CBR: Diamond Solicits Opinions On Tuesday Comics

[CBR News]

The direct market's most powerful player asks retailers for their opinions on the idea of moving the nationwide shipping day for North American comics back to line up with bigger media, including the possibility of advanced shipping.


Full article here.

[Kolymar]

I'm really curious about he result of this survey and what the retailers think.

[mortari]

Advanced shipping would never work.
there are alot of retailers out there who would be to worried the other guy would jump the gun and they'd lose a sale.

In the fantasy world advance shipping would be wonderful.

In the good old days we had Monday and Wednesday shipping and all was good.

[Jonah Weiland]

Advanced shipping would never work.

Totally disagree. There are a number of comics retailers that already do benefit from advance shipping, but those numbers are rather small at the moment. These are retailers who were grandfathered in or have it for any number of reasons. Having spoken with retailers who have this opportunity, it's a great advantage for them in that they don't have to stress and wake up extra early on Wednesday mornings to get their comics ready for the comics buying public.

Advance shipping is commonplace is most of the retail industry and with that advantage comes steep fines and penalties IF the sale date is broken. If you're a retailer who breaks that confidence, you'll be penalized and possibly could lose your account. That's not something the overwhelming majority of comic shops -- even the less "quality" ones -- would want to jeopardize.

Also, the possibility of selling product at 12:01 on Tuesday could be a lot of fun for stores who chose to exercise that option. :30 minutes of sales to the most diehard customers could be turned in to a fun, weekly event. Hell, I've got ideas on how it could be turned in to an effective and fun social gathering in major cities.

I want whatever retailers want, but I think this Tuesday shipping idea with the opportunity for sales at 12:01 might be a good idea.

[Iangould]

Advanced shipping would never work.
there are alot of retailers out there who would be to worried the other guy would jump the gun and they'd lose a sale.

In the fantasy world advance shipping would be wonderful.

In the good old days we had Monday and Wednesday shipping and all was good.

In the discussions with Diamond, mechanisms to enforce street dates were discussed.

[mortari]

In the discussions with Diamond, mechanisms to enforce street dates were discussed.

Good, I haven't had my store for a few years.
I'd have pushed for advanced shipping. I'd have loved having the pulls done a day early.

[POWRSURG]

Advanced shipping would never work.

You know FCBD books are shipped early, right?

[grphxkindaguy]

You know FCBD books are shipped early, right?

yeah, but no one really cares about those anymore and they're FREE.

[Iangould]

yeah, but no one really cares about those anymore and they're FREE.

And every year a stack of them end up on eBay prior to the day.

[C. Earl]

Hmm...I dunno. Instead of moving it up a day, maybe they should move it back a day or two...

[JackSmitten]

hmmm it will be interesting to see what happens. I personally like the Wednesday comics date but, Im no retailer, so I'm not exactly sure what would be best!

[SeritoNiN]

I remember when books came out on Thursday years ago. Wed is nice for me, something to look forward to in the middle of the week.

Business may beg to differ though. Whatever works.

[Sabrina_Fried]

I know that some of the comic shops around here can do as much as half or more of their weekly sales on Wednesday. People come in for the new releases, but they often shop for back issues at the same time. In that respect, I don't think things will change much except that Tuesday would be the new Wednesday.

Back in my bookseller days, all advanced shipping books did was cause headaches for us, especially when we started using self-service kiosks that the customers could use to look up books for themselves. For loss prevention/insurance reasons, the Advance shipping books had to be put into the inventory as soon as they arrived, even if the boxes had to remain sealed in the back. This means that when a customer looked up a book, it would appear as through we had however zillions of copies, but they were not on the shelf. And we had to find appropriately delicate ways of explaining to the "customer is always right" crowd why we couldn't sell them a book that was physically in our back room.

From a customer service perspective, it would have been easier to just sell the books as soon as they arrived. If the shelf-life on a product is so short that it becomes effectively worthless after a few days (and it is not produce)....maybe you need to rethink your product.

Sabrina

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

I want whatever retailers want, but I think this Tuesday shipping idea with the opportunity for sales at 12:01 might be a good idea.

It's hard to have read Brian Hibbs' columns on it and disagree with it being a good idea.

In the discussions with Diamond, mechanisms to enforce street dates were discussed.

I believe when DC did it with the Blackest Night issue, one store broke the date, and DC just cut them out from any deal like that ever again.

Seems a pretty solid/fair mechanism to me.

[Lethiecq]

I think Tuesday would be a lot better than Wednesday, especially if the product arrived the day before. Right now my LCS gets the box from Diamond and they start pulling the items out as soon as they open. While they pull product from the box, one title at a time, to count the order to ensure they got what they paid for (and ordered) they put the new comics in a bin. When all the new stuff is counted out they then start to pull peoples lists from the bin in alphabetical order. Once the comics are in the bin though, they can be bought by people in the store. Sometimes people, especially with late letter names, are left without their pulls on things that the shop doesn't normally stock, because it gets bought within an hour or two of the shop opening on Wednesday. If pulls were processed the day before this wouldn't be an issue. Since my LCS doesn't carry much in the way of independent books it is the independent fans that suffer the most from this problem.

The idea of having midnight release parties, even if only on special occasions like important new releases (avengers #1, secret avengers #1, stuff of that sort) it could be a fun thing to do, and would also be an interesting way to attract some media to comics. When there are people waiting outside of wal-mart the night a DVD comes out or people at Borders waiting for the next harry potter, the media picks up the story for their little blurb spot in the evening news and it ends up on news websites. Those are the sorts of stories that seldom are issued about comic books, except when something major happens (death of super-man, death of captain america, etc). It could be a good means of getting some free publicity for these books we all worship.