Elfsar Comics & Toys Blog

Note:  This was totally taken from the Canadian Geek Blog.

The point of “Behind The Counter” is to give you an insight as to how a comic shop works, so I thought I would share some more of the process of running the store.  This time around, we’ll deal with the love/hate relationship retailers have with Back Issues.

On several of the industry blogs and forums, there has been recent discussion on the usefulness and profitability of back issues.  As a touched on a dog’s age ago, Chuck Rozanski of Mile High Comics believes that any retailer who does not carry back issues is doomed to fail.  (Easy for him to say as the primary objective of his online company is to supply back issues). But not every store WANTS to carry back issues or NEEDS to carry back issues and the reasons for those would fill another column.  Here, we just want to get into how retailers decide what collections they will buy and why they pay what they do.

Let’s set-up a scenario to help things along.  Mary, after kicking her mousey, insecure, $8/hr Subway working boyfriend to the curb, decides that the best way to get back the money she loaned him for Cirque du Soliel tickets was to sell his comics.  Mary has heard that comics appreciate in value and are good potential retirement assets so she calls around to the local comic shops to see who’s buying.

The first question Mary should reasonably expect to get is “Do you have a list of the books?” It’s not likely that Mary does, nor does she know who many are even in the collection.  She’s got several boxes of varying sizes and the books are in no particular order so, over the phone, there’s little to no chance of moving the collection as the retailer will have no idea what’s s/he’s getting into.

Now Mary will be inclined to say things like, “They’re all in their original wrappings/plastic.” which is a bad thing to say since very few to any comics ever came in “plastic”.  Retailers will know that she means they are in comic bags but even that could be dubious.  I have bought collections where the issues were in their original “plastic” only to see a ton of books wrapped in plastic kitchen wrap.  Also, just because a comic is in a plastic sleeve doesn’t mean it didn’t get read repeatedly before getting there.

With little knowledge of what Mary is selling, the retailer may offer a blind, low amount ($.10 to $0.15 per book) or just not bother, the latter more likely. As in any medium, 90% of everything is crap and in a blind collection, hoping for 10% of anything good enough to get a return on the purchase is slim, especially in such a chaotic collection.

Aside from the gamble of quality in the collection, there are several other factors that play into purchasing a comic collection.  Most sellers only consider the upfront cost of the collection and often get offended when a store owner offers $200 for 1500 comics.  However, from the owner’s side of things, there will be;
1. the amount of time to sort through the collection, culling out the heavily damaged books, removing any outdated or improper storage material and alphabetizing
2. the amount of time to catalogue the books, update inventory both existing and non-existing items to the (POS) point of sale system.
3. the amount of time to grade the books if damaged, which is almost always the case.
4. the amount of time to calculate the values of the books
5. the amount of time and costs to bag, board and tape the books.

So let’s say we bought Mary’s 1500 books at $0.15 each.  Right off the bat, we are out $225.  Now to go through the process above (which we have just done recently with several collections we have bought), a total of about 15 hours of staff time is required for steps 1 and 2, another $150-$275.  Now, steps 3 and 4 are normally done by “the boss” and, depending on the collection, can take from 2 to 10 hours.  (or put aside to be done at a later date) Let’s say Mary’s collection is mostly all newer books so they can graded fairly quickly in under 3 hours, adding another $100 (yes, that’s conservative) to the total.

For the final step of bagging and boarding, we’re going to say that out of the 1500 books, only 1000 were worth converting to back issues and to clean those up, that would take about 4 hours of staff time ($40 to $60) and the cost of supplies ($45 to $60).  So, now the final cost of each of those $0.15 books is an average of $0.72.

On the surface, that still seems pretty good if each book retails on an average if $3 to $4.  But the real question still remains; how many of those comics are sellable?  If we take the “90% of everything is crap” adage, then the retailer is only going to make $300 to $400 from a collection that cost him $720 and there’s no telling how long it will take to recover that money.  A few books may sell right away if they are lucky but in reality, it will take a several years to recover the cost.

There is not a lot of data (if any) on the percentage of sales a typical comic shop does on back issues.  Some stores specialize in them while others won’t go near them.  They require space, time and capital.  They are a long term investment and, increasingly with the competition of high discount/no overhead online sales, more of a good will gesture for a shop’s regular clientele.

Of course, things also change dramatically with smaller collections containing key books, older collections and larger collections, all of which will increase the amount of time involved in grading.  When selling your collection, especially a big bulk one, do not expect a generous offer from your local comic shop guy.  There’s a lot more on the line for him that just cutting a cheque to you.