But the Diamond issue with their discount tiers is still real. And if you are a lower tier you are also bottom of the list when it comes to allocation of products (if orders exceeded expectation or on reorders and damage replacements) which affects not only what you pay for the product, but your ability to get products your customers want since you cannot get a lot of what Diamond sells anywhere else (the de facto monopoly aspect of Diamond), and not being able to get what customers want means you lose customers no matter how easy it is to order trades somewhere else, it won't matter if you have no one to sell them to.

In a perfect world, I agree with you, but the comics industry is far from a perfect world and opportunity costs are a much bigger factor since margins are so small and the customer base is niche and shrinking. And they would lose most of it if they switched to trades only, and if the industry did so, it would be the death knell of the comic shop as we know it. A few (like Hibbs shop) are set up to be able to survive such a transition, but Ingram would likely wind up trying to collect a lot of unpaid invoices from bankruptcy courts if comic shops switched over and the industry abandoned the weekly product cycle that sustains it (even if on life support) now.

-M