A comic store's legacy.

I've had several inspirations for my store's layout over the years. One of my major influences was a fellow named Rory Root who had a store in Berkeley called, Comic Relief. Whenever I posted on the Comic Book Industry Alliance, he was always especially helpful and considerate. (Which isn't always true -- there can be a tad bit of group think and one-ups-man-ship over there, just like any established small group. It's a great resource, if you can cut through the egos. Including mine.)

Anyway, I struggled for a long time with the idea of bringing in independent comics. Think of a movie theater trying to show independent films. It's a big decision. Obviously, not as lucrative as the tentpole movies, but then again, no one else is doing it.

I finally decided to go for it, partly because of stories about Rory's store, and partly because of Scott's store down in Ashland, More Fun. (I figured if Scott could do it in a small tourist town, so could I.)

I'm glad I did it. It hasn't been easy, but I think it's been helpful to the longterm survival of the store.

I don't think I'm being egotistical, though, to believe that not many other people running my business could pull it off. It has taken years of experience, as well as the ongoing intention of carrying this kind of material. It isn't always obviously profitable in the short term.

I've built it up slowly, taking advantage of every opportunity. And I'm proud of it.

Rory passed away awhile back, and his family took over the store. Apparently, they ran it like a business -- straight into the ground.

I've known for a long time, that I could run this business very differently, and perhaps even make more money, but I wouldn't be happy doing it and being happy in my job seems just as important as the money -- more so, the longer you do it. (Ah, hem -- best minimum wage job a middle aged guy ever had.....?)

But if you go for the money and you don't know what you're doing, you're likely to get the opposite reaction from your customers. If you draw the wrong conclusions, which I believe most people probably would, you'll accelerate the downward spiral by focusing on the best-sellers even more, until eventually, nothing is selling.

You can't always assign a direct dollar to dollar value on your inventory -- sometimes you carry material to, well, sell OTHER stuff. Hard to explain, but it's more an overall fabric that you can't pull too many threads from without it all falling apart.

Comic shops seems to be very connected to the personality of their owners, which makes it hard to reproduce success. It's a bit of an object lesson for me, and as I near the end of my career, I'm trying to make my store more inventory than personality based in it's focus -- my having employees is on purpose, because the store isn't really successful in some ways until it can sell stuff no matter who's running it. (As long as the keepers are doing a moderately good job...)

The article about Comic Relief's demise makes it sound like it's going down because Rory was too focused on non-selling product. My guess is that, in fact, the opposite happened. The new owners got too focused on what what they thought was best-selling product, and in some ways lost the whole point of Comic Relief and Rory's business philosophy. Which, while it was probably always challenging to survive, was it's very reason for being.