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No New Comics
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69 posts in this topic

59 minutes ago, lighthouse said:

As a shop owner I am VERY pleased with Diamond's move, even though their hand was forced by the governors in the states where they have warehouses.

It's unlikely any comic shops were going to be open to the public until late-May or early-June after this week. When the California governor enacted stay-at-home he indicated he didn't think it would be "many months" but that the "next 8 weeks" were critical. Anyone who think these lockdowns will last less than 8 weeks is naive.

Given that scenario, in a choice between burying 3,000 LCSs with invoices while they can't sell to customers or just suspending weekly shipping altogether through the lockdowns, this is the better choice.

What they need to do now as a followup is cancel pending solicitations, skip publishing Previews for two months, and just pretend these lockdown weeks never happened. If June 3rd is the date when shops nationwide are able to reopen, then ship the "April 1st" books to arrive June 3rd. Ship the April 8th books to arrive June 10th. And so on. And make the next round of new solicitations be for August shipping product. If a statue was previously solicited for June, you could probably ship it in June, it doesn't need to be pushed to August. But the printed material should just skip forward as many weeks as needed and then restart.

Because OTHERWISE you are going to tell a decent-sized $2500/wk customer that "here you go, here's 9 weeks of books all at once, you owe us $22,500". And that shop is going out of business. Because the shop's own customers will just then be headed back to work themselves. They won't have 9 weeks of pull money set aside waiting for opening day.

8 or 9 weeks of no new comics won't kill the industry. People used to sit through a summer of reruns and they still started watching tv again when fall rolled around. Sports fans deal with having an offseason. 8 or 9 weeks off won't have that big an impact on the typical comic buyer. But burying 3,000 shops with a 9x normal invoice? Yeah, that would. And frankly, knowing this is the situation with Diamond makes the rest of my planning as a shop owner much easier to deal with. I'm not getting any breaks on my store rent. My part-time staff is all being fully paid while they stay at home. Knowing that I only have to dip into savings / credit lines / stashed wall book inventory to cover rent and utilities and payroll (without having to also plan for inventory expenses) makes this all a lot easier.

People are spending five figures a month on modern comics? 

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3 minutes ago, dupont2005 said:

People are spending five figures a month on modern comics? 

In my experience, just about every major retailer/dealer has several "whales" that help keep the lights on. Either the shop has tons of smaller accounts or a combination. Just look at your jobs accounts-it's likely to be similar.

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Just now, KolmarAvenue said:

In my experience, just about every major retailer/dealer has several "whales" that help keep the lights on. Either the shop has tons of smaller accounts or a combination. Just look at your jobs accounts-it's likely to be similar.

I’m just surprised it’s that much. My LCS had sone $1000-$1200 monthly pulls and I thought that would be among the biggest modern readers

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30 minutes ago, kaculler said:

I believe that this refers to Diamond customers and their invoices, not individual people.

Yes it does. A decent-sized single location Diamond account with a borderline 54-55% discount sees typical weekly Diamond invoices of $2500 (with occasional invoices higher from event books or statues and whatnot). 

And that sized shop likely doesn’t have $22,500 sitting in the bank on a given day. And would be even less likely to have that amount after sitting closed for weeks on end while still paying overhead.

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36 minutes ago, JollyComics said:

I have absolutely no idea of why Diamond ceased. I believe it has to do something more than a mere virus.

I found a good article that has to do with the new generations but the industry did well - very opposite directions

Read here.

Diamond has major distribution warehouses in California and New York. Those states ordered them to stop coming to work. 

Diamond’s distribution model is based on trucking full trailer loads from Mississippi to various reship locations around the country, and disseminating the individual shipments from there. It saves on massive UPS charges, and allows them to make adjustments to orders later in the process. 

I typically pay around $200 a week in inbound freight charges for a shipment that weighs 500-600lbs. If that was shipped UPS the whole way it would be almost triple that. But when states like CA, NY, and IL shut down Diamond’s reship warehouses (in addition to shutting down their customers) they didn’t have a choice but to pause.

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8 hours ago, lighthouse said:

Diamond has major distribution warehouses in California and New York. Those states ordered them to stop coming to work. 

Diamond’s distribution model is based on trucking full trailer loads from Mississippi to various reship locations around the country, and disseminating the individual shipments from there. It saves on massive UPS charges, and allows them to make adjustments to orders later in the process. 

I typically pay around $200 a week in inbound freight charges for a shipment that weighs 500-600lbs. If that was shipped UPS the whole way it would be almost triple that. But when states like CA, NY, and IL shut down Diamond’s reship warehouses (in addition to shutting down their customers) they didn’t have a choice but to pause.

Interesting. I thought about setting up my own comic shop back in early 2000 with my father's help.  The first step started with Diamond. They demanded two things from me: Must have a brick and mortar store and very functionally website. Diamond told us to pull orders least $425 a month, no less. The second step started with the space rental. The smaller space is 30' x 40' is about $4200 a month. That killed us off.  I understood why there are too many Modern comic books are stacked up inside long boxes.  Diamond doesn't accept returns.

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From a creators viewpoint, a pause of even eight weeks is not going to kill the industry.  In some ways its a welcome relief, we often work with insane deadlines and now those deadlines have been extended so we can put a little bit more into the work.   We’ve also been meaning to flesh out a creator owned project we have publisher interest in and now this will give us the time to work out the details.   

I feel for the folks who will suffer from this, we work with some great editorial teams and I don’t know how badly this will effect them, but I also feel for comic shops who have seen a plummet in walk in traffic and sales, having them buried in unpaid invoices would be worse than putting everything on pause.   I worry for the employees who will likely be laid off, but the economy will bounce back once normalcy returns and hopefully the vast majority will resume the jobs they liked.

There’s no conspiracy on Diamond’s part— they employ a lot of people at their warehouses and those people are now asked to stay home.

We’re going to get through this, all of us.

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What lighthouse has said is correct.  This is a good thing for retail shops.  I can cope with paying rent (mortgage in my case), utilities (which can be set low while we're closed), and even help out my employees... but the threat of thousands of dollars worth of stock arriving every week which, by law, we can't retail would be brutal.  I don't believe this will be 8 weeks (at least in Ohio).  I'm guessing 2-4.  Beyond a month shutdown, then yes, I'm guessing a lot of smaller shops may not make it.

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11 hours ago, slym2none said:

Anyone who thinks these lockdowns can go on as long as 8 weeks is crazy. It's not sustainable for that long. We, both the private and public we, cannot be propped up for that long  without major damage being done.

I don't think anyone will go much longer than March 31st before things happen. What those things are, we cannot discuss here further. But 8 weeks in lockdown is not going to happen.

 :screwy:



-slym

It has not yet popped in many states. We shall see. I hope you're right. I fully expect to be working remotely until April 20 at the earliest (I am authorized until 3/31, but they can re-up that), when the schools here are supposed to re-open, but we shall see if that happens as some school systems already shut down for the year in states with few cases. I know here in NYC where this is exploding the teachers unions will fight and the way the mayor and chancellor messed up (not reporting cases to the CDC!!!) they have pretty good grounds.

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40 minutes ago, Bookery said:

What lighthouse has said is correct.  This is a good thing for retail shops.  I can cope with paying rent (mortgage in my case), utilities (which can be set low while we're closed), and even help out my employees... but the threat of thousands of dollars worth of stock arriving every week which, by law, we can't retail would be brutal.  I don't believe this will be 8 weeks (at least in Ohio).  I'm guessing 2-4.  Beyond a month shutdown, then yes, I'm guessing a lot of smaller shops may not make it.

Isn't this really Geppi taking one for the team?

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