Apathy

[Draco]

I think one of the reasons for apathy is most of the dealers probably lost a ton of money hoarding the books while they were hot and extremely expensive. Then they watched them plumet down in value and had to sell them off for extremely cheap prices just for somewhat of profit. A LCS relatively near was voted the best shop in NE PA for a few years and he barely had any Valiants when I went there over spring break. He said when they started to really lose value he had to sell to free up inventory space because no one was buying.

Im not sure if the apathy today is related to this.

I think a lot of retailers today ( not all ) are just happy to sit at the cash register and sell new product and dont care to pro actively sell good product as it seems like too much hard work.

How many times have you been to a store and got no kind of service whatsoever, and i dont mean retail in general, i mean a LCS.

Old school LCS were not much better for sure, but back when back issues were found in every location people used to talk more about the product, even if some were a bit anal and elitist

Now you get mainly ignorance and one word answers and i know im not alone in this opinion.

The old school had it so easy that they all helped create a false market with false prices and they all got what they deserved. I personally backed away in '93 when i knew it was just lies and deceit. I hated watching most of the other retailers lie to their customers and anyone who would listen as they hoarded comics and told everyone they were HTF.
A**holes !!!

It all reminds me of the whole variant incentive market where we are led to believe the wall books are all HTF yet nearly every retailer has them up.
Whatever happened to genuine supply and demand.
If a comic is HTF and you have twenty potential customers for it then the rules of supply and demand kick and the price goes up, but when a comic is specifically made to be sold at a premium but is not hard to get then surely this is a blatant attempt at price fixing and should not be allowed. However it will be allowed as other retailers continue to support it and foolish customers continue to buy them.

You know, given the demise of Valiant, and the problems retailers had with speculation (which in part they were responsible for), I can't really fault retailers for being apathetic. I mean, how many "startup comic companies" have there been that have failed, never really amounting to much? Do retailers have any reason to think VEI is any different?

I think it is up to us to convince retailers there is a difference, both by our words (talking it up) and actions (ordering the comics through them).

Once retailers see that VEI can make them money, I think they will become much less apathetic. But until then, they will remain so.

Of course, it is a vicious cycle. Retailers are apathetic, don't promote a company among their customers, the company doesn't get enough readers and fails, retailers point out yet another failed startup comic company.

Chris

Im guessing that most of the people you speak to are either retailers who fit my sit and ring the cash register on new product with no customer care or communications skills ( although not all )or are sheep like customers who follow pop music and are happy to be told what to wear, what to eat and what comics to read as they are too dumb to make an effort to find out whats really out there.

If retailers really spent time promoting the new companies that actually produce good quality product then we would be fine but they would rather make a buck without effort.

I was proud to be one of only three UK companies in the Crossgen retailer program they produced who stocked all their product.
It was 98% high end quality product and we always had new people picking it up and were gutted when they folded.

I have a great relationship with most of my customers who actually speak and they trust my opinion, so if i say " hey dude , check out this new title it fits right in with what you read " they trust me to do the right thing and they invariably try it out. I rarely get it wrong as i want them to be happy and repeat business is good business.

I dont know of enough retailers that bother to do the right thing by their customers so how can they expect a company to stay alive, be strong and expand. If they have to do any of the work they lose interest.
We know a company can produce great quality and not work as we saw with crossgen, but again i saw so many retailers put them down it was scary.
If people want the same old same old that Marvel & DC slop out each month then theres simply no hope.
The problem is not many people do want that but until we all take a stand together to support the quality we are ultimately screwed.

I appreciate theres a lot of other reasons too but the points i bring are what really irks me

over

thanks for listening.

Ian

[xodacia81]

Yep, that about sums up part of it.

[maraxusofkeld]

Speaking of apathy, I love when you go to conventions and unless the book is silver or early bronze age the dealers view them as completely worthless and look insulted if you ask if they have those books.

[xodacia81]

I love that too. Especially when asking about VALIANT. I get this look of "hahah...hahah...uh...hahahah...what a fool" and it would *SQUEE* me off if it wasn't so sad. I don't want to pay the prices I see the older books for at conventions. I think they put them in the mylars in part to jack up the price, the dirty rats.