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My fellow comic shop owners
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65 posts in this topic

11 hours ago, Point Five said:

This is somewhat off-topic to the OP's post, but just saw this from one LCS chain and thought it was a clever solution to raise funds during the downtime... selling packages of perks with extra value to be used when the stores reopen. Not a model that would work for every LCS but might work for some.

https://thirdeyecomics.com/battlebonds/

 

I wish they would just build a website so I could look thru there back issues. I cant seem to find it if they have it.

 

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On 4/5/2020 at 3:56 PM, DavidTheDavid said:

As a sole proprietor, I can apply for this, but my bank's site is apparently not working.

Plus you have to wait until 4/10

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On 4/5/2020 at 4:35 PM, kav said:

My LCS buddy reports his bank is not doing the stimulus, no new banks will take him for the loan only established customers.  He is also required to spend 75% on employees but he has 5 employees and they do not consume 75%-his rent does.  It is not working, for him.

There is another SBA loan for operating expenses other than payroll but the interest rate is up to 4%...my bank rate is 3.5%...and loan is not forgiven but amortized up to 30 years...a short term bridge type of 10k of the funds released initially can be forgiven

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It is called EIDL....sorry couldn't remember the name.  Here is the .gov link, so this is the true source page for all OFFICIAL info on the current programs being offered and will be updated with information as it becomes available: 

https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/coronavirus-relief-options

Scroll about halfway down and it has info on all the different financial options available.  I filed for mine on Saturday...only took me 7.5 hrs to get the app accepted, so please keep with it!  Please share this information with anyone you feel could benefit and feel free to reach out with questions.  I've spent 25 years wading through governmental paperwork/red tape and dealing with programs such as these, and they are all a bit wonky on the front end until the kinks get ironed out.  

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I have to chuckle a little at a few of my Facebook friends acting like all these businesses needed "bailouts after just one week of being closed".

My shop has been forcibly closed for 20 days and counting. I have seen no stimulus check. I have seen no SBA EIDL loan. I have seen no SBA Paycheck Protection. I fully expect that some of those funds will eventually arrive. I've still made my three weekly payrolls, still paid my utilities, still paid my insurance, still paid my rent. Diamond has stopped shipping to me but I still have other vendors shipping out stuff I ordered months ago and I'm still paying them. I'm still paying my HVAC contractor to do their scheduled maintenance. I'm still paying for my offsite storage location.

My shop is small. Less than 1500sf. But business was great the four weeks before we closed. We were doing a little over $6/sf/week over the final 4 weeks of winter, a full year pace of $315/sf during the slowest quarter of the year. It's really really hard not to sit here wondering what might have been. But for now, the goal is "survive the likely 90-100 days we will be forcibly closed and be ready to serve our customers on the other side". Government stimulus may well cover some of that 90-100 day period, but it didn't cover any of the first 20. And had this closure just been 30 days? I might have taken it as a blessing that I could finally get some backlogged work done. But it was never going to just be 30 days.

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31 minutes ago, lighthouse said:

I have to chuckle a little at a few of my Facebook friends acting like all these businesses needed "bailouts after just one week of being closed".

My shop has been forcibly closed for 20 days and counting. I have seen no stimulus check. I have seen no SBA EIDL loan. I have seen no SBA Paycheck Protection. I fully expect that some of those funds will eventually arrive. I've still made my three weekly payrolls, still paid my utilities, still paid my insurance, still paid my rent. Diamond has stopped shipping to me but I still have other vendors shipping out stuff I ordered months ago and I'm still paying them. I'm still paying my HVAC contractor to do their scheduled maintenance. I'm still paying for my offsite storage location.

My shop is small. Less than 1500sf. But business was great the four weeks before we closed. We were doing a little over $6/sf/week over the final 4 weeks of winter, a full year pace of $315/sf during the slowest quarter of the year. It's really really hard not to sit here wondering what might have been. But for now, the goal is "survive the likely 90-100 days we will be forcibly closed and be ready to serve our customers on the other side". Government stimulus may well cover some of that 90-100 day period, but it didn't cover any of the first 20. And had this closure just been 30 days? I might have taken it as a blessing that I could finally get some backlogged work done. But it was never going to just be 30 days.

No concept of a cash flow business.  They're going to be wondering why they are laid off when they aren't doing any work soon.  

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52 minutes ago, lighthouse said:

But it was never going to just be 30 days.

There's a lot of pressure right now (in some cases a state order) that even with essential businesses, they must limit the number of people inside their walls at any one time.  It occurs to me, that even when we're allowed to re-open, this will be mandated for all businesses.  Though on most days a comic shop may not normally exceed whatever limits are placed on a given business based on its size, I suspect the kind of close-quarters required for gamers to play will not be allowed for the rest of the year.  Free Comic Book Day isn't going to happen this year, period.

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2 minutes ago, Bookery said:

There's a lot of pressure right now (in some cases a state order) that even with essential businesses, they must limit the number of people inside their walls at any one time.  It occurs to me, that even when we're allowed to re-open, this will be mandated for all businesses.  Though on most days a comic shop may not normally exceed whatever limits are placed on a given business based on its size, I suspect the kind of close-quarters required for gamers to play will not be allowed for the rest of the year.  Free Comic Book Day isn't going to happen this year, period.

Agreed. I can't in good conscience promote another FCBD until there is either a vaccine or unlimited antibodies testing available.

I'd be fine reopening in June with a "limit 8 people in the store at one time" rule for 30 days or something similar. I get 90% of my foot traffic (and 25% of my revenue) from people leaving the adjacent movie theater, and I could do fine without that theater traffic for a month, just serving my regulars and folks who searched for me. Even on Wednesday mornings when I may check out 15 customers in an hour, they weren't all in the store at the same time. I won't see the huge masses of people until the theater is running again, which eliminates any concern for me about what the rules would say (since I don't need to receive huge crowds until they are).

I'd fear the inevitable "wanting to kick out a lookiloo customer who's been milling about to make room for the good customer to come in" situation, but that would be an easier problem to have than what we all have now.

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35 minutes ago, lighthouse said:

Agreed. I can't in good conscience promote another FCBD until there is either a vaccine or unlimited antibodies testing available.

I know this will be controversial, but in all honesty, it's time to lay FCBD to rest.  It was a great idea the first several years... a lot of people didn't know comics were still being published, and it got them in the doors to check places out.  It got a huge amount of publicity on local news and in the newspapers.  But the media is bored of it now... it gets very little local coverage.  We get about 1000 folks in the door on that day, and we recognize most of them by now... people who literally show up only once a year to get their free books.  They often smile, and thank us, and proudly announce they'll be back next year (completely unaware that this does us no good).  We do about 20% more in sales that week... but surprise!  We subsequently drop that same 20% in the week or two following (folks already spent what they wanted to for the month), meaning sales for the month are flat, and we're simply out the money we spent on the free comics.  Again, in the first 2-3 years, we had some new subscribers come of it.  But I've checked with the crew, and for the past several years they don't recall a single file customer signing on because of FCBD.

If you have to hand your product out absolutely free every year (not buy-2-get-1, not 50% off sale, but FREE just for walking in the door) it's a pretty good sign your industry isn't healthy.

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FCBD has been a boon for us overall. It's been in the top 5 sales days each of the years we have had it.

But we leverage our advertising budget around the event. And we see sales increases in the weeks leading up to the event as a result of that budget. We drop $700-800 on Facebook advertising promoting FCBD over 6 weeks leading up to the event, and that promotion gets shared and reshared to people we wouldn't otherwise reach because we aren't promoting a sale, we are promoting a future giveaway. So we get some "three degrees of separation" eyeballs that we simply wouldn't reach any other way. Folks tag their friends in late March asking if they want to go in May, that gets us extra traction with the friends of the folks doing the tagging and the people tagged. We get dozens of extra customers in each of those leadup weeks saying they saw a post on Facebook about FCBD, and the Top Of Mind Awareness that comes from that is invaluable.

The actual attendees on FCBD don't do all that much. We see around $4.50 a foot in sales that day, which is great but doesn't fully cover our costs for doing the event, especially when we give away $500-1000 in prizes in our costume contest. But the extra sales leading up from FCBD re-shares is huge. And there's no way we would get that by promoting a random "hey come check out our comic shop" post the way we can by promoting a "we are giving away 10,000 comic books" post.

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2 hours ago, lighthouse said:

I have to chuckle a little at a few of my Facebook friends acting like all these businesses needed "bailouts after just one week of being closed".

My shop has been forcibly closed for 20 days and counting. I have seen no stimulus check. I have seen no SBA EIDL loan. I have seen no SBA Paycheck Protection. I fully expect that some of those funds will eventually arrive. I've still made my three weekly payrolls, still paid my utilities, still paid my insurance, still paid my rent. Diamond has stopped shipping to me but I still have other vendors shipping out stuff I ordered months ago and I'm still paying them. I'm still paying my HVAC contractor to do their scheduled maintenance. I'm still paying for my offsite storage location.

My shop is small. Less than 1500sf. But business was great the four weeks before we closed. We were doing a little over $6/sf/week over the final 4 weeks of winter, a full year pace of $315/sf during the slowest quarter of the year. It's really really hard not to sit here wondering what might have been. But for now, the goal is "survive the likely 90-100 days we will be forcibly closed and be ready to serve our customers on the other side". Government stimulus may well cover some of that 90-100 day period, but it didn't cover any of the first 20. And had this closure just been 30 days? I might have taken it as a blessing that I could finally get some backlogged work done. But it was never going to just be 30 days.

I have a tough time believing it will be 90-100 days, but I guess the week before Memorial Day will be 60 days. Obviously Easter is pure fantasy. By taking action early California may have pushed their peak into may or june though (albeit, likely a less horrendous peak than we're about to see here in New York).

 

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59 minutes ago, Bookery said:

I know this will be controversial, but in all honesty, it's time to lay FCBD to rest.  It was a great idea the first several years... a lot of people didn't know comics were still being published, and it got them in the doors to check places out.  It got a huge amount of publicity on local news and in the newspapers.  But the media is bored of it now... it gets very little local coverage.  We get about 1000 folks in the door on that day, and we recognize most of them by now... people who literally show up only once a year to get their free books.  They often smile, and thank us, and proudly announce they'll be back next year (completely unaware that this does us no good).  We do about 20% more in sales that week... but surprise!  We subsequently drop that same 20% in the week or two following (folks already spent what they wanted to for the month), meaning sales for the month are flat, and we're simply out the money we spent on the free comics.  Again, in the first 2-3 years, we had some new subscribers come of it.  But I've checked with the crew, and for the past several years they don't recall a single file customer signing on because of FCBD.

If you have to hand your product out absolutely free every year (not buy-2-get-1, not 50% off sale, but FREE just for walking in the door) it's a pretty good sign your industry isn't healthy.

Comic shops having to pay for the free comics seems silly. At the very least you ought to get some amount free based on monthly orders. If you want more than that then pay extra.

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6 minutes ago, the blob said:

Comic shops having to pay for the free comics seems silly. At the very least you ought to get some amount free based on monthly orders. If you want more than that then pay extra.

The only folks who get paid are the printers. The publishers and Diamond forgo their costs. So the “free” comics cost stores $0.25-0.30 each (plus freight charges). Everyone in the whole chain loses money on them except the printers which seems fair to me.

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16 minutes ago, lighthouse said:

The only folks who get paid are the printers. The publishers and Diamond forgo their costs. So the “free” comics cost stores $0.25-0.30 each (plus freight charges). Everyone in the whole chain loses money on them except the printers which seems fair to me.

I understand bookery's point. I would never go into a shop just to grab the free stuff. that's cruddy. although last one I was in I only spent $8 because that's all the cash I had and his CC machine wasn't working. I guess that's on him because I would have spent $20-$25 (and he even knocked $2 off the stuff to get me to $8....). it's going to depend on the store though. an area with a lot of foot traffic, affluent parents and their kids, etc... I can see how this brings in a new batch of people every year if you have a store that caters to a lot of stuff and you become the once a month place the kids go and are allowed to spend $20...obviously I look at that like a New Yorker because that's what I saw.

 

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32 minutes ago, the blob said:

I have a tough time believing it will be 90-100 days, but I guess the week before Memorial Day will be 60 days. Obviously Easter is pure fantasy. By taking action early California may have pushed their peak into may or june though (albeit, likely a less horrendous peak than we're about to see here in New York).

 

Interesting tool to look at COVID projections (not sure I agree with them)

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

You can select CA in the drop down to see the peak is projected  to be April 17 from a number of deaths prospective.  The model spits out a huge range for some states.

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