Price back issues to reflect realized prices online. Be competitive with eBay. Don't let dollar drek take up retail space for decades, move it. Acquire more when collections come in. Buy at a dime a pop, sell at a dollar a pop.

Put your good merchandise online. Why let it fade and yellow on a wall when it could bring in revenue tomorrow?

When all those bins of comics are cleared, replace them with new TPB's and merchandise that sells. Whatever is hot at the moment combined with collectibles that will always have a market.

Cater to more than the mainstream crowd. Have signings. Have events. Make the store a hangout and more than a shop. Have a gaming night. Have a book swap night.

Since I travel for work, I've been in ALOT of different comic book stores.. probably at least 50. It seems there are two main types... the ones that people that aren't comic book fans think of (dirty, messy, with huge piles of comics and staff that look at you funny if they don't know you), and the new wave ones that pretty much just sell trades, Pop figures, and movie tie-in paraphenalia.

I think the key these days is to combine the comics with other things comic people like... CCGs, board games, baseball cards, music, toys all of the above, whatever, but still be an actual comic book store, rather than a book store that happens to focus on trades or a card store that happens to sell comics.

The comic shop needs to be a happy, clean, well-lit place that is fun to hang out it. You need a good trade selection, comprehensive new stuff, and enough back issues to be interesting, but not so much that its weighing you down cash-wise. The people working there should be able to answer questions, and have intelligent conversations about comics without scoffing at people who have different interests.

Most importantly, you have to price things correctly. Very few comics from the 90s are worth more than $1... don't sell #1s of long defunct Image series for $5, or jack up that Spidey appearance in Silver Sable... it turns one off... there's a happy medium between prices that allow you to make money and have a store, and being competitive enough with online prices to catch the customers walking in.

There are a few out there

As much as people complain about the increasing price of comics, let's be realistic -- publishers are not going to reduce prices on comics. With that understood -- I don't necessarily mind paying more money for comics purchased at an LCS vs. online or digitally, so long as the shop is giving me a compelling reason to do so. The primary advantage that shops have over online stores or digital is the ability to provide an experience instead of just a transaction. They need to provide great customer service. They need to have a presence in the community and provide events that create buzz and excitement -- sales, signings, parties, things like that. Do things like that and I think people won't mind paying retail.

Totally agreed on Overstreet by the way. I find it exceedingly bizarre that shops continue to rely on it to determine pricing for back issues, given the huge impact online sales have had on determining value for comics. Not to mention the fact that Overstreet bases its prices on reported sales data from select comic retailers -- effectively making the sources the ones setting the values for the entire market.

Just an reality check for everyone. Things are not quite so cut and dried from a retailers perspective, and not so easy.

For those saying buy books at pennies and sell for a dollar- Say I pay a dime a book, I have to pay someone to process all those books, pay for bags and boards, pay someone to bag and board those books, sort them, integrate them into stock etc. Let's look at it with some hypothetical numbers based on real costs.

I buy the books for dime to sell for a dollar. Wow going to make 90 cents on each book I sell great, right. Not. Add 20 cents for the cost of bag and board, so now I am only going to make 70 cents per book still good right. Well lets say you can process 30 books in an hour, that means, check them out make sure they are sellable (with no surprises inside (candid photos hidden in a book, dead bugs, pages missing, etc. etc. etc.-you won't believe what we've found hidden inside comics we bought in bulk), bag and board them, sort them for stock and put them out for sale in the store. Well let's see one hour of work is one hour of salary I have to pay. If it's minimum wage (lat's say $10 for average though the San Fran shops and others are looking at $15 an hour)
So 30 books at cost is $3, 30 bags and board is another $6, and one hours of salary is $10 so now I have paid out $19 for those books I will sell for $30, so I make $11 dollars or a whopping 2.72 cents per book sold. Add in the rent, utilities, salary of the person ringing register, insurance, etc. and even paying pennies for those books makes them not very profitable, if not unprofitable. Unless you found a key or in demand book by speculators in the box that covers the cost of processing the rest of the box you are going to end up losing money even if you are paying pennies for the dollars on those.

Selling a overstock of books already paid for to liquidate them is one thing, but buying collections to do so is not a profitable venture because of other overhead.

The key to improving stores is customer service, but considering most are one person ventures or have small staff and there is more work to do than hours in a given day to run a shop, unless you have the cash flow to designate employees just to offer customer service it's tough.

-In a given week, you have to track adds and drops to pull to adjust FOC each week with Diamond and determine what you need to place as reorders for all comics and trades...

-check in Diamond order, deal with damages, cal in damages, sort out pulls, sotck the shelves with new books which if you have a new comic area requires you tear down that section each week to put out the new books and integrate all the old stock into the other areas of the store...

-keep abreast of new books announced, creative changes, cancelled books, movie announcements, etc. etc. so you can mee the standard everyone here wants of being well-informed and knowledgeable about the products, considering there are several thousand new issues each month and additional products in each Diamond catalog and the owner has to deal with the products coming in, the products he ordered for next month but has to constanty adjust as customers let him know wha tthey want and don't want, a second month's worth of unreleasaed product that he has to write an order for at the end of the month and the month after that's products that the publishers are already releasing solicits for online so he/she need to gauge interest in so can hype/promote/order appropriately

-track what's actually selling in the store so he can make informed decisions about future order and make necessary reorders. Even if you have software that does this, you have to run the reports, look them over, compare with order date, etc. to make the info useful.

-if you have products other than comics (anything form Heroclix to rpg, to sports cards, etc. you have to do all that you do for comics for those products too, deal with those distributors and catalogs, etc.

-If you have an online store, you need to list products, package up sales, update inventory, etc. etc.

-if you take time to sort all those back issues it means you are not doing any of these. If you have customers in the store you aren't doing any of that as you need to provide customer service, even if the customer is buying one $4 comic but wants you to talk for half an hour about how DC destroyed the Legion and Marvel is going to screw up the continuity with the next event, essentially the same conversation you had with him last week and with 20 other different customers but you want to make it a pleasant experience for them so they come back right....

There are ways to make a comic shop a better experience. Unfortunately they all require time, money or both time and money, and what most owners do not have a lot of extra of is time or liquid capital to reinvest in their business. Most are living on a razor thin margin and spend more hours at the shop than most of us would at 2 full time jobs just to get by.

At Diamond's discount schedule, you basically need an 80% sell through of every comic book you order (minus whatever extras you charge for variants if you play that game) to even turn the barest profit. Discounts on trades are even less (more like 35-40% off of msrp than the 50% of floppies) so you need en even higher sell through rate, though there is more dollars earned per sale. This really limits what kind of discounts or extras they can offer with books unless they have a large volume store (meaning they order and sell a good number of books even for the dog sellers rather than 2-3, but considering that the best selling books through Diamond sell a little over 100K unless they are a big event first issue with a gazillion variants, and there are only approximately 5000 Diamond retail accounts t provide those sales a best seller sells an average of 20 copies of the best sellers and a book selling 10 K (i.e. most of the indies) average 2 copies per account) most accounts aren't doing that kind of volume. So unless you have a crystal ball to tell you what will sell, you have to guess and do all your homework and hope all your pulls don't get pissed off and drop a book because hot writer A makes unpopular decision with fan fave character B and leave you with 20 unsold copies of the latest issue.

So now you have to choose what to stock for display and tie up your capital vs. what you know you will sell through pulls. Customer comes in looks at the stuff you have on display, flips through it then pulls out his smartphone looks it up on Amazon looks at your price and walks out ordering the book elsewhere. Or asks for book you chose not to carry, you offer to order it (it takes 4-6 weeks for Diamond to process backstock trade and get them to you on reorders and special orders mind you), will they wait the extra time when they can get it for less and sooner from Amazon?

So even if I do everything right-clean well lit, easily navigable store with a decent selection and polite and knowledgeable staff, kids section, events, gaming, etc. the system works against me being successful. I can offer to match prices but then I can't afford to keep as much selection or have as large a staff. I cut staff, then I have to have the staff I do have spend more time on logistical tasks keeping the store running and less time on customer service, or continue with customer service but offer fewer options of stock and events and no discounts/add-ons, etc.

You have to pick your poison. A lot of options become mutually exclusive because of the costs/overhead/discount structures/ volume/economic realities of it all. Growing your business is possible, but takes a lot of time and money, and the infrastructure of the comics business places all the risk and very little of the reward on the retailer. I greatly admire the retailers who do it, because I know how much effort it takes.

The best thing stores can do is to improve is to make the store welcoming and make customer service a priority, but even those two things have repercussions and hidden costs in time and money necessary to keep the stores logistics functioning.

-M

We've had comics that have come in collections, some bagged some not that have had everything from nude photos to condoms to wrapping papers, to dead insects inside them between pages. High school age kids will hide things anywhere and then forget they are there when they go to sell off their kid stuff as adults. One of those things winds up in a customers hands, especially a kid, and you have a law suit waiting to happen. If you don't check the books, it's negligence on your part and you become fully liable for it. In the three years that I helped at the shop, we had hundreds of collections brought in by people looking to sell, I can count on one hand the number that were bagged and boarded, and only about half of those were in any kind of order. Maybe things are different in your shop, but that's not common around here. Most of the stuff that comes into shops were stuff found by relatives of more casual collectors who kept things in cardboard boxes or plastic storage totes with nary a bag or board around.

I'm not denying stores that do it, we have one shop here that carries over 40K dollar books in a separate storefront. He only buys collections with key sought after books not bulk, most of the stock for the dollar bins is from years (he's been operating since '74 I think) of overstock and shedding off non-key books from those collections with keys. He makes sure he can make his money and overhead from 1 book in the collection before he buys anything, everything else then is pure profit. Another store in the are buy bulk comics by weight (around 10 cents per pound of comics), but he sorts nothing, just makes sure everything is salable. He has yearly sidewalk and Black Friday sales where he pulls the stuff out and sells it at dirt cheap prices but he spends no time of his weekly time selling or dealing with these books, just special occasions. Both stores deal in a lot of high end stuff and the second is one of the biggest dealers of Magic and Hero Clix singles in the region, which is where he makes most of his money, not comics. There are ways to do it, but buying collections and hoping they are already ready for sale is not one of them.

-M

I don't think that it's improving comic book shops, as much as them having a different place in the industry. I've been to one comic shop I can think of in 20 years that was the stereotype comic book shop back when I lived in St Louis. If bottom dollar is the issue than they will never compete. When I took my son to FCBD, I saw him looking at Walking Dead figures and my immediate reaction in my head was, having to tell him we'll check Walmart, since I'm not paying $19.99 for a figure when I don't have to. And that's the thing for me. If I don't have to, why should I? I don't grocery shop at Target (for those not familiar it's basically an upper middle class version of Walmart) I go to Crest (discount grocery store, even better on prices than Walmart a lot of times) cause I have three mouths to feed besides my own on one income. I had the inclination to get the next volume of Cerebus when I was there on FCBD until I realized that the cover price is $30, and the volumes I got before on amazon were $20 or less, new. I can't afford, literally, the luxury of atmosphere and convenience. And if a lot of Americans are in this boat, then I am sure it's not just comic book shops but a lot of specialty shops that are suffering due to people being able to stretch what little disposable income they have by buying on the internet.

Now the local (in the midwest) store Vintage Stock (where I've been getting my $1 comics I've been posting) that stocks comics, games, movies, CDs, vinyl, game consoles, toys and cards/card games, usually always has good prices outside of toys. About 3-4 years ago I scored the first three Starman Omnibus for $13 something(normally $50 I think), used, but in perfect condition. I don't know what they do different in how they acquire what they do, but of games and game accessories that I have bought there, I have never see ridiculous pricing compared to other outlets like Walmart. I still maintain it's a specialty shop, but with 6-7 different "specialties" maybe it maintains overall competitive pricing and movement of stock because it's not relying on one specialty. That's just a speculation, but my personal explanation as to why improving comic book shops isn't an issue, if they cannot compete in pricing.

My LCS is one of the biggest and most successful in New England. Every time I go in, it's packed with people, children, women, the whole shebang. One of the big things they have done over the years is diversify. They have tons and tons of comics, both new and old, but they also carry everything else geeky under the sun - toys, action figures, board games, video games, Magic cards, baseball cards, all of it. And probably most importantly these days, superhero merchandise. It's just like going to a convention now, where half the dealers don't have comics at all, but t-shirts, mugs and posters featuring comic book characters. It pains me a little to say it, but I think stores need to have the same mindset as the big companies that are publishing the comics - view the comics themselves as probably unprofitable advertisements for the merchandise. Superheroes are more popular than ever in pop culture, even if comics aren't. Lean into it.