I Have Decided Not To Open A Comic Shop

[atlcane]

Some of you may remember me starting a thread about the possibility of opening a comic shop in my city. Upon research and talking to other comic shop owners, I have decided to no follow this plan.

One, there is a reason 99.999% of comic shops look like your mother's basement. Because there is very little money in the business. It is way to risky. Two comic shops in Atlanta, have closed over the past 3 months. One really big the other one is a crack-out basement of a building.

I also spent some time reading about the market on various websites and everything I read for the most part was negative. Today I was in the suburbs and went by this comic shop I have never been too. I just dropped by to check it out on my Lunch break. First the place was in a very run down area and the shop it self was dirty and very unorganized. I actually spoke to the owner for about an hour. I was amazed at his honesty about the business. He talked about how many of the stores in the area had gone out of business because of the Internet. Most people are not supporting their LCS anymore so that can save a few dollars online. It was not until about 40 minutes into it that I told him I was thinking about opening a store in the city. From the impression that I got from him is that it is a Tuff business. Almost everything I have read and learned over the past month has thrown up red flags at me.

I am a Christian. While some of you may cringe, I live my life following God and his plan for my life. I have been praying about this over the past month and I have asked my friends to pray for me as well. It is 100% clear that God is telling me this is not where he wants me, which is cool. I would rather find out now then in bankruptcy court.

To everyone that pointed me towards information about this industry, thank you. I will say that I am going to start buying books at my LCS again, instead of the Internet. although it will cost me a about $30 more a month, it will be worth supporting an industry that I really enjoy.

[Charles RB]

Today I was in the suburbs and went by this comic shop I have never been too. I just dropped by to check it out on my Lunch break. First the place was in a very run down area and the shop it self was dirty and very unorganized. I actually spoke to the owner for about an hour. I was amazed at his honesty about the business. He talked about how many of the stores in the area had gone out of business because of the Internet. Most people are not supporting their LCS anymore so that can save a few dollars online.

Of course they're not supporting their local comic shop, it's dirty and very unorganised! Who wants to go all the way to a run down area to go to a shop like that?

Claiming "oh, we get few customers, that's why we look like shit" is a weak excuse when people say they avoid comic shops because they look like shit.

[Jaye]

Wise decision, thanks for letting us know.

[Charles RB]

There's also a solution to the Internet threat. It's called "having a website and doing mail-order". Then you get sales from people who aren't local.

[atlcane]

There's also a solution to the Internet threat. It's called "having a website and doing mail-order". Then you get sales from people who aren't local.


The issue here is that you would not be able to compete with companies like Midtown comics and DCBS. The amount of money it takes to build and maintain the website would not be worth it.

[Charles RB]

The amount of money it takes to build and maintain the website would not be worth it.

Considering how many websites there are, how many small-press & indie comics have websites w/ mail-order abilities, and that there are local comic shops with websites that do mail-order, I really doubt it "would not be worth it".

[Iangould]

I also spent some time reading about the market on various websites and everything I read for the most part was negative. Today I was in the suburbs and went by this comic shop I have never been too. I just dropped by to check it out on my Lunch break. First the place was in a very run down area and the shop it self was dirty and very unorganized. I actually spoke to the owner for about an hour. I was amazed at his honesty about the business. He talked about how many of the stores in the area had gone out of business because of the Internet. Most people are not supporting their LCS anymore so that can save a few dollars online.


Funny, my stores are currently growing sales at 25-30% per year.

I guess that just proves we aren't "average" comic shops.

[Kid Omega]

We, as well, are having a very successful year.

Go figure.

-a

[Charles RB]

I wonder if that has anything to do with your cleanliness & organisation?

[K'Nort]

Geography makes a big difference. I'm not sure it's fair to say that the success of Australian shops would translate to Atlanta. And if it was going to be a capes-centric store, it wouldn't measure up well to Rocketship either.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

I'm gonna have to agree. My old town used to have 3 to 4 comic book shops. In a span of 20 years they all went down. Not big enough place to support them.

But ya have a big City and that changes. I'd listen to that Internet Shipping idea Charles RB had. You never know how good it could work. Lots of companies are going that way.

Or ya could always hire Marisa ; comic book hottie to walk around your store in a short mini-skirt . She does have a fantastic booty , so ya never know. ;)

[K'Nort]

My shop has a mail order service, but they gave up on their website. I would think that sometimes you just don't have someone who finds internet work interesting enough.

[Forefinger]

If I ever win the lottery, I'm going to start a comicbook shop just so I can kick out smelly fanboys and not let them buy anything.

[Charles RB]

Or ya could always hire Marisa ; comic book hottie to walk around your store in a short mini-skirt . She does have a fantastic booty , so ya never know. ;)

Or you could get an actual comic professional to do a signing and get paying customers.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

If I ever win the lottery, I'm going to start a comicbook shop just so I can kick out smelly fanboys and not let them buy anything.


If I win the Lottery I'd open a comic shop and hire hot babes for it. Because hell...I wanna combine my 2 favorite loves. Hooters ( nice chicken wings) and comics. I wonder if I'd get sued if I called my store: HooterComix . :D

[SUPERECWFAN1]

Or you could get an actual comic professional to do a signing and get paying customers.


Hmmmm...thats cool thinkin. Maybe I can have Marisa and George Perez in my store at the same time. That way fanboys can watch George sign for hours and watch Marisa's booty !

[Charles RB]

Isotope has launch parties and other such stuff to attract customers in, maybe other stores should do that. "The new Punisher tpb is out! We have a signing by Garth Ennis and then we're all getting totally munted & firing paintball guns at stuff!"

[Iangould]

The issue here is that you would not be able to compete with companies like Midtown comics and DCBS. The amount of money it takes to build and maintain the website would not be worth it.

$10 a month for an eBay store.

[Brandon Hanvey]

Shops can be profitable if they are run by owners who are smart and work hard.

Just look at our various CBR shop owners from Alex to Pol to Ian. Each of them has run a shop successfully by knowing their market and how to order and how to sell their customers.

A comic shop owner should be a business man first and a comic fan second.

[Brandon Hanvey]

Furthermore, my firend owns a shop in San Francisco. He took it over from the previous owner about 3 years ago and has almost double the amount of business in that time.

He did this by cleaning and re-arranging the store, knowing what and how much to order, and basic friendly customer service. He also has an ebay store for merch that does not get sold in-store.

[twilight]

I guess the key to successful comic shop is location.

My LCS is the only one in town and they get a lot of business because of it.

[Brandon Hanvey]

I guess the key to successful comic shop is location.

My LCS is the only one in town and they get a lot of business because of it.

Location is important, but is it not the only factor in a successful store.

You could be the only store in a city and still fail if you don't know your market, have a miserable looking store and poor customer service.

[xakko]

I support both my LCS and a friend's online shop.

It's expensive, but it's stuff I would probably be getting anyway. I get monthly titles at the LCS- I just don't have the patience to wait for a subscription.

Anything I need ordered, I hit up the online store...

[Donald M.]

I am a Christian. While some of you may cringe, I live my life following God and his plan for my life. I have been praying about this over the past month and I have asked my friends to pray for me as well. It is 100% clear that God is telling me this is not where he wants me, which is cool. I would rather find out now then in bankruptcy court.


Not to disparage your relationship with God, with is a very personal thing and obviously an important part of your life, but this sounds like a bit of a cop out to me.

As the old saying goes, God helps those who help themselves. There are stories of successes in the field of comic retailership out there. The lesson of these stories is that success in that field requires hard work, it requires being a good businessman, it requires knowing your audience and making your store accessible to draw newcomers into your audience.

Not everyone is up to the challenge. I know I'm not. I doubt I could barely handle working the counter at a comic shop, let alone owning one.

What it comes down to is, a lot of guys open a comic store loving comics, but not really knowing how to run a successful business and they end up falling into the same pitfalls that have brought down other stores. Most of these guys are inevitably going to blame outside factors for their failure rather than simply own up to the fact that they got in over their heads.

If you're prepared to let this defeatist bunch who couldn't hack it and are looking to blame everyone but themselves scare you away from the business, then maybe you were never really that serious about opening a shop in the first place. There's a big difference between being a comics fan and opening a comic shop. Not being able to see that difference has lead to a great many failed stores.

There's no shame in admitting that you didn't really think things through and making a shop successful looks to be a bigger challenge than you're willing to take on. Saying that is obviously not where God wants you because it looks too hard is kind of the same thing as some guy in a filthy, disorganized pit of a store in a cesspool neighborhood blaming the internet for his crappy sales.

I think that where God wants us is living good lives and being true to ourselves. The rest is just details.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

There's no shame in admitting that you didn't really think things through and making a shop successful looks to be a bigger challenge than you're willing to take on. Saying that is obviously not where God wants you because it looks too hard is kind of the same thing as some guy in a filthy, disorganized pit of a store in a cesspool neighborhood blaming the internet for his crappy sales.

I think that where God wants us is living good lives and being true to ourselves. The rest is just details.

God sent me a message...he wants me to open a store with Marisa and the hot comic babes. My HooterComics will grace the landscape as I go nationwide ! Chickenwings,hot babes , comics and beer. GOD BLESS AMERICA !!

[Donald M.]

God sent me a message...he wants me to open a store with Marisa and the hot comic babes. My HooterComics will grace the landscape as I go nationwide ! Chickenwings,hot babes , comics and beer. GOD BLESS AMERICA !!

God sent me a message as well. He said you're too good for the comics industry. It doesn't deserve your help.

Your time is better spent looking at comics and breasts rather than bringing them together in a retail environment, hugely successful though such a venture would inevitably be.

[twilight]

You could be the only store in a city and still fail if you don't know your market, have a miserable looking store and poor customer service.

It's quite a good looking store.

It's underground but it's well lit with many TPB's on display,a big case of statues,a half wall of action figures,a big wall of mangas and anime DVD's and behind the counter you can see all the customers pull boxes.

The staff is kinda split.Some of them are nice and they'll shout the shit with you about comics but the others are scary looking and rush you.

[Shellhead]

I guess the key to successful comic shop is location.

My LCS is the only one in town and they get a lot of business because of it.

There are two comic shops within 3 miles of my apartment, and they have both been successful in their respective locations for more than a decade.

One (call it store A) is part of a local retail chain, with at least a dozen locations. Store A offers free bags and boards with new comics, and also carries collectible card games, sports cards, role-playing games, books, and porn.

The other shop (call it store B) is a few blocks away from one of the local college campuses. Store B also carries rpgs and card games, along with lots of anime. They operate a free gaming room, and advertise on late-night television.

Aside from these two stores, there are several others in the metro area, and each seems to have one or two areas of specialization, to set them apart from the competition.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

God sent me a message as well. He said you're too good for the comics industry. It doesn't deserve your help.

Your time is better spent looking at comics and breasts rather than bringing them together in a retail environment, hugely successful though such a venture would inevitably be.


But I wanna save the Industry. I wanna spread a message of uniting hot breasts and good comics nationwide ! By uniting the Breasts and the Comics world peace shall be achieved on a global scale. ( Plus I wanna make a lotta money...but peace is my goal...2nd goal....no 3rd goal unless ya count gettin laid by those hot HooterComics girls. )

[Mr. Truth]

There's about 4 comicshops around where live, but all in different cities, and since I practically live in between each, its not that big of a deal to drive to them. The store I usually went to was a dive, it wasn't dirty per-say but it did have that basement look to it, which honestly didn't bother me, what did though was that they never got my pull right at all. Sometimes they didn't order enough issues or just give me completely random books, and I would usually spend about 50 there weekly sometimes even more, and I'm a pretty mellow guy and I do understand I get a ton of books but damn, sometimes it didn't make sense.

So when a new shop opened up near my area I checked them out, it was clean but it did not look like a basement and it was very professional, and the customer service was FANTASTIC! And after talking to the owner and seeing how nice he was I got my pull there, since then there have been a few mistakes in my pull but they were not big deals at all, esp. since they gave me the Green Lantern #9 Bat-Lantern variant cover instead of the regular issue cover, and they always give me a %10 discount, and its that kinda kindness that goes a long way. And because of it I volunteered to teach people whom are interested in it how to play Vs Systems and help out with their Magic tournaments, which from what I've seen have been boosting their business quite a bit, and it doesn't hurt to be directly in the middle of a high school and Jr. high school.

[Donald M.]

There's about 4 comicshops around where live, but all in different cities, and since I practically live in between each, its not that big of a deal to drive to them. The store I usually went to was a dive, it wasn't dirty per-say but it did have that basement look to it, which honestly didn't bother me, what did though was that they never got my pull right at all. Sometimes they didn't order enough issues or just give me completely random books, and I would usually spend about 50 there weekly sometimes even more, and I'm a pretty mellow guy and I do understand I get a ton of books but damn, sometimes it didn't make sense.


Actually it makes perfect sense: whoever ran that store was a lazy idiot. The whole point of pull lists is so that the store knows what its regular customers want and can order those books on top of whatever it orders for the shelves, because those books are guaranteed sales. "We didn't order enough books," is never an acceptable excuse for not getting a book on your pull list. The first time a store pulled that crap on me I would go looking for an alternative because that is obviously not a professional store that cares to keep me as a customer.

So when a new shop opened up near my area I checked them out, it was clean but it did not look like a basement and it was very professional, and the customer service was FANTASTIC! And after talking to the owner and seeing how nice he was I got my pull there, since then there have been a few mistakes in my pull but they were not big deals at all, esp. since they gave me the Green Lantern #9 Bat-Lantern variant cover instead of the regular issue cover, and they always give me a %10 discount, and its that kinda kindness that goes a long way. And because of it I volunteered to teach people whom are interested in it how to play Vs Systems and help out with their Magic tournaments, which from what I've seen have been boosting their business quite a bit, and it doesn't hurt to be directly in the middle of a high school and Jr. high school.

Great, good for you, but with other shops to choose from that were just as easy to get to I don't understand why you kept going to that rathole. Were the other stores at the time just as bad?

[Mr. Truth]

Actually it makes perfect sense: whoever ran that store was a lazy idiot. The whole point of pull lists is so that the store knows what its regular customers want and can order those books on top of whatever it orders for the shelves, because those books are guaranteed sales. "We didn't order enough books," is never an acceptable excuse for not getting a book on your pull list. The first time a store pulled that crap on me I would go looking for an alternative because that is obviously not a professional store that cares to keep me as a customer.

That's basically why I left, I didn't stay with them long, maybe a month, and I mainly went because there's why my friend got his pulls at as well, and saved gas since we could carpool to the same place and they had a lot of space to sit down and just talk about comics and what not.



Great, good for you, but with other shops to choose from that were just as easy to get to I don't understand why you kept going to that rathole. Were the other stores at the time just as bad?

One shop was just too far away period, and it was more a hobbyshop then a comicshop even though they had a pretty big comic collection it was mostly devoted to table-top WarHammer games and what not. And they had this assholish geeky elitist attitude to them, like "if you're not down with the hardcore AD&D crowd, you're not down with us" which they would demostrate each time me or any of my friends went to the counter, even if were ahead in line and basically had our stuff on the counter ready to go, as soon as one of their gang showed up we'd be kicked to the side.

So I felt really outta of place there, and there was really no one who knew anything about comics, it was like being on the recieving end of Clerks.

And the other even though it was a pretty nice shop I never liked it, it just didn't vibe with me.

And of course you know of the dive, and the 4th was the one that I now go to. Amazingly even though I've been reading comics for awhile, I just now decided to have a pull list sometime last year.

[malephoenix]

I am a Christian. While some of you may cringe, I live my life following God and his plan for my life. I have been praying about this over the past month and I have asked my friends to pray for me as well. It is 100% clear that God is telling me this is not where he wants me, which is cool. I would rather find out now then in bankruptcy court.

I know exactly how you feel. I've dealt with some similar situations. It's good to hear this from another Believer. Cool that you're letting God guide some of your life while you make decisions. (May not end up richer, "happier," or more famous, but always end up more fulfilled.) Reminds me of King David's dream to build the temple. He really wanted to do it, but it wasn't in God's plans for him. David followed that guidance, and ended up doing lots of other great things. And he was even a jerk and a bad father - and was still "a man after God's heart" and whatnot. So cool. It's not about "being good." It's about being selfless. And *S*elfless.

God bless you with whatever you end up doing. I wanted to open a comic shop, but there is so much negative material in comics that I'd end up not offering enough to the buying public 'cause I wouldn't order so many titles. No reason for me to "find out in bankruptcy court."

Thanks for the post.

[Iangould]

Altcane, when you started your previous thread about opening a comics shop I had some serious reservations about your plans. Briefly, you lacked retail experience, lacked capital and didn't seem to have a clear business plan or a realistic appreciation of the amoutn of work and risk involved. (Sorry if all that sounds overly harsh.)

Now, you seem to have swung over to the other extreme and are taking an unrealistically pessimistic view of the idea of running a comic shop.

Take some time to put together a proper business plan. If possible, spend at least a few days behind the counter in a real comic shop even if you aren't being paid. (Find a store well away from where you want to open and tell them up front about your plans.)

Then, if the figures seem to balance and you have a realistic understanding of the work involved in running a comic shop (as opposed to squatting in one) think about going ahead.

[pennywisdom]

EDIT: NM. I was thinking of a different thread.

[Forefinger]

If I win the Lottery I'd open a comic shop and hire hot babes for it. Because hell...I wanna combine my 2 favorite loves. Hooters ( nice chicken wings) and comics. I wonder if I'd get sued if I called my store: HooterComix . :D
That sounds like a great idea. Give me a job as the bouncer if you win the lottery!

[Donald M.]

That sounds like a great idea. Give me a job as the bouncer if you win the lottery!

At a store like that, "bouncer" means something else entirely and I don't think you have the qualifications.

[Forefinger]

At a store like that, "bouncer" means something else entirely and I don't think you have the qualifications.
Too true. I would be the "ass kicker" that gets paid to make sure that no one touches the bouncers. :)