Crikey! I Forgot About This

I now have a website and a myspace page

I guess it is time to get back to my blog.

A brief history of me:

I grew up in Chicago and my first memory of comics was when friends of the family moved out of town and the 2 teen age sons left me what seemed to be a refrigerator box full of comics. Mostly Archies, Richie Rich and Caspers, but just enough Superman, Batman and Spider-Man to set the hook in permanently. Later in high school I found out that there were stores where I could get every comics book out there. They also had older comics and I could fill in the gaps and find out what happened. That’s when I started collecting comics and I have never stopped. After graduating from Penn State, I bounced around from many different jobs. I eventually hit a fork in the road in 1999 and decided that I would either go to law school or open a comic book store. Sadly, I chose law school. After graduating and working as an attorney for 5 years, I realized that that was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I started researching what was actually involved in the day-to-day operations of a store by searching the internet and finally opened my store September 7, 2006.

OK, I know that was fascinating. I guess the whole point of this blog for me is to try to pass along some insight that I have learned in opening a store. While it has been fun there have been a lot of mistakes and successes that I figured I would pass along.

If you really want to do this, get some retail management experience first. Luckily for me, when I wandering aimlessly through employment options after college, I took a temporary job a Christmas working at a Radio Shack to get some extra money. While never being a tech geek, it wasn't a bad job. I quickly moved up to management and ran a couple stores. Luckily, both those stores were small and I ran them mostly by myself. Good training for now. I also learned how to deal with customers, stocking levels, ordering and general business stuff that I still draw on today.

Comic Book Store Employees

The biggest problem I see for comic book store employees (and owners to be honest) is that comic books are such an odd product. To be a good, helpful employee, you need to have a pretty good knowledge of what is going on in the current storylines, know what is coming up (or as much as the publishers will let us in on) and know what happened in the past. Nothing is more impressive (or outright scary) for someone o come in and say I'm looking for the book where such and such happened and being able to grab the back issue or the trade where that happened. Now, the internet has made this a much easier task.

Editorial note: This is one reason that Borders will never be able to replace comic book stores and I hope the publishers realize this. I am not getting into the whole Bookscan debate, but most good comic books stores should be able to destroy a mass market book store on knowledge and selection and keep all of the trades selling, not just the most popular.

But to also be a good employee, a person needs to be personable, interested in what the customer wants, and be interested in what is best for the store. Most comic book readers think that working in a comic book store would be something they would enjoy and be a lot of fun. But their opinion is based on being around a lot of comics and talking comics all day. Which is great. That is a really fun part of the job. Sadly, a lot of the job is cleaning, straightening, merchandising, counting, ringing up sales and other retail type things. And this is where the "fans" fall down. I recently had a customer stop at another store and the cashier argued with him that the book he was buying was not as good as another book. I kind of blinked, not wanting to believe it was true. I make tons of recommendations all day long. "Hey, if you like that, you may like this." Or "I see you like that writer. Did you know he just came out with this book?" I have never, and will never, denigrate a persons purchase. Well, that's not true. I will good heartedly mock some purchases from the quarter box, but only with customers that know my level of sarcasm. "Ravage 2099? Really?"

I used to have to drive to get my Wednesday books and sometimes the books would be late, so I would be able to watch the employees interact with customers. I was pretty shocked at the level of disdain. The attitude was "Don't you know that this is when the new books come out and I want to read all of the new books, not deal with some nitwit like you." New books weren't available until the afternoon. One guy would take them out of the box and the two other guys would grab a title he wanted to read and actually stand there reading it! Phones were answered with a very "Why are you bothering me" tone. My personal favorite was when a part timer brought in a vacuum from his other job because they didn't have a vacuum to vacuum the carpet and someone decided it needed it.

OK. Enough venting on other store's employees. The point I am trying to make is that the desire to work in a comic book store has to be tempered with an actual idea of what needs to go on in a retail store. Spend some time working for a large corporation. While they may lack the personal touch of a small neighborhood store, they know what works. Read the employee manuals. See what they do to train. Understand merchandising, suggestive selling and even just basic bookkeeping.

Store Environment

I'm not saying you need to be a marketing genius, but you have to think about what makes people buy. How are you going to let people know you exist? What are you going to do to make sure they come back? Simply putting an open sign in the window isn't enough. And even worse is scaring them off once they bothered to come. There is a store nearby that I went to once. It is 15 minutes away, but I drove an hour to get my new books. It was a gaming store with about 40 titles of newish comics and 6 short boxes of 50 cent books. There were people playing some sort of game on tables in the store and they all stopped and watched me look around the store. I felt like I was intruding in their club. The counter was on a riser and the cashier was seated behind the counter with his girlfriend standing behind him, hand on his shoulder. I felt like I was approaching the King. Guess what? I have never been back. One of the owners stopped by right after I opened and said that they were getting much more into comics. I mentioned my experience (without the King comment) and said I didn't think I'd be treading on their feet since they didn't seem too serious about comics. He assured me I was wrong, but from the customers I have gained, I don't think this is so.

When you plan out your store, think about customer flow. How are they going to walk around the store? Make sure your aisles are wide enough for people to get past one another. Make sure customers are not having to step over merchandise. Make things logical. I never was able to figure out the shelving of another local store. He bags and boards all of his new books and put them on the shelves that way (but he doesn't sell bags and boards - never figured that one out). That is a great service for the customers and makes sure the books don't slump on the shelves. It also let him hide damaged books. Going through a box, I recently found the book that kept me from returning to his store. A copy of Bite Club #3 with a tear in the front and rear covers. Being in the bag disguised the damage. Now, to be fair, I never returned the book to him to have it replaced, but it angered me enough not to return. Do I sell damaged books? Probably. I can't look at every book when it comes in to make sure it is OK. But more often than not a customer has brought a damaged book to my attention. And I have never knowingly put damaged merchandise on the shelf for sale. It's not worth the damage to my reputation. I want every person to want to come back to my store.

That's all for today.