I usually enjoy Alan David Doane’s writing about comics even if I don’t always agree with it. If for no other reason, he’s one of the most confident-in-his-views blogger out there right now and he doesn’t back down. I admire him for that. He’s one of the loudest and most vocal opponents against bad comic shops. Yesterday he had an entry at his blog that caught my eye.
I’d suggest that if your business model is dependent on the same customers coming in like clockwork every week, every month or every quarter, it’s fatally flawed in the first place — unless, of course, you are a dynamic and robust enough store to draw in customers regularly without the lure of one single title. I am now down to picking up my comics about once a month, because there’s just not enough volume in my pull list to make the drive worthwhile on a weekly basis at the moment.
Isn’t most retail plans somewhat driven by returning customers on a regular basis? I don’t understand why he thinks that a business plan that is dependent on returning customers is a bad thing. Most big box retailers are counting on repeat customers within a yearly period. Now, that’s not the only thing that a comic store can count on but I think the vast majority of shops count on the regular customer. But of course, they’ve got to plan on growing their business as well. Most shops will be hugely dependent on the regular customer as well as the new customer. To dismiss a business plan because it’s “dependent on the same customers coming in like clockwork” is ludicrous.
And I think if ADD has proven anything on his blog in the past couple of years, he’s not the typical comic book shopper or reader. He’s probably more in line with a typical consumer of anything but I don’t know how much he lines up with the “typical” comic book customer. Like ADD, my regular issue buying is getting down to next to nothing, at least compared to what it used to be. A mixture of boredom with the mainstream and more discount shopping through DCBS, Amazon and Borders have made the weekly trip to the comic store less substantial for me than it used to be but I know plenty of people who still get huge weekly stacks.
