Hey, Folks!
It looks like more interesting weather in our near future. Yes, it looks like there is another Snowmageddon possibly on the horizon! I am, of course, monitoring the situation, but it certainly doesn’t sound like anything that is going to require a store shutdown for Friday. Now that I am essentially living in the country and on the farm, I’m a little more easy going when it comes to less than three feet of snow…lol. I mean, the couple of days this season when I have had to deal with snow I’ve had more anxiety with giant country trucks riding by booty on icy roads than I actually had with the icy roads. So unless there is a HUGE amount of snow then expect us to be open the whole day tomorrow.
I have been trying to keep my mouth shut about behind the scenes problems I’ve been dealing with as a comic retailer lately. I mean there are some customers I talk to about this stuff, but mostly because they are small business owners themselves and therefore I figure they can understand some of my frustrations. I thought for a while I was bitching and moaning about business related problems a little too much in the store and that is not the comic buying experience anyone was clamoring for when they shop at Monarch Comics. I certainly didn’t want to completely turn into one of the grouchy old men who do nothing but complain about their business and inadvertently suck all of the joy out of what they are selling. There have been some major changes behind the scenes in the last several months and I wanted to explain to all of you what they are and how they have been affecting the running of the store.
Now that I have a couple of years of experience dealing with three different distributors for our comic books as well as switching all of our comic supply business to one rather than multiple distributors I think that I can say that I’ve got the hang of it. I’ve had to update my record keeping and spread sheet game to keep track of it all and things are working out better than they were several months. Part of the challenge for me has been dealing with switching a lot of our small press orders from Diamond to either Lunar or Penguin. There is a very good reason involved with this decision and it mostly centers around the extremely expensive shipping charges that we get from Diamond. Our shipping charges for our Diamond invoices are between 11%-33% of our weekly invoices. In comparison, Lunar is usually 2-3% of our total invoice and Penguin is, well, 0% of our invoices because they don’t charge shipping. This huge amount of shipping charges are not broken down by the box and there is no transparency in what we are actually being charged for from week to week. I have had to stop ordering comic supplies or merchandise material from Diamond because there are weeks that I can’t make enough money from them to even cover my costs. So, as more and more small press companies either defect from Diamond or become available from other distributors, I have been switching all of my orders from Diamond. The discounts for the material itself tend to be the better at the other companies as well, sometimes by as much as 10%.
The actual reality of ordering and tracking orders and sales from three distributors is where things get a little tricky. I think I have gotten it down oat, but I still tend to accidentally miss a title or two every week or else put something on the subscription form that is actually not available yet. There is also a weird schism going on where a titles might be available from one distributor one week, but not available from another distributor until a week later. I’m getting better at spotting these issues, but please forgive me if you order something and turns out it won’t be out for another week or two…lol.
Also, I want to reiterate that if you order something on the subscription form that is not something that we carry or if we have already sold out of all the copies we initially ordered and have to order more then tour order may take a couple of days more to get here. Every week I am here on Sunday and my main job is to do our weekly reorder and any sub form orders that are received after I put in that weekly reorder (usually around 4pm on Sunday) won’t be processed in time. These special orders will take at least a week to fill so it really behooves you to get those sub form orders in before the Sunday afternoon cut off. Now don’t get me wrong…there’s no problem with putting in an order on Mondays or Tuesdays, but we can’t guarantee we’ll see any special orders until the following week. Also, since we are now dealing with three different distributors there is no was to predict anymore when we will see any of our reorders. In the days before The Apocalypse, when we had only Diamond to deal with, I could be reasonably sure that when I ordered something it would be here with 2-3 business days. Such is not the case anymore in these interesting times. I’m getting better with Lunar reorders since they instituted a fairly affordable direct ship reorder system, but Diamond has gotten a bit iffy on shipping times and Penguin is the roll of the dice on how quickly you are going to receive your reorders from them. Thankfully, for initial orders all three distributors have upped their game as you can tell by the very early times I have been filming Monarch Comics Afternoon Delight since early December.
I have also cut back on the amount of Diamond Previews that I have in the store. This is partially because of the shipping charge issues I mentioned above, but also has to do with the cover price being raised from $3.99 to $4.99. I am basically trying to make sure that I have enough catalogs for folks that interested in seeing what is being published by small press companies as opposed to the D.C. and Marvel catalogs. It’s also worth noting that I get the D.C. and Marvel catalog FOR FREE and the Diamond catalogs I have to pay $3 each. Strangely enough, I do believe that I have covered pretty much everyone pretty well, but if you would like a copy and missed it them please let Brian or I know and we will do our best to set you up with a copy.
Okily dokily…back to work for me. I always handle Lunar and Penguin FOC orders on Thursday afternoon and it usually takes at least 5 hours to get through them. After that I typically process as many sub form orders as possible so Brian doesn’t have as many to deal with over the weekend. I should probably mention that Brian is still working diligently at processing all of the collections that we have picked up over the last two months. There will be more stuff going into the Dollar Boxes as well as the showcase and the back issue boxes, so make sure you bring in your checklists when you are shopping in the store!
Have a great week and please drive carefully when the weather turns crappy!
Eddie