2001-03-24 - 11:59 p.m.

Anniversary Sale

Today was the day of my big anniversary sale at my comic store. Every year about this time I have a day when I sell all my comic back issues at 40% off. This year, I decided to make it 50% to see what would happen.

Actually I didn't really decide, I FORGOT. I put 50% on the flyers and then saw my old flyers with 40% on them. D'oh! Oh well, what's done is done.

Truth to tell today really isn't my store's anniversary. I opened my doors for the first time on Feb. 22, 1982. I really was supposed to open on March 1, but the landlord let me move in early and since I was ready a week early, why not open? I consider March 1 my official opening date and sine I'm a terrible procrastinator, the sale always gets moved to late March.

Because the sales focus of the comic business is moving towards trade paperbacks, back issues are becoming less and less important to my business. There was a time, about 10 years ago, when I was selling nearly 25,000 comic back issues a year, now I doubt the figure is over 4,000.

In some ways this is a good thing: this means that most of my customers are comic readers, not comic collectors and speculators. However, I am left to deal with the fact that I have a store full of old comics and I want to sell them!

In recent years the sales have done very well - I take in about as much on that one day as I do in an average week - but the trend is downward. 2000's sale was only 90% of 1999's which was 90% of 1998's, and so on.

So how did we do today? Unbelievably well! In fact, today was the biggest sales day in the history of my store and it made this week the biggest ever too! What a shock! Who said the back issue market was dead?

However, I would have to say that there were some extenuating circumstances. The lion's share of what sold was expensive books from the Silver Age (1958-1970). I had a pretty good selection of stuff that was the leftovers of my own collection and nearly all of it sold today. I would have rather not sold it for half price, but I am happy to sell it. Most of it had been hanging around the store for at least half a year, so it's not like it didn’t have a chance to sell for full price. The downside is I have nothing to replace it with. Once this stuff is gone, it's gone forever.

Overall, this is very good news. Money has been a little tight around here, so the cash from the sale showed up at a perfect time. Now I can pick up some things that I've been putting off - like a new hard drive for my computer.

But right now I am happy but exhausted. I worked hard today, so I'm going to go relax.