Why are some LCS becoming so petty about this Walmart deal?

[The Darknight Detective]

Comics were literally all around me since I was an infant. I remember crawling through the piles of comics my sisters had. I smelled them, before I ever read them. The first comics I got into were those Harvey, Gold Key, Archie, Dell and Fawcett's DENNIS THE MENACE. I was an old man of seven years before I got into the super-hero comics from DC, thanks to Batman--but I already had a deep love of comics. Every kid in my neighbourhood was the same. You would go over to someone else's house and check out their pile of comics, to see what they had. And my parents would buy me a comic book, when we went out shopping, just to shut me up.

The first comic I ever owned was a Gold Key Pink Panther back in '72. I also was 7 when I received my first DC superhero comics (Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen and Legion of Super-Heroes) a year later.

[MajorHoy]

First GameStop and now Walmart. This is excellent. I thought people would be excited about it because it helps the culture thrive. Expanding readership is always a good thing. I would like ongoing monthly titles to be available at Barnes and Nobles.

Some of them were (for at least several years) at the Barnes & Noble stores I went to. But I don't know how well they sold there, and even after first Marvel and later DC raised the printed cover prices on those newsstand copies by $1.00 over the prices printed on direct market copies, I don't know if it was worth it to Marvel and DC because unsold copies of newsstand versions were returnable (and by "returnable", that meant the stores just had to return the covers, not the whole book).

The disgruntled comic store owners shouldn't be annoyed at DC, they should be annoyed at the monopoly Diamond has had over comics distribution, . . .

Even before this, comic book shops have been annoyed with Diamond, but there's no other alternative for stores these days for comic books. (Unless, of course, they stop selling new single-issue comic books.)

[alton]

Some of them were (for at least several years) at the Barnes & Noble stores I went to. But I don't know how well they sold there, and even after first Marvel and later DC raised the printed cover prices on those newsstand copies by $1.00 over the prices printed on direct market copies, I don't know if it was worth it to Marvel and DC because unsold copies of newsstand versions were returnable (and by "returnable", that meant the stores just had to return the covers, not the whole book).

Even before this, comic book shops have been annoyed with Diamond, but there's no other alternative for stores these days for comic books. (Unless, of course, they stop selling new single-issue comic books.)

Apparently a lot of people on this forum have never heard about the Mom and Pop stores that died in many towns as the result of the opening of a Walmart. I wish I had a direct link to offer you to any of the studies that have been done on this topic. I have no idea how this may or may not have affected Comic shops in the past. Certainly this could have an effect on the future of Comic Shops. I think that while Comics alone are the only things being discussed here that could change in the future as well changing the retail dynamic between the two. Basically the ability to send back unsold copies and the larger upfront discounts put the LCS's at a disadvantage as well. The Barnes and Nobles DC experiment about 2-3 yrs. ago flopped because because people read the comics in-store and seldom bought anything. Walmart may have a smarter approach to this form of shoplifting and maybe not. For those of you that don't have an LCS I guess Walmart and the internet is the only way to go.