Originally Posted by
MRP
When you are only sold in niche shops that are destination only and not available in the mass market, you are a niche product regardless of price. The low cost of comics is what made newsstand retailers NOT want to carry them, they did not have a large enough revenue potential to make it worth the space they took up ont he newsstands most of the time. Many newsstand dealers left them bundled and just returned them for credit rather than opening up the bundles, putting out the books to make a few pennies and then having to take the rest off, strip them and then return them. They did not provide enough return on investment for a lot of the newsstand vendors at those price points which is why DC kept experimenting with formats (80 page giants, the 60 cent and dollar giants, etc.) and Marvel experimented with the Giant Sized quarterly books, during the 70s, trying to find a format that news vendors wanted and was profitable for them. You can't sell a product at a price point that none of the retailers will carry. Ultimately, you are selling your product to vendors not customers and if the vendors won't buy them from you to resell, you cannot reach the customers.That means having a price point that makes it worthwhile for the vendor to carry the product. Basic retail theory is that a product has to generate enough revenue to pay for the square footage in your store it occupies plus the % of operating costs that square footage represents to the whole in labor, utilities, etc. plus a profit margin otherwise you lose money carrying the product. Unless you are deliberately choosing the product as a loss leader, you are not going to carry a product that loses you money even if it sells. Comics disappeared from the newsstands and became a niche product in large part because the low price point wasn't worth it to the vendors and they could sell other more profitable items in the space comics occupied.
Remember, at the $4 price point, retailers are buying it at about $2 an issue, Diamond is buying it at a bout a $1 per issue so Marvel/DC are only getting $1 per copy sold on average, Diamond $2 and retailers $4 minus whatever discount they offer to pull customers. That's not a very big margin and cutting the prices back shrinks the margin even more, and without access to mass markets outside the niche market of the direct market, there's not enough volume of sale sot make it workable. Comics are niche products because the direct market is a niche market, not because their price point is too high, and niche products always have a higher price point than equivalent products in the mass market. So you can't compare the price point of comics when they were a mass market item to comics now which are a niche market product just by adjusting for inflation. It's an invalid comparison, like comparing apples to oranges. If you want to compare today comics to comics of that period, look at things like what undergrounds and other niche products of the time were priced at and suddenly, they are not overpriced for the time/inflation adjustment. And lowering prices now won't suddenly make comics a mass market product again because there is no infrastructure in place to sell them on the mass market (in floppy/periodical format at least).
-M