No, I don’t have a scanner at the register to keep track of sales for me, because I’m an old-timey general store owner from the Wild West.
So as I was talking to my former boss Ralph about Miracleman orders, as I mentioned last time, I also had a question or two about the actual process of ordering the monthly comics back in the long-ago days of the early 1980s. You may recall that I’d been going through boxes and boxes of Ralph’s old comic company promotional materials from the early days of his shop (something I need to get back to soon, in fact). In the process of doing so, I found several retailer packs filled with order forms and publisher promos and such…no single Previews catalog like we have now, but rather pretty much every publisher supplied their own individual fliers with product information. You’d go through all these, figure out your orders, write the numbers down in the order form supplied by the distributor, and send that in.
I asked Ralph if that was as huge a pain in the ass as it seemed, and he said that, actually, no, it wasn’t. For one thing, there was a lot less monthly product to be ordered. There weren’t hundreds and hundreds of pages to plow through…I don’t have one of those old retailer packs right in front of me at the moment, but if I had to make a rough estimate, at the absolute high end all those different fliers and info sheets probably didn’t total up to more than about 100 pages. In addition, orders were probably a lot more consistent from month to month…no reboots/relaunches/crossover events/variant covers/whathaveyou making you have to ponder and re-ponder your numbers. You’d have to pay attention to things like “who’s drawing this issue?” and “is Wolverine guest-starring?” more than “how many more readers are going to bail on the book with its fifth consecutive first issue in as many years?”
Now, with the Previews catalog slowly becoming multiple booklets (as I somewhat sarcastically commented upon at the beginning of this End of Civilization post), it’s like we’re slowly returning to that time. I only half-jokingly suggested that Dynamite and IDW and so on would get their own separate product info publications…that’s how things used to be done, and maybe could again. At least, until it all goes entirely digital, and I’m squinting at an endless series of downloaded order form PDFs on my computer screen.
Anyway, one thing Ralph mentioned about ordering comics way back when was, a thing that made the actual process easier, was that with the smaller product line it was easier to keep track of things in his head, versus maintaining extensive cycle sheets, on which you could keep track of each title’s orders and weekly sales. That was fine up until the late ’80s/early ’90s comics boom, when numbers on a lot of titles suddenly exploded, and instead of 20 or 30 copies of something, you were suddenly ordering 300 copies. Even at that point, it was theoretically possible to just mentally track the numbers, but once the comics market crash hit…hoo boy.
Now keep in mind that we didn’t know that the crash was “The Crash” as it was initially happening. After a couple of years of huge, nonstop sales — “it’s like our Christmas rush never ended!” I remember saying to someone at the time — a sudden downturn wasn’t seen as an immediate problem. It was like, “oh, That’s Just Retail, it comes and goes, the customers will be back” and orders stayed up…and up, and up, and eventually the lightbulb clicks on over your head and you realize “oh, wait, this is bad.” Particularly with a two or three month lead time between making your orders and receiving them, at a time before distributors had the “Final Order Cutoffs” for retailers to adjust orders on some products a little closer to the actual release dates.
If you look back in my “market crash” category, you’ll see me talking about this sort of thing. What I haven’t mentioned is what my former coworker Rob and I used to do was make notes for Ralph in the Previews or Capital City catalogs (which by this time did exist as a retailing tool, versus all the separate booklets) and make notes next to specific title that we felt had desperately egregious differences between what was ordered and what was left over. In other words, basically saying “for God’s sake, order fewer copies of Spider-Man Unlimited” or whatever. It was this sort of thing that eventually brought us to adopting the full-on cycle sheet method of keeping track of orders versus weekly sales, rather than just depending on memory and the now completely gone consistency of numbers from month to month. Gone were the days of bumping up numbers because “if it doesn’t sell on the rack, surely it’ll sell through as back issues,” which may have been sorta true during the boom, but “cutting numbers to the bone” was the strategy of the day after the crash took full hold.
Today, at my own shop, I use a combination of methods…I don’t necessarily use full cycle sheets, but I do keep track of certain items of note, do regular checks of what is and isn’t moving on the new shelf, and otherwise just keep a close eye on sales. It’s a bit easier when I’m the one man on the job, there every day, seeing how stuff is selling. Everything that leaves the store passes through my hands (well, I mean, let’s hope) so I am directly witnessing how product is moving. It’s still tricky…sales on the previous Venom or Hulk series wouldn’t have given me any clue as to how the new relaunches would sell, for example…but for the most part, everything’s more or less consistent and I’m not having too much trouble staying on top of everything. Now, if there should be another big comics boom, I’d definitely switch everything over to detailed sales tracking, which would be a lot more work, but, you know, a good problem to have…while it lasted.
I legit love reading stories about this kind of thing, both from your former place of employ and your current shop, so thank you.
Also, how *do* you track/estimate the amount of product that “walks out” of the store without passing through your hands? I assume you have to do that for stock/tax/security purposes. Or maybe I’m wrong. Either way, I’d love to know more about how you handle shoplifting, if you do.
What would a scanner and the POS software cost you and would it pay for itself in terms of ease of use, time and effort saved and record keeping?
As I recall from working in a store back in the order packet days was that it was often very helpful to see the order form itself. A publisher who couldn’t produce a coherent, readable, clearly printed order form wasn’t going to produce a comic that could sell off the shelf either. Some publishers would actually send sample copies of their books no less, so you could see what you’d be selling.