As candid and straightforward as I try to be in this blog, there is one thing I do not do.
I do not point out problems with comics to customers. Or, more to the point, I let them tell me if it's a problem.
I constantly read of other retailers complaining that customers "hate" this or that; while in my store, I hear no such thing.
My guess is that the owners are talking about their own biases; "I hate what they've done to Superman." "Wonderwoman's new costume is ugly." "Oh, ANOTHER cross-over...."
That kind of thing.
And then they complain about their customers having the same feelings.
So, like I said, I prefer to let customers make up their own minds. I mean, I tell them when I think something is really good. I'll be honest if they ask my opinion, but I don't voluntarily subvert a title.
For one thing, tastes vary.
My biggest customer was drawn back into the comic industry by the Clone Sage in Spider-man (Peter Parker was a clone, and not the real Spidey). This series is one of those landmark failures in comics, and yet, here's Rick -- loving it, coming back and reading comics.
So, like I said, I let customers decide.
So when both DC and Marvel comics jumped the price on a lot of their comics from 2.99 to 3.99 a comic, I kept quiet.
Sure, I thought it was nuts to aggressively raise prices in the Great Recession, but I figured my customers would decide for themselves how to handle it. Loudly complaining in my store seemed like suicide.
Well, apparently, both DC and Marvel have decided to retreat from this price point. They are going back to 2.99 on "new" comics, whatever that means. Which I think is kind of amazing. And rare. I suspect the blow back was extreme.
I haven't noticed that comic sales have dropped that much, but then again with 1.00 more per comic, just staying even means I may have lost a hefty percentage of readers and unit numbers.
It remains to be seen how many titles will be affected, or how the consumer will react. But getting 4 comics at 10.80 (with the standard 10% discount) would seem a whole lot more promising for the longterm health of the industry than getting 3 comics at 10.80.
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Based upon the way this is spreading the housing maket is going to be brought to a sudden and screeching halt. I certainly would not be willing to purchase a REO or anything that is not a normal sale. I suspect that title insurance companies will not insure a title that has been a REO until this is resolved.
This has the potential to make the housing issues of the past couple of years seem like good times.
The political quagmire of this is going to be extreme. The politicians are not going to want to do anything that creates the impression of making foreclosure easier. Failure to do so may result in a totally dead housing market with noone being willing to make a loan or insure.
"The politicians are not going to want to do anything that creates the impression of making foreclosure easier."
Or maybe they're getting tired of Wall Street holding a gun to their head and saying, "Do this or will blow out the economy's brains!"
Or as Jon Steward put it last night:
“What the—you—wait—what?! The banks weren’t reading the fine print?” Stewart spluttered. “The banks? You’re the f***ing people who came up with the fine print in the first place! We never read the fine print!”
“we are f***ed,” declares Jon Stewart—“and the sad part is, Rube Goldberg himself could not have designed a more convoluted method to, in fact, f*** us.” Stewart explained the situation last night as only he can: “Everybody was getting billions of dollars. And in return, the American people would now be the proud owner of these bales of s**t. I’m sorry, ‘troubled assets.’ And the banks, the guys who got rich originally selling the loans, would step away, merely to service the paperwork. What could go wrong?”
I just noticed Trading for the Masses uses the same J. Stewart quote.
But it's a good one.
What a tangled web we weave....
The problem is that in 99% of these cases the person being foreclosed on clearly has the loan and owes the money. They are clearly behind on their payments and stopped paying. The financial institution that is foreclosing has been carrying the loan on their balance sheet and incurring the revenue loss. The problem is that these transactions hav been handled electronically and that the law has not changed to allow electronic transactions.
Now in normal times this would probably not be much of an issue because the debtor would accept that they owe the money and would not fight the foreclosure. Today you have enough that the difference between practice and the requirements of the law has become visible. The next step is for every ambulance chasing attorney to try and sign up as many people as possible that are either or have been foreclosed upon and start filing cases.
It is not just the banks. It is also the title insurance companies that also thought that the titles were clear.
Now you may dislike the banks, but if they start rolling back closed transactions we will have a double dip and the second dip might be deeper than the first.
I'm sure 99% people arrested are guilty, of something.
Why don't we just skip the pesky trial part.
Sorry, that was a cheap shot. But these banks are beyond the pale right now...
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