Ethan Peacock of Elfsar Comics & Toys in Vancouver, British Columbia saw comments about holiday shipping schedules (see “Kirby Tardy of Tardy's Collectors Corner on Holiday Shipping Schedule”) and says, the Canadians don’t really have an advantage:

In reaction to Mr. Tardy, regarding the late shipping for books during the week of July 4th, I think I can speak for most Canadian comic book retailers that we feel for you and understand your frustration as we Canadians have dealt with the burden of late books for a number of years.  However, I disagree with your complaint that this gives Canadian comic retailers an unfair advantage.  Please allow me to provide a “northern” perspective.

In the past, your northern neighbors have not only suffered late shipments due to their own Canadian provincial holidays but from American holidays as well.  If you combine this with the more aggressive Canadian weather, you will find Canadian stores on average suffer from a much higher number of weeks with late shipments than the U.S. (So far, the powers that be at Diamond have had no luck with controlling the weather.)  

Fast forward to today where Diamond has recently taken preventative steps to make sure that their Canadian accounts no longer suffer from U.S. holidays to provide a more balanced shipping structure, and all of a sudden the Canadians have an unfair advantage?!

Yes, they do.  But this advantage is that the Canadian dollar is rising (or rather the U.S. dollar continues to drop).  I can see your point if your competition is down the street, across the boarder, within Canada.  Otherwise, waiting another 24 hours like everyone else should not be detrimental to your business. 

What is a problem is when Diamond decides to partially fill an order with full knowledge that they are receiving more and without sharing this information with the retailer.  Unlike the issue with Kick Ass #3 (which has been met with some mixed reviews) where Diamond did inform us that the remaining 60% were shipping the following week.

Hopefully retailers had the foresight to not allow the 40% of the Kick Ass #3 order to go totally to their pull list/pre-orders/saver files/guaranteed sales leaving nothing for their walk by traffic.  When a partially filled product is shipped to both you and your competitors, the amount of your total order can play a huge factor in how many copies you receive and thus how many copies you can sell within that initial week.

At Elfsar, we made sure not to fill our saver files for this particular issue as Diamond did inform us and promised that the rest would ship the following week.  If there was any protest as to why it was not pulled for them, we simply explained the reason.  Most of our customers understood and knew that they would get there copy the following week.  The same goes for when we get an entire shipment of damaged books (which I am sure most everyone has experienced).  Of course if any of our saver file customers needed it that week we kept track of who picked it up off the shelf and who did not.

It was an interesting opportunity to see how many of our customers really pay attention to the “new this week” rack, and it was surprising to see how little of them actually noticed that the #3 came out.  Was it the placement on the rack?  Was it a bad cover design?  Was it the poor reviews online?  Or was it that more people sought out #1 and #2 after they sold out?  All of these could be contributing factors as to why this book is no longer selling as fast.  However, I am in full agreement with Mr. Tardy that I would rather see a book come out totally all at once rather than 40% one week and 60% the next.  All this creates is a tracking nightmare for most stores who do not operate with a POS system.

If this Canadian advantage Mr. Tardy is taking about is Internet sales, 24 hours is not going to make anyone lose a sale, other than tack on another 24 hours of shipping time.  Which, to be honest, gets evened out as orders from Canada to the U.S. have to pass through customs.  I agree, it is one less day to sell that week’s line of books and it is an unforeseen obstacle when estimating/gambling how many of what title to bring in as we order these two months in advance.  It is the cost of doing business in this industry.  But again, I do not feel that Canadian retailers have an unfair advantage in this department. 

I am sure most Americans have noticed the Canadian dollar and the different prices each company puts on their books.  Some don’t even put a Canadian price at all as they “pass the responsibility” on to the Canadian retailer adding just another step for us to do before it goes on the rack on Wednesdays.  Aside from adjusting prices on books, if we do the math, we could factor in the population difference between the U.S. and Canada and I’m sure everyone would be quick to realize that this so called Canadian advantage is really not the case.

I have full respect for Mr. Tardy as his store has been around a lot longer than mine (since 1979), but it saddens me to hear his loss of love for our industry.  I just hope as a young Canuck, I can continue to take the puck and continue the fight to get as many comics in the hands of people as possible.  (Even if it just so happens to be a day before the Americans).

The opinions expressed in this Talk Back article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.