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Opening a new brick and mortar shop
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196 posts in this topic

28 minutes ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

How did you obtain 110 long boxes? 

Sent an old friend money to buy out a few struggling dealers at shows in his area. And purchased the remnants of a large original-owner collection from an even older friend. Then flew to where those books were, rented a truck and drove them back.

Edited by lighthouse
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I love the series so far, I hope you keep going. 

Statues offer a great deal of visual appeal to a store, and help draw people in.  Even if they don't sell right away, they're worth having.

Selling Magic cards by the box or by the pack is a good idea (no gaming space encourages them to buy and leave), and 20 different sets sounds like a nice display.  However, seeing "Magic singles" on your list turns my stomach.  Magic players have no loyalty to anyone:  they'll happily tell every other Magic player not to shop at your store if you don't have all the hot stock at a discounted price, but will still come in to check if you've underpriced something.  They also take a long time to serve, looking through boxes or binders for the same cards that everyone else has already asked for.  They're litterbugs, leaving empty wrappers everywhere.  Worse, they'll flip open their binders on top of your back issue bins or other selling spaces, and sell their own stuff to others in your store, rather than buying/selling through you.  I'd rather have raccoons.

Edited by FineCollector
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2 minutes ago, FineCollector said:

I love the series so far, I hope you keep going. 

Statues offer a great deal of visual appeal to a store, and help draw people in.  Even if they don't sell right away, they're worth having.

Selling Magic cards by the box or by the pack is a good idea (no gaming space encourages them to buy and leave), and 20 different sets sounds like a nice display.  However, seeing "Magic singles" on your list turns my stomach.  Magic players have no loyalty to anyone:  they'll happily tell every other Magic player not to shop at your store if you don't have all the hot stock at a discounted price, but will still come in to check if you've underpriced something.  They also take a long time to serve, looking through boxes or binders for the same cards that everyone else has already asked for.  They're litterbugs, leaving empty wrappers everywhere.  Worse, they'll flip open their binders on top of your back issue bins or other selling spaces, and sell their own stuff to others in your store, rather than buying/selling through you.  I'd rather have raccoons.

Thanks for the kind words, both yours and the others who have chimed in so far.

The "Magic Singles" category didn't last long.

We cracked 3 boxes each of the 4 most recent sets, and filled binders with every common and uncommon and rare individually priced. All our prices were roughly 10-15% below a blend of SCG and TCGP pricing, so they were all as competitive as possible with the current market. It didn't matter. We had a few "customers" who would spend 15 minutes going through binders to ultimately buy one uncommon for 50 cents. And despite very fair pricing on older stuff I pulled out of my long dormant collection from my days playing in PT Quals back in 1995-96, all I got were complaints. It didn't matter that we were charging 15% below market value on Volcanic Islands or Force of Wills, it was just complaints...

Magic Singles made it to about the end of the second month, when the next set of Magic came out. And I ran the numbers on whether we were getting a decent return. We weren't, so out they went. A few customers asked if we had discounted them and blown them out, and they were told we just weren't carrying them at this time.

It's a shame, because I have fond memories of playing Magic in my mid-20s. And selling my original collection (2 power sets and roughly 400 dual lands) is what funded my first comic shop two decades ago. And we did have a few very nice customers who I felt bad when I told them we wouldn't be carrying singles any more.

The glass showcase that used to house the better singles now has sealed booster boxes in it. Life goes on.

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Another great read - keep them coming.  I've been around long enough to remember seeing your name being mentioned and thinking "oh - no what has he done now" so it's great to see you on the straight and narrow.

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I notice you sold 1,208 back issues for about $4 each and even your Silver-Age books averaged out to less then $10 a book.  Where they all filler books in the collections you bought with no keys or did you price your keys aggressively and very few sold.

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My question about the back issues is, can that be sustained? Is there a small pool of back issue buyers who picked things over and have diminishing value as long-term buyers? Maybe not if you keep back issues stocked? I thought it was interesting where most of the back issues fell in the 2000s.

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5 hours ago, 1Cool said:

I notice you sold 1,208 back issues for about $4 each and even your Silver-Age books averaged out to less then $10 a book.  Where they all filler books in the collections you bought with no keys or did you price your keys aggressively and very few sold.

Mostly filler books, and there were certainly some books that were underpriced the first month. We expected to have more time to get books priced during open hours the first couple months (since we obviously weren't expecting the volume of customers we had). There was enough time before opening to get 110 long boxes of books in fresh bags and boards, and to get them sorted, but there wasn't enough time to get them all priced. So for many titles from the 90s especially, it wound up being a shotgun approach of "all the non-keys of this title are $3, all the non-keys of that title are $4, etc".

On the day we opened, we had virtually no Silver on display. There were some keys on the wall opening day, including a low grade copy of BB28 that was technically my own (rather than the store's) just there to seed the wall. But during that first month we bought nearly 400 Silver Age books from customers, so it took a little time to get those priced. We didn't have excess Mylars in stock on opening day, and Gerber's turnaround time was 4 weeks for the size order we placed. So until Mylites2 and Fullbacks arrived, the Silver Age sat dormant. (The Silver Age actually averaged over $15 per book the first month, 5 books totaling $77, but not a big deal :) )

The back issue breakdowns the first month are less than ideal. Only 157 of them were properly in their category, the other 1753 wound up in catchall "Miscellaneous" categories. Part of this was due to minimal training. It doesn't take staff that long to instantly recognize that a 60c book is 80s, or that New52 is 2000s (we don't break 2000s and 2010s apart yet) or that Legionnaires is a 90s book. But we expected more time for shadow training that simply didn't happen. And someone in their first 30 hours of running a Square register takes far more time to navigate item searches than someone in their 300th hour. Rather than have customers wait excessively for us to do our tracking, we defaulted to ringing them up as miscellaneous if they weren't already bar coded.

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Two days later, still waiting for answer to an easy question which is central to evaluating the value of your advice.

On 8/27/2018 at 3:45 PM, sfcityduck said:

Where and what is the name of your store?

 

On 8/28/2018 at 11:27 AM, sfcityduck said:

My desire to know has nothing to do with internet or mail order business.  Instead, while I enjoy your writing style, it is hard for me to evaluate the value of your advice and experience without knowing where and what the name of your store is. Your location says SF (where I am), but up thread you professed to have no real connection to the Bay Area.  So why not just come clean with those two details?  

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5 hours ago, DavidTheDavid said:

My question about the back issues is, can that be sustained? Is there a small pool of back issue buyers who picked things over and have diminishing value as long-term buyers? Maybe not if you keep back issues stocked? I thought it was interesting where most of the back issues fell in the 2000s.

As I eluded to in the reply to 1Cool, you can't take away too much from the decade breakdowns that first month. We have accurate tracking that 1910 back issues sold, but we had proper category tracking on less than 10% of them. Best guess is that it was roughly 60% 2000-current, 30% 90s, 10% 80s, with a negligible amount of Bronze and Silver.

Later on, the table mix changed as we added more Silver and Bronze and 80s stock to the tables.

Here are the breakdowns so far (last month wasn't our first month open):

294093490_ScreenShot2018-08-29at11_50_31AM.png.3a93eda01b5519b724d47710f9fda9fb.png

Dark Horse is largely driven by cheap sales of old Star Wars, plus moderate sales of Hellboy related titles. The unit volume is decent but very little of it sells for more than $3.

Image back issues are light, mostly because no one sells their collections of good Image titles. With the notable exceptions of Spawn and Walking Dead, Image is largely a garbage-filled wasteland from 1992-2007. Thankfully the money Walking Dead brought in has transformed the publisher, and virtually any customer looking for ""stuff like Vertigo was back in the day" can now find amazing Image stuff on the shelves. But that amazing stuff isn't leaving collections. We do got collections of Saga and the like walking in occasionally, but it's very occasionally. Most every collection inquiry that starts with "I have a bunch of Image stuff" ends with everything they brought in that isn't Spawn going straight into dollar boxes in storage. Eventually the folks collecting Saga and Monstress and Ice Cream Man and Regression and the like will be selling their collections, but not yet.

As far as sustainability, that first month was obviously high. Lots of folks checking off gaps in their collections that they planned to fill eventually but didn't want to deal with mail order to do so. But even as other categories have grown, back issue sales have been consistently above 15% of revenue on an ongoing basis. And that always ignores wall books. Just the stuff on tables.

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12 minutes ago, sfcityduck said:

Two days later, still waiting for answer to an easy question which is central to evaluating the value of your advice.

 

I have a story to tell. I am telling it in my own way. I will get there eventually.

The information I am providing here is not information you could gain by walking into the store if you knew where it was. This is a tale from behind the scenes. And it's providing a level of detail that is essentially never available publicly from any small business owner. A level of detail that would frankly benefit my competitors. I am more than aware of the risks in being this open about my business's story, and I have chosen to tell the story in a way I feel minimizes those risks. No small business in a competitive environment willingly gives up sensitive information to their competition. I'm doing so here as a way to give back to a community I love, but I am making choices about how to tell the story, because there are business planning choices on my near horizon.

All the store's name and location would tell you is that yes, there is a store. There are a dozen board members here who know the store's name and location, some of those have known since before the journey began. If you genuinely question whether I currently own a comic shop, after reading everything I have posted here? Then somehow I doubt that telling you Greggy believes I own a shop will matter. But either way, I wish you the best. I've been a season ticket holder at Autzen for decades. If you plan to visit Eugene this season, let me know, and I'll toss you a pair of tickets. I have pairs on both the 25 and 35, both on the sunny side, Sections 13 and 12 respectively. Stanford and UW are both spoken for, but the ASU, UCLA, PSU, and San Jose State are still around. I used to go to 4 games a year and sell the rest on Stubhub, but I won't be going to any this season. Just too busy. I hope Wilner is right, he made a bold call putting them in 9th in his preseason top 25 as a sleeper.

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1 minute ago, lighthouse said:

I have a story to tell. I am telling it in my own way. I will get there eventually.

The information I am providing here is not information you could gain by walking into the store if you knew where it was. This is a tale from behind the scenes. And it's providing a level of detail that is essentially never available publicly from any small business owner. A level of detail that would frankly benefit my competitors. I am more than aware of the risks in being this open about my business's story, and I have chosen to tell the story in a way I feel minimizes those risks. No small business in a competitive environment willingly gives up sensitive information to their competition. I'm doing so here as a way to give back to a community I love, but I am making choices about how to tell the story, because there are business planning choices on my near horizon.

All the store's name and location would tell you is that yes, there is a store. There are a dozen board members here who know the store's name and location, some of those have known since before the journey began. If you genuinely question whether I currently own a comic shop, after reading everything I have posted here? Then somehow I doubt that telling you Greggy believes I own a shop will matter. But either way, I wish you the best. I've been a season ticket holder at Autzen for decades. If you plan to visit Eugene this season, let me know, and I'll toss you a pair of tickets. I have pairs on both the 25 and 35, both on the sunny side, Sections 13 and 12 respectively. Stanford and UW are both spoken for, but the ASU, UCLA, PSU, and San Jose State are still around. I used to go to 4 games a year and sell the rest on Stubhub, but I won't be going to any this season. Just too busy. I hope Wilner is right, he made a bold call putting them in 9th in his preseason top 25 as a sleeper.

PM sent, because I'm not doubting your story, I'm seeking what I view as helpful information.  But, feel free to tell your story the way you want.  Next time, respond to the earlier posts, and I won't follow up.

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29 minutes ago, lighthouse said:

I have a story to tell. I am telling it in my own way. I will get there eventually.

:golfclap: You just went up a bunch of notches, with me. (thumbsu Not that it matters to anybody but me.........

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