Hey, Folks!
Welcome to a rather late edition of the EDitorial! I swear that every time I think I’ve got my new, post-Steve schedule down pat something comes up and throws everything into disarray! I mean, I figured out early on that without Steve here to plant in front of the register to take y’alls money that I am no longer free on Wednesdays to sit at my desk and attend to the business of running the store. Not really a problem really, but it means that I get to take some work home with me to do at the dining room table. The problem that has now cropped up is that I keep forgetting to do little work tidbits while I am at home and then I show up at work on Thursday morning and realize that there is a ton of stuff that has to be sorted through before I can get to the Thursday business of writing/posting the EDitorial and the Subscription List.
Let’s use today as an example. My original plan was to sort of glide into the store, quickly write up an EDitorial, post everything, and then get some restocking attended to. Well, I sat at my desk and immediately remembered three things that needed to be done before I could even begin babbling away, including logging in all the preorder customers on the subscription form before I go live with it. I started dutifully banging away at the job and before I know it UPS shows up with some reorder boxes that were missing in action yesterday. I sighed and added it to the pile of boxes containing NEXT week’s D.C. Comics that I got in yesterday and still have to be unpacked and sorted. And let’s not forget the mess the back room is in or the amount of restocking I have to attend to because of the sale or the fact that my Diamond initial orders are due soon and I haven’t even begun to figure out. Also, I have the new poster rack to attend to and the stock I ordered in to fill it.
Ooooo…that’s something I wanted to mention! The new poster rack! Steve and I have had alternate views on carrying posters for years. I’ve always to expand our stock of posters, but Steve was not happy with their sell through rates. It was a valid point so I never pushed back too hard on it, but one of the things I wanted to do when I took over the ship was to really try stocking up on merchandise items like posters. In fact, for the last year and a half I’ve been trying to find a winged poster rack for sale on the internet and I wasn’t having nay luck at all with it. I mean, I used to love going into Spencer’s Gifts as a kid and flipping through the posters. Well, I had pretty much given up the cause, but then I got an interesting call the other day. A gentleman who owns a local business called and asked for Steve. I informed him that Steve was retired and asked if there was anything I could do to help. Turns out he was the one who could help me. He informed me that he had an old winged poster rack that was taking up space in his warehouse and asked if we would be interested in purchasing it. I was, of course, thrilled and immediately agreed to buy it if he could deliver it to the store. Well, a deal was made and I am now the proud pappa of a winger poster rack! To make it even better, Marvel released a poster sale the next day and I have ordered a bunch of posters to fill it up! It’s currently resting in the back room and hopefully I will have the time to get it cleaned up, out on the floor, and filled with new posters by the end of the week. I guess it goes without saying that I’m gonna have a poster sale!
Speaking of sales, the current Post-Holiday Sale is succeeding beyond my wildest dreams, although you may notice a lot of holes appearing in the hard cover/trade paperback displays. There’s a very good reason for this…actually TWO very good reasons for this happening. The first reason is that there are many stock items that are currently between printings with all of the publishers, both big and small. Apparently, when all of the printing presses shut down last Spring it was not simply a matter of switching them back on to get them printing at full capacity. Also, there was quite a backlog of print orders that piled up because all of us were very busy buying books, magazines, and comic books. So there are a lot of items that are selling now that I’m waiting for my distributors to get back in stock so that I can restock as well. Also, as I’m sure you are aware, D.C. Comics have finally settled on a US distributor for their products, Lunar Distribution. Unfortunately, there is apparently still a ton of D.C. backlist product that is still parked at Diamond and UCS. Until Lunar receives this stock from Diamond and UCS there are many D.C. backlist items that are currently unavailable to order from Lunar.
Of course, I could still open an account with Penguin/Random House, the distributor of D.C. backlist material that services the book stores, but that is a move I am hesitant to make for purely business reasons. On paper it sounds like a good idea. Their discount for D.C. books isn’t as good as the Lunar deal, but the shipping is free and I’m pretty sure that would bring them close to equal cost-wise. Unfortunately, there is another bit I have to keep in mind. You see, Diamond Comics discount tables are structured in such a way as to consider all of the product a retailer orders from them when calculating the discount. Monarch gets one of the highest discount percentages not because of the amount of new product ordered month to month, but because of the amount of backlist items we carry (and reorder). Now so far Lunar (and UCS before them) have honored whatever discounts stores had before D.C. left Diamond, but they could, at any time, institute a new system for calculating the discount a retailer gets for D.C. product. I’ve been holding off getting a Random House account for D.C. backlist material until I find out if doing so might harm the discount I currently get from Lunar. It’s kind of a waiting game and I’m hoping to find out what happens here shortly. I’ll keep you informed.
I’m going to be carrying a lot more merchandise type stuff in the next few months. I mean, I’ve already stepped the t-shirt inventory (witness the new t-shirts based on the Amazing Spider-Man #55 cover and Immortal Hulk #41) and I mentioned the poster rack above. I also got in some rather cool Mandalorain/Grogu welcome mats this week as well as some new Justice League keychain designs. Hopefully, I will be expanding on these new merchandise items in the next couple of months.
Oh, well, there’s probably more for me to babble on about today, but, geez, it’s almost three o’clock and the subscription form hasn’t been posted yet! Let me take one more quick moment to thank all of you who have helped to make my first month as owner of the store an incredibly successful one. Let’s hope I can continue to make good on my service as well as all of the new changes that are being planned even as we speak.
Have a great weekend!
Eddie