Sharpening the Sword is a regular column by retailer John Riley of Grasshopper's Comics, a 1,300 square foot comic and games store in
OK, I’m back. I let the column take a break for the summer while I finished up some long running projects and tried to spend some much needed time with the kids. In our industry where we get literally hundreds of new items every week its amazing how fast a year can go by, so I really was trying to make a conscious decision to slow down and spend a lot of time with the family the past three months. I’ve already got a few columns ready to go, but the current situation with All Star Batman and Robin #10 got my ire up to write about it first. But to get to that topic, we have to discuss this whole Tuesday shipping issue.
Over the past two weeks there has been a continuing discussion here on ICv2 about Diamond’s shipping policy and getting books a day early to process them. Although I personally would love to see this happen, it’s been talked about many times before and Diamond’s position has been clearly stated as “not interested.” It’s one of the reasons you see any conversation on it end rather abruptly as we’ve all been through this before. As one retailer said, I would love to finally be in the position of being able to actually sell my books on Wednesdays instead of processing them. Despite the existence of any “Sneak Peek” programs or the ability to look at certain issues online, it’s usually the new or offbeat book that you really want to be able to read and promote to people.
I think it might be useful to at least understand Diamond’s position in this. Diamond obviously benefits from chain stores ordering as one account. They get the chance to pack up one set of boxes instead of many, meaning they save on the various expenses associated with warehouse help. But in order for these stores to be able to order as one account the stores themselves need the time to be able to break out the boxes into each store’s order. This all makes sense, as obviously even a minor discount advantage wouldn’t help a chain store if it takes half of the day Wednesday just to self-distribute the books among their stores.
But the entire argument thus far has avoided two key areas. The first is simply the issue of relative volume. Currently a single location store that orders more than the minimum required for chain locations to achieve Tuesday shipping isn’t eligible for it. L.E. Becker states that he has two stores and orders $40K a month, or somewhere over $20K a month per store. Does that mean that if he had four stores he could order as little as $10K per store and receive Tuesday shipping? I completely understand that part of the extra day is used to divide the books between the stores and actually deliver them to each store, but I would think that any store ordering in the $25K-$30K range each month requires a significant amount of time to process their orders without having to shuffle books between stores. And considering that the single store only has one set of staff to process such a large shipment, in some ways they are at a disadvantage in processing speed. We are currently considering opening a second location and one of the key benefits would be to qualify for Tuesday shipping as it would give us the opportunity to process our books at the existing store one day early.
It seems to me that the volume of the order should also be a determining factor in many cases. I for one would love to see Diamond institute a policy where accounts that order over a certain threshold would have the option of receiving Tuesday shipping. Will this provide an advantage to bigger stores? Yes, it would. But at the moment bigger single location stores that aren’t near a UPS hub are at a distinct disadvantage in processing time. There is no way we could ever process our books before late afternoon if we were unable to pick them up at the UPS hub, and that’s a situation I’m sure many stores share.
The second factor, which is inextricably related to this, is that offering Tuesday shipping for some stores establishes a false perception of service on the part of the consumer. I hadn’t thought about this much until a few weeks ago when, like most of the Northeast, an accident caused our books to arrive on Thursday. I was taking it in stride (since we were all in the same boat, weren’t we?) until a few customers said, “Well, I’ll just go to Store A then. These things never happen to them. Diamond must hate you guys.” It was at that point when I realized that since Store A had more than one location, a one day delay for them meant that their books would be arriving… on time. Over a few years this created the perception that they were somehow special and in effect a better store than us because “these things never happened to them.” They never experienced major shortages either because they were aware of them a day early and could react accordingly. Regardless of the relative size of the stores or the level of service they provide, etc….the Tuesday shipping store can be perceived as superior by the consumer because they have a built in buffer to unexpected delivery errors.
So how does this tie in to All Star Batman & Robin? Well, I’m assuming that most of the stores that somehow received their copies were stores that received their books a day early. Honestly, I have no idea if that is true, I just think it’s a logical assumption. Regardless, we’ve spent quite a bit of time this week explaining to customers why we don’t have the book while some other stores do. Honestly, some customers have just outright yelled at us for not receiving it (not that we would have sold it anyway). Again, there is the appearance of inequalities between stores due to a shipping policy (or a shipping error) that the consumer is oblivious to. The lack of a uniform “street date” and shipping policy has many unintended consequences, and while we can’t do much about them, at least we should all acknowledge them.
But All Star Batman and Robin also provided us an incredible opportunity to pursue this argument with distributors and publishers. If comic retailers as a group wanted to show that we were really responsible enough to have books shipped to us before the “street date” as a policy, all we had to do collectively was return every single copy of that book that DC shipped to us. Obviously, that didn’t happen. And I wonder if DC had asked for stripped cover returns how many copies they would have even gotten back.
If we really want a street date policy enacted then we need to demonstrate beforehand that we can handle it, and unfortunately until we do we’re going to be stuck with the situation we have.
OK, next time onto more pro-active stuff!
The opinions expressed in this Talk Back column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
