by Brian Hibbs
A week late this month – mostly
because my 40th birthday was last week, and the last
thing I wanted to do was write a column during my birthday week
– but I’m actually a little relieved, because of the sheer volume of news
that came out on Friday of the two conventions. The column would
have scrolled off the front page in an instant.
I opened Comix
Experience in 1989, when I was 21 years old, and I’ve seen the market
change a whole lot in the meantime. I still have a copy of my first
Diamond order form, all of 32 pages long in 14-point type, while
now the order form (not Previews, but the order form)
is usually over 130 pages in something like 8-point type.
There were less
in-print graphic novels back then than how many that come out in
a typical week today. You could buy an entire month’s output
of X-Men or Batman family comics, and still have plenty
of change left over from a five-dollar bill.
So, yeah, a different world.
There was a time
where it was not only easy to keep track of everything by pen and
paper, it was actually probably easier that way – there weren’t
that many SKUs, most books were ongoing, not minis or one-shots
or whatever, so why not have a streamlined data system?
But, things change.
I’m going to be
making the move to a Point-Of-Sale (POS) system this summer, because
we’ve reached the tipping point to where it is no longer practical
to have a diverse and wide-ranging stock, and not be computerized.
Honestly, I should have made the move a year ago, but I thought
I could still handle it.
The complexities
of ordering have become somewhat staggering – DC and Marvel are
each individually producing, on a monthly basis, more comics than
the two of them were producing, combined,
in 1989. More and more of these comics are “special circumstances”
books – new minis, or one shots, or tie-in crossovers, things where
your cycle sheet data isn’t necessarily helpful in helping you place
a new order. Back in the day, an issue of Amazing Spider-Man
was mostly much like another, and they came out like clockwork (honestly
– same week every month, it was a dependable schedule). Today? I don’t think there’s been a “normal” issue of Amazing
Spider-Man in something like a year.
Each and every
week there are somewhere in the magnitude of 60 to 80 new TPs that are available to stock. Think about how that scales
over the course of a year – three or four thousand new books each
and every year. Even at a quarter-inch per spine (ha ha!),
even on the lower figure of 3000 new books, that’s another sixty-two
linear rack feet of material. We’re already pretty capped at how
many more books we can fit in as it is, so the name of the game
becomes Hard Choices where you try to keep in stock the best sellers,
leaving the more moderate or slow sellers for special order. There
was a point, five years or so ago where we had (pretty much) everything
that was in-print and available from a distributor, in stock – but
today there simply isn’t the space (nor the interest from the consumers,
really) to be that comprehensive for anything but the largest volume
stores. Does one need to stock each and every Marvel “Essential”
volume? Or is it more practical to just keep 70-80% of them on hand,
and rotate through them as things sell?
I only have so
much room to display material, and between the Essentials
and the DC Showcase line, we’ve got something like twelve
linear feet of classic b&w reprints. That’s not even counting the potential stock
of Masterworks and Archives, or archival reprints from companies
other than DC or Marvel.
The point I’m
trying to make is that there’s a delicate balancing act going on
for most stores of having the “right” inventory – in a perfect world,
you want to have every book that every customer looks for, and just
enough stock to fill their browsing needs, but not a single book
more. Stock in your store needs to turn – it is no good tying up
money in inventory that isn’t selling again and again. The question
becomes, is it worthwhile to have inventory on-hand for, say, v2
of the Essential Iron Man if you’re only selling one copy
a year? Or is the smarter play hoping that this year’s customer
who wants it will ask for it if they don’t immediately see it, and
to special order it for them?
My pen-and-paper
system of tracking inventory is pretty good at seeing what I’m out
of (and back when there were less than, oh, 5000 graphic novels,
it used to be “really good”), but its really not good at all at
analyzing what’s been sitting there too long. I can, by and large,
do that by memory, but “memory” is always the most fallible part
of any ordering system.
So, yeah, POS
has to happen. Sooner, rather than later, at that.
Further, the “whole
market” is about to make the shift to POS, over the next year or so. Diamond
Comics Distribution is about to introduce a comics-specific module
to work with Microsoft's
RMS POS system. They’ll also be bundling together
hardware with what sounds to be a discount price for the software,
and providing some amount of tech support.
This could be
an incredible sea change for the market as a whole, increasing efficiency,
increasing accountability, making Direct Market stores measurably
more professional. And because it is being offered by and through
Diamond, there’s a really large chance that a broad swath of stores
will make the move at once.
For myself, I’ve
decided to not wait for Diamond. At the Las Vegas ComicsPRO meeting this year there was a demonstration
of RMS, as well as a demonstration of the MOBY POS system. That really clinched it for
me, and I’m going with MOBY.
MOBY is, as far
as I can tell, a fuller featured, more nuanced piece of software,
specifically designed for the vagaries of the Direct Market business,
with a multi-year working track record in several diverse stores.
While there are many stores adopting RMS to their businesses, MOBY
just looked better to me.
But, let’s not
turn this into an advertisement for one system over another!
It’s my guess
that by mid-2008, something close to half of the volume in the Direct
Market will be computerized. Note that that isn’t the same thing
as “half of the stores” – the largest stores do a disproportionate
percentage of business – but I’d estimate that at least a quarter
of stores will be up and running on POS.
That number will
continue to grow pretty sharply, I think, through the end of the
decade; and I suspect we’re going to hit a point where you simply
won’t be able to do business without being computerized.
I anticipate that non-computerized orders will start to be penalized
fairly steeply and fairly quickly.
On the publisher
side of things, a large number of vendors are simply going to have
to change their procedures, as well. Bar codes will, sooner or later,
be mandatory for all publishers – at least if they want to
get into the largest number of stores. There’s going to be a certain
amount of “grace period” while the industry makes the switchover,
but, at some point, bar coding your stock is going to be one of
those “wait, why are you making it harder for me to sell your comics?”
things that no one is going to put up with.
The price of hardware
isn’t any kind of a significant barrier any longer – I put together
a fairly robust system for under $1200, with all of the moving parts
I wanted, including a lot of “optional” stuff I technically could
have done without, had I chose. (Example: I didn’t need the
“pole display” to show the customer their total)
In fact, if there’s
a real problem and barrier for an existing store, it’s almost certainly
converting their inventory into those 1s and 0s that the computer
understands. I haven’t quite started in that aspect of the process,
but I’m having a hard time seeing how it is going to take me under
sixty-to-eighty man-hours. Even more problematic is how to manage
that while not closing the store to do so.
See, if the store
is open, and you’re selling things in the middle of trying to get
your inventory into the system, you’re “hitting a moving target”.
At the core of it, a POS database is only as good as the
accuracy of the data it contains! If you have to make “on the
fly” adjustments to data while you’re operating, you dramatically
scale up the chances of data error, which can have catastrophic
long-term effects.
I’m planning on
solving the problem by building the database first, then doing the
inventory/data entry in one 36-or-so hour burst, but, even then,
I know we’re going to have hundreds of “exceptions” items whenever
we go live with the system on day one – basically all of those things
that don’t have barcodes, or are OP, and so can’t be built easily
into a database, and so on. But, the goal will be to only be closed
for one day, max – a Sunday probably, our slowest day with the shortest
hours.
Even then, there’s
tons that just can’t be in the system upon launch – single bag and
boarded back issues will probably be the most problematic thing.
Because “condition” is a component of pricing those, you can’t generically
create a (for instance) “Amazing Spider-Man #129” item – each individual
copy of “ASM #129” is a separate and distinct piece of inventory.
Either way, that’s
how I’m spending my summer – the rest of June and most of July will
probably be devoted to building the database, and I’m hoping we’ll
be able to go “live” with the system by August 1, at the latest.
I only wish I
had started this process a year before!
**************************
Brian Hibbs has owned and operated Comix
Experience in San Francisco since 1989. Feel free to e-mail him with any comments. You
can purchase a collection of the first one hundred Tilting at Windmills (originally
serialized in Comics Retailer magazine) from IDW
Publishing. An index of Tilting at Windmills on Newsarama
can be found right here.
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