $3 seems a fair price for both sides.

I have no clue what I would have to charge in Manhattan... or in the 7x7... in order to make the business model work. Maybe $4-6 is the number. Thankfully I don't have to make that choice.