How long until dollar boxes are all $2 boxes? 1 1

[lordbyroncomics]

2 minutes ago, dupont2005 said:

I think I’m younger than many on here and I remember when they were quarter boxes

Yeah. I was a child in the 1980s' and I visited many regional comic book stores along the East Coast and there were quarter boxes, 50 cent boxes, and then 3 for a dollar boxes. I just wanted any comic I could read and, off the top of my head, I remember getting old Defenders from the late seventies from the 50 cent boxes and then stuff like an 80s' B&W Airman reprint, Ditko's Static, things I'd never have been exposed to otherwise. As this was when my Grandparents had a specific house, this would have been like 1987. I loved it. You'll still sometimes see 50 cent boxes at cons but it's more dollar boxes. No complaints. 

[dupont2005]

20 minutes ago, wisbyron said:

Yeah. I was a child in the 1980s' and I visited many regional comic book stores along the East Coast and there were quarter boxes, 50 cent boxes, and then 3 for a dollar boxes. I just wanted any comic I could read and, off the top of my head, I remember getting old Defenders from the late seventies from the 50 cent boxes and then stuff like an 80s' B&W Airman reprint, Ditko's Static, things I'd never have been exposed to otherwise. As this was when my Grandparents had a specific house, this would have been like 1987. I loved it. You'll still sometimes see 50 cent boxes at cons but it's more dollar boxes. No complaints. 

I was busy getting all the Silverwolf comics out of the bins, skipping the Archies saying I’d get them another time. Then someone came and cleared the bins of Archies and I was kicking myself because nobody was gonna buy those Silverwolf comics 😂

[lordbyroncomics]

Oh man!! Silverwolf Comics were prolific. Yeah I got a lot of 80s' Black & White boom books though I didn't know that was a thing at the time I was getting them

[the blob]

On 4/7/2021 at 11:36 AM, 1Cool said:

I'm not sure about the end of $1 boxes but the explosion of certain obscure comics (looking at you Westcoast Avengers) could spell the end of $20 bulk long boxes.  Why sell 10 long boxes of drek to someone for $200 when a handful of them could get that in a few years if a book explodes.  People could simply just run out of room and need to sell but I'd say the buying opportunity for $20 longboxes have to be down.

Running out of room is a reality. Renting storage is expensive. If you are out there buying collections you presumably wind up with a lot of drek. With that said, is any of it really drek anymore? Any X or related title, any Bat title, Spidey, Avengers...any mainstream marvel actually.... WW, Justice League...a decent number of Image titles... anyway, nowadays the list of titles that probably shouldn't be bulked out at 7 cents a book in a $20-30 long box is getting pretty long because, really, even if we are talking future dollar box books, does it make any economic sense to sell 225-250 or so dollar box books for $25? Yes, I get it, a certain % may not sell, but even if 50% do not sell, that's still a pretty big discount (particularly as the 50% that do not sell can then be bulked to the next sucke....I mean customer). Maybe if you have 1600 copies of Trencher or Ravage 2099.

 

[the blob]

On 4/7/2021 at 5:46 AM, HotKey said:

With the comic market exploding like it is, will it mean the end of the dollar box? I've already seen one store switch to a 2 dollar/3 for 5 box setup.

If I ran a shop I'd probably do the same and try to bulk out the worst of the drek. I wouldn't want to devote floor space to $1 books and have them compete with new issues or better back issues. Or I might sell grab bags, possibly at a better price than $1 a book. My old shop, I believe, had $5 grab bags with 10 comics in them. The book on the front was usually what would be a good find in the dollar box, the ones behind it, not so much. Part of it was he might have 50 copies of some book and he didn't want to just dump them in the dollar box. Oddly enough as he had a lot of tourists wandering in they bought a lot of them for cheap entertainment on their flight or whatever. Many shops don't have that, so the regulars aren't going to want grab bags like after 1 or 2 purchases. There are only so many hidden copies of Turok 1 anyone wants.

[the blob]

On 4/7/2021 at 12:30 PM, shadroch said:

You are mixing back issue sections with dreck boxes.  My first store did very well with back issues, they were well more than 50% of my sales. 

A three month old Marvel title would get bagged and a small premium put on it. Most books with 50 or 60 cent books were 75 cents as a back issue. I still had a 3/$1 section that was mostly beat up back issues in VG or less, or a sprinkling of recent books I had over-bought.

As prices climbed for new books, stores got better at ordering. Having 12 books left over at thirty cents a piece stung a bit but  when each mistake cost you a dollar or more you learn not to do this.

As stores ordered to sell out, back issue sections shrunk. 

Eventually, the shops junk section rose from 3/$1 to $1.  When it cost the store $3 to buy a new comic that it sells for $5.99, most shops would rather sell out than have leftovers. The better the store gets at ordering, the less fodder it ends up with.

Selling your new books for $5.99 but having a large selection of dollar books doesn't make sense to me. 

Your experience running a shop in the late 80s was a different world than now. Back issues were a much larger % of total sales then, at least based on every single thing I have read. Turning $3.99-$5.99 cover price books into even $3-5 back issues now (below cover, not above cover like you'd do) would result in 99% of them going unsold. Midtown comics has tens of thousands of back issues of recent comics priced like this (actually, they might be a little over cover price). I wonder if they sell more than .1% of them a month other than half price sales. Nobody is paying that kind of $ for back issues unless they're hot books, which might be 2% of the market now, up from .2%. 

Most of the dollar box sections I see do not consist mostly of recent overstock. They look like the books folks sold the shop in bulk for 5-10 cents each (or stuff that has been in the store a long time). My old shop (until a few years ago) was about 25% recent overstock in the cheap boxes, the rest drek people sold the shop or ancient stock from the basement.

My most recent old shop had been in business since like 1990, so I think he had a decent idea of how much to order, but he'd still get stuck with stuff, file customers wouldn't come back, books got dinged up and went unsold, etc. And sometimes he'd get stuck with stuff semi-intentionally, like if he ordered extra to get an expensive variant. So he'd blow those extras out best he could.

 

[Ken Aldred]

On 4/9/2021 at 12:50 AM, dupont2005 said:

I think I’m younger than many on here and I remember when they were quarter boxes

Lots of 25p boxes in the U.K. back in the late 80s / early 90s, often with some decent Bronze Age.

[the blob]

20 minutes ago, Ken Aldred said:

Lots of 25p boxes in the U.K. back in the late 80s / early 90s, often with some decent Bronze Age.

my old old shop had 25 cent bins until 1999 or so that had decent stuff in it. He got rid of it and replaced it with vintage records. He said he was making $10 a week from the space and it wasn't worth it as he was just selling the same comics on ebay for $1 each and $1 extra per comic s/h. He couldn't believe he was now making almost $2 a comic on his junk.

[sonicyouth1]

Long live quarter bins!! 
New Dimensions warehouse in Elwood city PA (Pittsburgh) still has the best dollar books in the land! 

where do yinz go for dollar box books? 

 

[shadroch]

In the 1980s, a lot of comic shops were run by fans who didn't understand how to run a business. I remember a meeting of about two dozen store owners where Jim Hanley mentioned how important cycle sheets were and maybe a third of the owners didn't know what a cycle sheet was, let alone how to use them.  Many didn't even have cash registers. I remember Mel Thompson pushing his POS system and over-promising it's potential to a room full of non computer users.

Carol Kalish had Marvel bring in a few business consultants and I remember being asked to draw a diagram of my shop, showing where everything was and to take pictures.  The consultants pointed out that X amount of revenue came from each area of my store but the lesson I learned was having too many cheap back issues resulted in lost revenue, not extra.  That discounting back issues resulted in selling more cheap books at the expense of selling higher priced books. I'd been setting up at to local shows, blowing out my leftover stuff at half off. I was raising cash but not making any money as everything was at cost. I looked at it as a chance to make up some of my losses but the consultant convinced me to go in another direction. Instead of using the shows to recoup money on my mistakes, he said to bring nothing but high end stuff and use the conventions to highlight what made my store different, not just to blow out cheap books.  I was pessimistic, as I'd grown used to the shows producing a certain amount of cash but I found having the higher end merchandise lead to more conversations and suddenly people who I saw every month at the shows but never in my shop became customers. Displaying my two EC boxed sets ended up bringing in a pair of parents who wanted to order several for their sons graduations. These were hundred dollar sales at a time when my average sale on non-new book days was about $3. Instead of having six or seven boxes of cheap books( I think they were 3/$1 but they may have been 4, I replaced them with two spinners of D&D stuff that brought in new customers and one weekend a month I would throw up a table with the boxes of cheap books. 

To my surprise, I'd sell more cheap books in one weekend than I previously had in a month and the D&D stuff sold really well for about six months before it started to taper off.