Dave Brzeski of The House On The Borderland in Peterborough, England saw the recent comments on Marvel's secret variant covers (see "Jay Bardyla of Happy Harbor Comics on Marvel's Secret Variants" and "Dave Salisbury of Fan Boy Three on Secret Variant Covers ") and says this incentive practice only benefits larger retailers:

It was interesting to read the recent comments on the Marvel secret variants.  Y'know what? I have the perfect way to handle such things.  I just ignore them!  We are a very small store, in terms of sales, so we almost never qualify for an incentive based variant anyway. 

I refuse to go the way of selling incentive books at a premium price, just to cover the cost of unsold copies of the regular book.  It wouldn't work anyway, as I don't even remember the last time one of our customers bought the same book twice at face price just to get another cover.

I wish publishers like Avatar would get over their habit of trying to milk their small customer bases, by releasing everything in at least four covers.  You never know, if they cut out the cost of producing all those extra covers, maybe they could bring the price down on the books, which would do much more to help their sales, in my opinion.  It's a tired, cynical, marketing ploy which simply rewards the bigger retailers, to the detriment of the smaller ones, as if they don't already get a big enough advantage with high volume discounts.  Apart from anything else, sometimes the amount of extra work involved in wading through some of the complex Marvel incentive offers is ridiculous.

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